The person behind Palateful

My journey with food has always been driven by curiosity — a desire to understand not just how a dish is prepared, but why it tastes the way it does, where it comes from, and the stories it carries.

The two educations do not always agree. A professional kitchen teaches you to control every variable; a home kitchen in Assam teaches you that some of the most important variables were solved generations ago by people who never needed to name them. Both are right. Getting them to talk to each other is the work.

Culinary school gave me the grammar: stocks, emulsions, temperature, timing, the discipline of mise en place, and the particular humility of cooking someone else’s menu very well for a very long time.

Service teaches speed and consistency, and it leaves no room at all for curiosity — you are not there to wonder why something works, you are there to produce it identically two hundred times. That training is invaluable and it is not, on its own, an education in food.

What it did give me was the ability to take a dish apart properly. When I went back to the food I grew up eating, I could finally ask useful questions about it.

Because the recipes I wanted did not exist in the form I needed them.

There is no shortage of Assamese recipes online. What is missing is the reasoning: why the fenugreek is measured in seconds, why khar and tenga sit at opposite ends of a meal, why the ash gourd goes into the duck forty minutes from the end and not at the start. Those are the things a cook actually needs, and they are exactly the things that get stripped out when a dish is written up as a list.

Palateful is an attempt to put them back in — and to keep a record of a regional cuisine that is under-documented, frequently misrepresented, and quietly losing its more difficult forms.

I am not a purist and I am not a preservationist. I change things constantly.

What I try very hard not to do is present a change as the original. Every Roots piece on this site sets down the traditional dish first — as faithfully as I can research it — and only then shows what I did to it, under a separate heading, labelled as mine.

This matters more than it sounds. When a modernised version circulates as the authentic one, the traditional version does not get an argument; it gets quietly overwritten. A generation later the simplification is what everyone believes was always there.

The experiments here are deliberately boring in structure: one variable at a time, everything else held constant, and the failures written down alongside the successes.

Half the useful findings on this site came from getting something wrong. The khar that tasted of soap taught me more about alkaline cooking than the three that worked. The loosely packed jar of khorisa that grew mould in four days is the reason I can say with confidence that packing matters more than salt.

A food publication that only reports its successes is not doing research. It is doing publicity.

Fewer ingredients than most recipes call for. Salt earlier than most cooks are comfortable with. Acid at the end, almost always. Heat treated as a variable rather than a setting.

And a strong preference for understanding a dish before improving it — because most traditional cooking turns out to be solved engineering, and the parts that look like superstition are usually the parts I have not understood yet.

The ingredient library is the long project. There is no good, structured, searchable reference for Northeastern ingredients — what they are, how they behave, what they can and cannot replace — and building one properly will take years.

Beyond that: more forgotten forms, documented before the last people who make them stop; more measurement, so I can describe things with numbers rather than adjectives; and more cooking, which remains the part that makes the rest of it worth doing.