A family cookbook. An idea I have been toying with since I got obsessed with cooking in my early primary school days. I remember sitting on the couch watching the Food Network, hearing cook after cook weave a story and a feeling surrounding their recipes and their families. They narrated their memories and experiences through food and how that helped them walk the journey to being a chef. On loose A4 papers, I started collecting recipes. A pumpkin pie here, a boerwors stew there, a chakalaka rendition here; by the end of the year I had enough of a collection to staple together and make a makeshift book. I planned to rewrite it all down and turn it into a proper recipe book. Thinking back on it now, I realise that the goal was to record and document my family’s journey through food, and to pass on lessons, feelings, and experiences to the next generation. I wanted my children and grandchildren to understand their past and look forward to a future waiting to be written.

The preservation of such recipes and moments is my act of love and care for the coming generations. The most crucial ingredients—memory, adaptation, love—are never listed in the instructions but make the passage of such knowledge valuable. By recording a multi-cultural perspective and reinforcing an important life lesson, I learned that it is important to record life... whether you use food like I do, or something else you are passionate about, record it, document it and share it. This notion and perspective on a recipe book that is passed down through generations is what ultimately sparks my current mission: to create a book that captures not just the what, but the how and the why of your family’s culinary DNA, woven from distinct threads.

My cookbook is an amalgamation of four distinct threads. I am Zambian (Bemba & Chewa) by lineage, and I grew up around Tswana people and their way of life. My culinary roots start as a mix of these three cultures. From Inshima and Kapenta to chakalaka and Tshotlo, I was raised to enjoy both culinary cultures as they are my own. Chakalaka was meant for celebrations and festivities, Kapenta as a quick fix for lunch, inshima is the Bemba person’s language, therefore it must be there for all meals—yes, including breakfast. And tshotlo was a flavour bomb that was best had when you needed something fast on a Sunday or Saturday night, usually after a heavier meal earlier. I was raised on the concept of “ifyakulya tafi chepa,” which means that food is never scarce; we all share, we all eat. It was here that I learned the ingredients of community, nostalgia, and togetherness. Food was for everyone to share, no matter how little you had; recipes from the past were for telling stories and learning about life; and food was something that was done together.

The recipe cards from that time did not record how fond those times were. They didn’t capture the excitement and constant sobboling (‘taste testing’) we did whenever tshotlo was being made at home, or the excitement of chakalaka at braais and during holidays like Christmas and New Year. They didn’t capture how ifisashi was an all-day batch cooking experience, or how beans were an all-day cooking event. They didn’t record the feeling of being full and just chatting after eating pap (inshima), or the taste of corned beef we travelled to Botswana just to buy. The Tswana cuisine is my culinary mother tongue, and my Zambian cuisine my culinary lineage. We Zambianized Tswana dishes and Tswanarized Bemba dishes, until it was not strange to speak both languages in one setting, like how I speak Bemba, English, and Tswana in one sentence.

In 2012 I watched my first K-drama, and that opened the door to Asian cuisines for me. This was the new dialect I chose to shape me. From Thai spring rolls to Korean kimchi to Japanese tonkatsu, these were flavours I met not at a family table, but on a screen. They were stories told in a visual language I was learning to parse. This is the dialect I speak with intention. It is not my mother tongue; it is a language I have chosen to study, to admire, and to incorporate into my daily speech.

My relationship with this dialect is different. There is no nostalgia here, no taste memory passed down from a grandmother’s hands. Instead, there is the crisp, clean page of a new notebook. There is the intention of curiosity. When I make congee, it is not because my body remembers its comfort from a childhood fever. It is because I read about its history as a scholar’s food, a sustenance of patience, and I intend to bring that quiet resilience into my own kitchen.

My ‘fried rice’ is an act of translation. Having never tasted the definitive version from a Guangzhou wok, I use the ingredients of my landscape: day-old rice, a dash of Chakalaka spice for heat, and lots of Braai spice. It is a palimpsest—a new story written over the familiar textures of home. The recipe card for this would have a long footnote, an apology to purists, and a celebration of the immigrant nature of all food: that it must travel, change, and find new roots to survive.

This section of the cookbook, then, will not be a faithful archive. It will be a map of culinary imagination. It will record the questions: What if I add ginger to the stew? What does sesame oil do to the scent of a room? The ‘recipes’ will be less about precise measurements and more about the moment a flavour from a distant place clicked with a memory from my own—like when the umami of a soy-marinated egg suddenly made sense of the deep, savory joy of our own Kapenta.

To speak this dialect with intention is to acknowledge the distance, to honour the source by not pretending to its innate ownership, but to engage with it so deeply that it becomes part of your own creative grammar. The ingredient here is yearning. It is the love for a culture experienced through its stories and its steam, and the respectful, joyful adaptation of its syllables into the ever-evolving story of our family’s table.

The combination of these four distinct threads has shaped my culinary language: my culinary roots/language (Bemba & Chewa), my culinary mother tongue (Tswana), and my new dialect (Asian cuisines). The grammar is represented by the unwritten rules (ifyakulya tafi chepa) and the ability to speak three culinary languages in one dish. This makes me wonder: what exactly will be the unwritten ingredients for my future family? The quiet confidence of kneading dough in preparation for a long day? The story I tell about my childhood while adding the bay leaf to stew? The Korean gochugaru I daringly add to Chakalaka, creating a new lineage? This perspective shifts the recipe book from a sealed archive to a garden. There will be heirloom seeds (the exact, traditional recipes), and there will be new, hybrid crosses (Korean-inspired bibimbap served on a bed of Pap?). Each page has space for notes, for the next generation to add their “unwritten” ingredient.

I envision myself in my kitchen, book open, weaving threads from four corners of the world into a single meal. The final unwritten ingredient is love—specifically, the love required to hold multiple identities in one pot and to willingly, joyfully, pass that complex, beautiful stew forward. Heritage is not a perfect replica; it is a translation. Therefore, the stories I pass on are not to be perfectly recreated, but warmly translated.

This is the philosophical introduction to my recipe book. It prepares the reader (my future children and family) to understand that the measurements are guides, but the soul of the dish lies in the stories, silences, and choices that surround it. It’s not just writing a cookbook; it’s writing an edible family guidebook.

If you’d like to have a conversation about anything really, reach out on LinkedIn, or find me on Medium and Substack. If you’re looking for a writer to bring similar depth and reflection to a project, you can explore my professional services right here on Contra or email me at mnatashabwalya@gmail.com.