Zeenat Nani ki Rasoi: 32 Recipes from Lucknow
For Alina in Bengaluru and Zaid in Toronto, from their mother Farhana, with Nani's own voice notes. A fictional family.
Family recipe books
Her recipes, in her handwriting, made into a family cookbook
Answer a few questions, add your photos and get your recipe books as a PDF.
Pick a story to start
Books we made for fictional families
For Ketaki, With Love: Aai's Recipes for Your New Kitchen
For Ketaki, from Aai (Sunanda), Nashik, before her wedding in February, with a blessing from Aaji and Ajoba. A fictional family.
How it works
- 1
Pick a book
- 2
Answer and add photos
- 3
Flip through it
- 4
Save the PDF
Print it when you love it
- Card book₹449
- Classic softcover₹1,199
- Classic hardcover₹1,799
- Large hardcover₹2,499
- Heirloom layflat₹4,999
Price notes
- Launch prices including GST. Final price is confirmed before you pay.
- Extra pages: ₹99 per 4 pages on 8x8 books, ₹149 per 4 pages on larger books.
- Second copy of the same book: 30% off. Five or more copies: 35% off.
Who it is for
- Daughters and granddaughters. You have meant to write down her recipes for years. Photograph the diary on your next visit and give it back to her as a book for Mother's Day or her 75th birthday.
- Mothers of the bride. The dishes she grew up on, in your handwriting, for her first kitchen, with a blessing from her grandparents she can play from the page.
- Parents of a student going abroad. Twenty to thirty dishes from home, made simple for a hostel kitchen, with ingredient swaps for supermarkets abroad clearly marked as suggestions.
- Families keeping her kitchen close. When she is no longer here, her diary can become a quiet book of the dishes the family will always make, in her own handwriting.
Styles and occasions
- **Heirloom facsimile**: cream paper, her handwriting large on the page, the typed version in a quiet serif beside it, with haldi and maroon accents. Our default.
- **Steel dabba modern**: clean white space, brass and steel tones and the dish photo as the hero. Suits the study-abroad and bidaai books.
- **Vintage Bombay cookbook**: letterpress-style type and two-colour pages, in the spirit of old Indian community cookbooks.
- **Folk border**: Madhubani, Warli or Kalamkari borders around her original cards, chosen to suit your family's region.
- **Watercolour kitchen**: soft watercolour illustrations of dishes and spices for recipes without a photo, always marked as illustrations.
- Mother's Day, May
- A cookbook of Maa's everyday food, given back to her. Start in April so the printed copy arrives in time. For a storybook about her, see Mother's Day books, or keep her life in her own words with a life story book.
- Wedding season, Oct to Feb and Apr to Jun
- A bidaai recipe book from mother to daughter, for her first dishes in a new kitchen. Tell us the date and we plan delivery around it.
- Leaving for studies, Jun to Aug and Dec to Jan
- The dishes they will miss most, simplified for a small kitchen far from home, packed before the flight.
- Diwali, Sep to Nov
- The family's festival sweets and snacks, from ladoo to chakli. Recipes and customs vary by family, region and community, so the book keeps hers.
- Achaar and papad season, Mar to May
- Pickles and masalas are the recipes most often lost. Photograph the steps while the mangoes are in.
- A milestone birthday
- Her 70th, 75th or 80th, with the grandchildren's notes on the dish each of them loves most.
- Year-end visits home, Dec to Jan
- The best time to sit beside her, photograph the diary and record her telling the story of one dish.
Privacy and care
You confirm you have the right to use the photos before every book, and we never use photos for ads. For illustrated books, up to three photos are used once to draw the character and then deleted.
Guides and ideas (6)
- How to make a family recipe book from handwritten recipes
- How to photograph and preserve handwritten recipe pages
- Andaaze se: how to write down a recipe that was never measured
- How to make a community cookbook for your society or temple
- Katori, mutthi, chutki: Indian kitchen measurements in cups and grams
- How to record your grandmother's recipes: 15 questions to ask
Questions parents ask
Is it really free?
Making the book and saving the PDF is free. Printing is optional and paid, and we confirm the price and delivery date by email before you pay.
What happens to my photos?
Photo books are laid out on your device and the photos never leave it. For illustrated books, up to three photos are used once to draw the character and then deleted. See privacy.
Will the book keep her handwriting, or retype it?
Both. Every recipe leads with the photo of her own page, cleaned up and straightened, and the typed version sits beside it, labelled as read by AI. Her words stay as she wrote them: "andaaze se" stays "andaaze se", and any cup or gram conversion appears only in brackets, marked approximate. If you want help with the photos, see how to photograph handwritten recipes.
Her recipes say "thoda sa" and "ek katori". Will you change them?
No. We keep her measures word for word and, if you like, add an approximate standard measure in brackets. Our katori to cups guide and the piece on andaaze se recipes explain how we approach it.
How long does a printed cookbook take, and can copies go to different cities?
The digital cookbook is ready as soon as you confirm. Printed books are made to order and checked by a person before they go to press. We show the delivery estimate for each pincode before you pay. Order several copies in one go and send them to different addresses, one for each sibling, with a lower price for each extra copy (see prices below). For a wedding date, tell us early.