In this delightful memoir-cum-cookbook, Rukka shares the memories and recipes of delectable food that she has cooked and eaten over many decades. Having travelled extensively from Poona, Madras and Delhi to Berkeley, Stanford and Boston she realized, at a very young age, the indispensability of authentic home-cooked food. She records here her emotional and deeply personal bond with food from Chitappa s masala vadai and Appa s vegetable cutlet to bondas on Marina Beach, Narayana s bajji and Amma s Mysore pak. Alongside, she shares stories from her childhood in British Poona, of making vegetable cutlets with a Victorian meat grinder, college days in the Madras of a newly independent India, cooking for author R.K. Narayan and her travels around the world with her husband, the renowned social anthropologist, M.N. Srinivas.