Recipes Without Measurements: How Grandmothers Cooked

In the hills, a recipe was rarely written down. It was watched, remembered, and carried from one kitchen to another.

In a village somewhere in the hills of Uttarakhand, the morning kitchen has its own language. The chulha is already warm, a brass or steel pot sits over the fire, mandua flour waits to become roti, lentils are soaking nearby, and a small stone sil-batta has seen more recipes than most cookbooks ever will. Outside, the mountains are beginning their day, but inside the kitchen, another kind of knowledge is already at work.

A grandmother reaches into a container and takes a handful of flour. There is no weighing scale, no measuring cup beside the stove and no carefully written recipe pinned to the wall. She adds a little water, a pinch of salt and begins kneading. She feels the dough with her palm, adjusts the water without hesitation and knows when it is ready. If you ask her how much flour she used, the answer may simply be, "Bas, itna hi." That's it. Somehow, she knows.

She knows how much mandua the dough needs, how hot the tawa should be, when the dal has cooked without looking at a clock and exactly when jakhiya should meet the hot oil. If you ask her for the recipe, she may struggle to give you one, not because she doesn't know it, but because she has never needed to describe it. She has lived it.

The Recipe Was Never on Paper

For generations, many Pahadi recipes travelled without cookbooks, printed cards or carefully measured ingredients. They moved through kitchens, from one generation to the next. A daughter watched her mother, a granddaughter watched her grandmother, and someone sitting beside the chulha slowly learned what each sound, smell and texture meant.

A child might begin by cleaning lentils or washing vegetables, then move on to grinding spices, making dough and eventually preparing an entire dish. There was rarely a formal lesson. The learning happened through observation, repetition and participation. The recipe was not written down because the recipe lived in the person cooking it.

In Uttarakhand, where food traditions are closely tied to the seasons, the fields and what a household could grow or preserve, this way of learning made perfect sense. A recipe was never simply a fixed list of ingredients. It was knowledge of the land translated into food.

"Bas Itna Sa"

Ask a grandmother how much salt she puts into a dish and you may not get a number. She might bring her fingers together and say, "Bas itna sa." Ask how much flour she uses and she may answer, "Ek mutthi" — a handful. Ask how much water goes into the dough and the response might be, "Jitna lage" — as much as it needs.

To someone accustomed to precise measurements, this can sound frustrating. But there is a logic behind it. A traditional cook does not necessarily think of a recipe as a mathematical equation. She reads the ingredients as she works. The dough tells her when it needs more water, the dal tells her when it is ready, the aroma tells her when the tempering has reached the right point, and the colour and texture of a dish reveal whether it needs more time.

The hand becomes the measuring instrument, but experience is what makes that instrument accurate.

The Dough Knows

Watch someone who has made mandua roti for decades and you begin to understand this language. There is no need to stop and calculate the exact amount of water because the flour itself provides the answer. Its texture changes under the fingers, and the cook responds accordingly. She knows when it is too dry, when it has become too wet and when it has reached the consistency that will make the right roti.

The same knowledge exists in countless traditional preparations. A grandmother may not tell you the exact temperature of the oil, but she knows when the jakhiya begins to crackle. She may not know the precise cooking time of a dal, but she recognises its aroma and texture. She may not describe the perfect consistency of a chutney, but she knows it the moment the mixture reaches the right balance.

These are measurements too. They are simply measurements that cannot easily be written down.

Learning Through the Senses

Traditional cooking is deeply sensory. You listen to the pan, smell the spices, feel the dough, watch the colour of the vegetables and taste the food as it cooks. The sound of seeds hitting hot oil can tell you whether a tempering is ready. The aroma of spices can reveal whether they have cooked properly. The texture of a vegetable can tell you how far along it is, while a spoonful tasted directly from the pot can tell you what is missing.

This is why traditional recipes can be difficult to reproduce from written instructions alone. A recipe might say "cook until done," but what exactly does "done" mean? The answer is often hidden in experience rather than in minutes or temperatures.

The Kitchen Was the Classroom

For many generations, the kitchen was also a classroom, although nobody called it one. Children absorbed knowledge without necessarily realising they were learning. They watched their mothers and grandmothers prepare everyday meals, helped with small tasks and gradually became familiar with the rhythm of cooking.

A young girl might first learn how to sort grains, then grind spices, roll rotis or prepare a simple dal. Over time, she would begin to understand the small decisions that make a dish work. How much water is enough? When should the fire be reduced? How dark should the tempering become? When does the food need another pinch of salt?

There was no formal instruction. Repetition became knowledge, and knowledge eventually became instinct.

Every Family Had Its Own Version

One of the beautiful things about recipes without measurements is that they were never completely identical. A dish could change from one household to another. One grandmother might use more chilli, another might prefer a sharper sourness, while someone else might add a particular spice that was unique to her family.

The same dish could taste different in two homes in the same village, and both versions could be equally meaningful. Traditional cuisine does not always have a single authoritative version. It has family versions, village versions, regional versions and seasonal versions.

That variation is not necessarily a weakness. It is evidence that the cuisine is alive.

When "Authentic" Becomes Complicated

Today, we often search for the "authentic recipe." We want the original, the traditional and the correct version. But whose version are we looking for? The recipe from Kumaon? The recipe from Garhwal? The recipe from one particular village? Or the recipe a particular grandmother learned from her own mother?

Food traditions rarely fit neatly into one definition. What is familiar in one home may be completely different in another. What one generation remembers as traditional may itself have been an adaptation of something older.

Food travels. People migrate. Ingredients change. Techniques evolve. Tradition is not always about preserving one exact formula. Sometimes it is about preserving the relationship between the food and the people who make it.

The Measurements We Forgot

There is something else hidden inside these unwritten recipes. They reveal how closely people once paid attention to food. Today, a recipe can be followed while looking at a screen: five grams of this, ten minutes of that, two hundred degrees in the oven.

Traditional cooking required a different kind of presence. You had to watch the pot, smell the spices, feel the dough and taste the food. The cook was constantly responding to what was happening in front of her rather than simply following a sequence of instructions.

Perhaps that is one reason traditional food can feel so personal. It carries not only the ingredients, but also the attention of the person who made it.

When the Recipe Starts Disappearing

There is, however, a quiet problem with recipes that exist only in memory: memory can disappear. A grandmother may know exactly how to prepare a particular dish, but if nobody learns it from her, the knowledge may disappear with her.

A daughter moves to the city. A grandson grows up far away. The old kitchen changes. Ingredients become difficult to find, and a dish that was once prepared every week becomes something made only on special occasions. Eventually, someone may remember the name but no longer know how it was made.

This is how culinary traditions can disappear without anyone noticing — not all at once, but one recipe at a time.

Writing It Down Is Not the Same as Freezing It

Documenting these recipes matters, but documentation should not turn living food into a museum exhibit. Writing down how a grandmother prepares a dish does not mean insisting that every future cook must reproduce it exactly.

It creates a record, a starting point and a bridge between generations. The next cook may change the recipe, adapt it to a different kitchen, use a new ingredient or serve it differently. That is how cuisine has always survived: it changes while carrying something forward.

The Last Measurement Is Memory

Perhaps this is what makes these recipes so special. Their measurements were never really missing; they were simply different. A handful, a pinch, a little more, until it smells right, looks right, feels right and tastes right.

Behind those seemingly vague instructions are years of observation, practice and memory. The cook knows because she has done it countless times before. Her hands remember what the recipe book cannot explain.

And sometimes, after tasting the food, she simply knows that it is ready.

Ask Her Before It's Too Late

The next time you sit with your grandmother, mother or an older member of your family while they cook, ask questions. Ask how much of each ingredient they use, why they use a particular spice, when they learned the recipe, who taught them and what they would do differently.

But don't worry if they cannot give you exact measurements. Watch their hands. Watch how they knead. Listen to the sound of the tempering. Notice how they taste the food and how they decide what it needs next.

Because somewhere between their fingers and their memory is a recipe that may never have been written down. Perhaps that is precisely why it deserves to be remembered.

The Kitchen Remembers

A written recipe can tell you what to put into a dish. A grandmother can tell you why.

She can tell you which ingredient was available when she was young, which dish was made during winter, which recipe belonged to a particular festival, which food was prepared when someone came home and which flavour reminds her of her own mother.

Those details are not measurements. They are context. And context is what turns a recipe into a story.

At House of Jaagar, we believe that is where food culture truly begins — not with a list of ingredients, but with the people who carried those ingredients, techniques and memories from one generation to another.

Because sometimes the most important recipes are the ones nobody ever wrote down.

They were remembered, cooked and shared.

And now, they deserve to be heard.