Last October, while travelling through Kashmir researching recipes for her debut cookbook, Sana Javeri Kadri and her team found themselves in the home of Aaliya Mir, wife of a saffron farmer.
An innovative cook and a gifted teacher, Aaliya laid out the best of Kashmiri delicacies before Sana, co-author Asha Loupy and photographer Melati Citrawireja. “She served us celebratory dishes from the Kashmiri wazwan, each one outstanding. But we were undecided,” she recalls. “As we packed up to leave, Aaliya shyly asked if we wanted to try a pumpkin, walnut and yoghurt chutney she had made for a function the next day.”
That dish would later inspire one of the cookbook’s standout recipes: Aaliya’s Doud Alle, a roasted squash and labneh dip.
October marks the walnut harvest season in Kashmir’s saffron fields. Using heirloom pumpkins from her backyard garden, along with yoghurt, walnuts, Kashmiri chilli and a touch of honey to sweeten it, Aaliya created a simple dish that Kadri describes as “a beautiful expression of Kashmiri autumn”.
“All I managed at the time was a quick phone photo,” Kadri says. “But neither Asha nor I could forget the flavour combination.” The recipe was later adapted into a dip to suit American palates, while retaining its essence. Loupy added a traditional Kashmiri tempering of caraway, fennel, and chilli powder, transforming the traditional chutney into a vibrant, party-ready dish.
Aaliya’s chutney is one of more than 85 recipes featured in The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook, authored by Kadri and Loupy, which was released globally last month.
Snacks, mains, drinks, and desserts sparkle through the book—the result of five years of work from proposal to publication, including 120 days spent travelling across farms in India and Sri Lanka. More than a recipe collection, the book captures the essence of South Asian diaspora cooking.
Like the recipes it contains, the story of the cookbook unfolded organically.
For Kadri, who grew up in Mumbai, food has long been a way to connect with both sides of her family. “I have two childhood food memories, and I think they represent my Jain side and my Punjabi Hindu side. I would have lunch most weekdays at either my nani’s house or my dadi’s house. At my nani’s house, my favourite food was chaas, thin buttermilk with cumin, chilli, and salt, poured over pocha bhaat, which is very soft rice cooked until it is almost congee-like. The other memory is from my dadi’s house. I loved rotis, little phulkas with ghee and chhundo on top,” she says.
After moving to California to work in marketing at a San Francisco grocery store, Kadri realised that the spices available there were pale imitations of those grown on Indian farms. Even centuries after colonial trade routes transformed the global spice industry, farmers across South Asia were still earning very little while producing some of the world’s most extraordinary ingredients.
Thus began Kadri’s journey as a spice trader. Her quest took her to over 40 farms, calling up people and meeting with the “good folks” at the Indian Institute of Spices Research. “I met one farmer, and then I was slowly introduced to the next and the next and the next. A lot of it was really relationship-based,” she says.
In 2017, at age 23, she founded Diaspora Co. with a single product: Pragati turmeric sourced from Prabhu Kasaraneni’s farm in Andhra Pradesh. Today, her Oakland-based firm sources 30 single-origin spices, including Anamalai nutmeg, Baraka cardamom, Kashmiri saffron, Kaveri vanilla, wild cinnamon quills and more. She works with over 25 farm families in India and Sri Lanka and pays her farm partners an average of six times above the commodity price.
As her work expanded, her understanding of spice cultivation and trade grew. “We work with our farmers on drying and milling techniques,” she says. One example came through her collaboration with the Sakariya family in Gujarat, sixth-generation coriander farmers whose crops were traditionally grown for local auctions where appearance mattered more than flavour.
Kadri encouraged the family to dry coriander in the shade rather than in direct sunlight to retain more moisture and oil content. The result was a dramatically more fragrant coriander with citrusy, floral notes. The family eventually named the variety ‘Nandini’, after their beloved cow.
Over years of visiting farm partners, Kadri found herself welcomed into kitchens as often as into fields. “I was eating these delicious meals in our farm partners’ homes, and the more I ate, the more I felt in America people’s understanding of South Asian food is so limited to butter chicken, naan, saag paneer, and so on. I just felt like I had to share this fresh, seasonal, vegetable-forward cooking with our diaspora community. And whose recipes are better to share than our farm partners’ recipes?” Kadri says.
The idea became the heart of the cookbook. Kadri enlisted Loupy, Diaspora Spice Co.’s recipe developer, to help translate the recipes for western kitchens. For six months, Loupy worked closely with farm families over phone calls, learning cooking techniques and family traditions before travelling to cook alongside them in person. “She’s incredibly talented at recreating recipes from instinct and observation,” Kadri says. “Often, she would simply watch the women cook and understand the recipe from that.”
Each dish went through multiple rounds of testing—sometimes as many as nine trials, as in the case of Sri Lankan appam—to adapt ingredients and techniques for American kitchens without losing the soul of the original recipe.
They travelled all over India, from Kashmir to Maharashtra, Manipur, Karnataka and Kerala, staying with 25 farm families they had grown especially close to over the years. “We wanted recipes connected to real life,” Kadri says. “What people cooked during weddings, summers, sickness, childbirth—everyday food, not just celebratory dishes. We got a long list, and then looked at commonly available vegetables in the US,” she added.
They cooked alongside families for days at a time, eventually tasting more than 185 recipes before narrowing the collection to 85.
The process was painstaking. She recalls how they walked through fields at dawn, tasted seeds fresh off the vine, and bent low to the ground to observe larvae at work. Each challenge was balanced by shared home-cooked meals under trees and by fires with the amazing people who grow the spices. “Each visit left me asking: how can we tell people about these incredible meals—made with such care, delicacy, and, above all, fresh ingredients. This cookbook is my answer,” the entrepreneur says.
The book tells the stories of her farm partners: how Abraham Chacko cooks with forest-grown cardamom in Udumbanchola, Kerala, and how Sumitra and Amita in Sri Lanka’s Kandy prepare watalappam—a coconut custard dessert infused with spices—in a kitchen deep in the forest.
“We learned from 35 women, from Aaliya in Pampore to Shirley aunty in Thirunelly to Chachu in Udumbanchola to Zeino in Ukhrul. I think the most special part was that they were patient and kind teachers who would take us in and help us learn. One story that really stayed with me is Amita’s roasted Sri Lankan curry powder. We thought it was going to burn, but it turned out to be the most perfect, complex spice blend we had ever had, and now it is used in five recipes across the book,” Kadri recalls.
Her favourite recipe is Andhra Pradesh’s own ‘gongura pappu’, lentil curry made with sorrel leaves and toor dal. “Gongura pappu was served to us by our turmeric farmer’s family. It has a distinct tangy flavour, and we thought it was a great representation of the Telugu turmeric farm partner. Sorrell is also a summer crop in the US, and we chose to include it in the book,” she adds.
But they realise their limitations. “The dishes we ate in Sri Lanka’s forest kitchens can never taste exactly the same in the US,” she says. “And oven-dried tomatoes will never fully recreate the richness of sun-dried tomatoes from Andhra in the case of tomato pachadi.”
Still, the team worked carefully to develop alternatives. Every recipe in the book has been tested repeatedly using ingredients and techniques accessible to western home cooks. “We wanted the recipes to feel approachable without losing their soul,” Kadri says. “And we encourage people to cook them when ingredients are truly in season. Every recipe has been tested and adapted with multiple ingredients and techniques so that it can be recreated in a western kitchen. Everything has been broken down—from spices to techniques to pantry essentials—in a way that’s approachable and easy to follow.
Now, with the cookbook already being named one of Eater’s Best Spring 2026 Cookbooks and one of the Los Angeles Times’ Best New Cookbooks, Kadri sees the work as part of something much larger than food.
“I did not know before I set out to write this book that colonialism stripped South Asia of $50 trillion, and that our region was the richest in the world before colonisation,” she says. “So if, through our work, we can start to shift some of that money and power back to our farmers, that would be amazing.”
THE DIASPORA SPICE CO. COOKBOOK
By Sana Javeri Kadri & Asha Loupy
Published by Harvest
Price: Rs1,393; pages: 272 pages
