Kitchen Table Recipe Book
A collaborative cookbook and storytelling project
Kitchen Table is a collaborative cookbook and storytelling project bringing together recipes and personal narratives from people currently living in Metro Detroit. The project began as a research inquiry into home, nostalgia, and the ways food carries memory across migration and everyday life.
Developed through community participation, the book collects over 50 recipes alongside stories of childhood, family kitchens, and the cities that shaped people's identities. Rather than treating recipes as static instructions, the project positions them as lived archives—where food becomes a way of remembering, translating, and preserving personal and collective histories.
Through conversations, submissions, and gatherings, Kitchen Table explores how diasporic communities construct a sense of home through food, especially when living away from where they grew up. The project culminates in a printed publication that acts as both archive and social space, bringing together fragments of lived experience through cooking.
A Little Thank You Note from the Book
I moved to the US about eight years ago, leaving behind a city filled with my loved ones, lots of street food and a chaos from the city that I missed immensely. While living between two cities during my time here, and trying to find my community, my new home, I realized the nostalgia I felt may not be a solitary feeling. I was surrounded by people who moved cities and countries to find a home, far away from home.
This project started as an exploration of that feeling, that nostalgia of home.. and especially home-cooked meals. The food I grew up eating is not something I find easily outside my home, and many people felt the same. Finding a space to share these moments, thoughts and stories was my way of missing home a little less. Funnily, one of the dishes I miss the most is Rasam, which although my whole family makes Rasam, I miss my dad's Rasam the most, and when I shared this project out into the community of Detroit, the first entry I received was of Rasam! You can imagine my excitement.
The book is a beautiful compilation of heartfelt memories on food and people, and I truly hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed the journey of putting this together. The stories celebrate our everyday lives and highlight the people who made us who we are. The cities and spaces that shaped us. I was especially nostalgic of spaces as my childhood home in Bombay was being demolished to make way for a new building in 2021. This was around the time I was moving to Detroit in search of a new home. So my memories of the spaces were vivid— hope you enjoyed my description of the home I grew up in. The last page is an image of the kitchen I describe, and its double-grills at the windows.
Shubalakshmi Shekar