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Rejuvenated Memories: Rebirth and Reliving through Nani Maa ke Nuskhe

By Sonakshi Srivastava

वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय नवानि गृह्णाति नरोऽपराणि

तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णान्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही

–Baghavad Gita

“Just as a human casts off their old clothes to wear new ones, similarly does the soul or aatman cast off the old, worn-out physical body to assume a new one.”

The above quote from the Bhagavad Gita operates on the premise of “Rebirth” as the law of existence. Here, death is but a rite of passage for the soul to reincarnate in various forms over the many cycles of re-births so as to attain the final salvation or moksha

The analogy, relating the body to a worn out piece of clothing, reminds us that the process of aging is not unlike the wear and tear we see in the household objects and materials we use everyday.  No wonder, then, that we very often try to keep both our bodies and the objects around us “alive” through recipes that purport to rejuvenate our skin or hair or prevent beloved objects from falling into disrepair. In India, these recipes for rejuvenating objects are often collected and shared  under the rubric of nani maa ke nuskhe or dadi maa ke nuskhe. These terms roughly translate to “the formula/recipe of maternal grandmother” or “the formula/recipe of paternal grandmother.” The terms nani maa and dadi maa ke nuskhe  capture  the love, innate wisdom and warmth that is generally associated with grandmothers.

It is a truth universally acknowledged (at least in my household) that the wisdom in the form of nuskhe passed down by my set of maternal and paternal grandmothers, and the generation of grandmothers before them, are indispensable, not only to my mother but also to my father and grand-father. And yet, the nuskhe that mean so much to us are not particular to my family. For the most part, it is impossible to trace the genealogy of these recipes or formulas. Nuskhe cannot be dated, and neither can one claim them to be their own. These are universal remedies, pervading every Indian household. They are an intricate thread that stitches together the cultural fabric of the country, regardless of caste, class and religious differences. 

Belonging to the corpus of oral tradition, these nuskhe also assume a particular gendered nomenclature. The nuskhe function on the assumption of women as “kushal grahinis” (astute housewives), the astuteness a sign of their ability to keep things and objects as clean and as new as possible, preventing goods from being damaged as well as the ability to breathe a new lease of life into household paraphernalia. But besides rejuvenating and reviving objects, nuskhe also revive the generational vocabulary of memory, keeping wisdom alive through generations. They follow a matrilineal legacy, renewing themselves every generation. 

A few of the my grandmother’s nuskhe that I place trust in include:

A photo of a book with neem leaves to keep silverfish away.

A time-tested remedy, my nani used to keep neem leaves between the pages of books and among books to prevent silverfish from eating away at the pages. This nuskha promises to rescue books from the clutches of age.

Uncooked rice with dried red chilies and a knot of turmeric to keep weevils out.

Another nuskha that continues to find a nurturing ground at home is the use of dried red chillies and turmeric knots in rice jars. The use of chillies and turmeric allows the rice to stay fresh, away from the onslaught of weevils.

Nuskhe not only restore gaiety to books and food items. Some also promise to extend their restoring properties to the body and hair. Here is one such nuskha that finds a ready resonance in most Indian households, albeit with a few modifications.

Nani Maa ka Nuskha for Rejuvenating Hair

A clip from a 1991 issue of the Hindi magazine Manorama that carried a column on nuskhe with a particular focus on rejuvenating skin and hair health.

4 tablespoons amla (Indian gooseberry) powder

1 tablespoon hibiscus powder

1 teaspoon grounded fenugreek 

3 tablespoon coconut oil

1 egg/2 tablespoons curd (optional)

Mix all the ingredients, ensuring that there are no bubbles or lumps. Part hair and apply the paste on the scalp. Leave for 10-15 minutes. Wash away with a mild shampoo. The hair mask recipe lends luminosity and volume to hair, giving new life to it.

The popularity of these nuskhe is such that popular Indian magazines, particularly with a good base of women readers have a specific column titled nani maa ke nuskhe or dadi maa ke nuskhe, thereby allowing these to be in perpetual circulation.

The ancestral wisdom, in the form of these nuskhe attest only to the power of renewal and rebirth but are also a lesson in sustainability, a vision foreseen to be economic with resources!


Sonakshi Srivastava is a writing tutor at Ashoka University. She is a translation fellow at South Asia Speaks where she is translating a provincial novel by Jaishankar Prasad into English under the mentorship of Arunava Sinha. Her areas of interest include food studies, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. She actively retweets @SonakshiS11.

Recipes to Remember: Coriander, Gallyngale, and the Legacies of the Lost

By Lucy Mookerjee

Originally composed for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Beyond Shakespeare blog, this primary source highlight from Lucy Mookerjee, a Research Fellow at the Folger, invites the reader to think beyond the study the recipe as a set of instructions to be performed, and to consider the recipe itself as a generative composition with much to tell us about origin and loss, remembrance and ignorance, revival and rebirth.

A detail of a painting of Ophelia semi-submerged in water with flowers around her.

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies,

that’s for thoughts.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV Scene 5

On learning of her father’s death, Ophelia, the heartbroken heroine of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, falls into a “weeping brook” and quietly allows herself to drown (4.7).  While modern scholarship has tended to construe Ophelia as ‘feminist heroine; critics in the Victorian period perceived Ophelia as a deranged ‘madwoman’; not only has she lost her father and her lover, but she has also lost her mind. In the words of Hamlet’s mother, she is “incapable of her own distress” which is to say: she has forgotten her ‘self’ (4.7). It is curious, then, that the “sweet flowers” – pansies, forget-me-nots, rosemary sprigs –which surround her in the famous Pre-Raphaelite painting, and which are frequently referenced in the play, should have a long history as symbols not of loss, but of memory.

The term pansy comes from the French pensée, meaning “thought” or “remembrance”. Legend has it that forget-me-nots are named after a medieval knight who died while picking the delicate flower for his lover and spent his last breath crying out: “Forget me not!” In Ancient Greece, students wore circlets of rosemary to school to increase their capacity to remember their lessons.

While memory-enhancing herbs have a rich legacy in symbolism, the evidence of herbal consumption – though less studied – is well represented in the historical record. Recipes for memory-boosters surface in early modern manuscripts in the form of charms, spells, and medical treatises. Hundreds of these recipe books — digitized and transcribed into Modern English — can be found here.

The Receipt Book of Margaret Baker (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.619), compiled in 1675, contains a recipe for a memory-potion called “Confect of Coriander Seed” and provides step-by-step instructions for a brew to “helpe the memorie … by comforting of the braine.”

Manuscript receipt book.
The Receipt Book of Margaret Baker. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.619.
To read more of Lucy’s post about remembrance and recipes, visit the Folger Library’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog.

Outside Issues: Tea Gardens in Early Modern London

By James Brown

The HERA-funded research project Intoxicating Spaces (2019–22), on which I was fortunate enough to work and which explored material environments for the production, trafficking, and consumption of new intoxicants in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Stockholm 1600–1850, coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant lockdowns. An avid user of bars, cafes, and restaurants in Sheffield in the UK, where I live and where the project was headquartered, I admired and became fascinated by the creative ways in which these hospitality businesses adapted and repurposed outdoor spaces – gardens, pavements, patios, roads, and yards – in response to bans and restrictions on indoor socialising (measures which have a long historical precedent in plague time). These present-day crisis developments inspired me to take my own research on early modern London outside into the open air.

Photo of two shoppers at ordering at the outdoor window of a bar.
Gatsby on Sheffield’s Division Street with its new outdoor serving window – ‘The Great Hatchby’ – in April 2021. Photo: Author.

There were various kinds of al fresco food and drink retailing in the early modern capital, from the street-sellers recently investigated by Charlie Taverner and Freya Purcell, to the temporary (or, in modern parlance, ‘pop-up’) booths that sprouted in the royal parks and during fairs. However, one of the most common was the tea garden, a distinctive species of space that flourished in the metropolis – as in other cities across the continent – between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The significance of these environments, especially for the enjoyment and assimilation of new intoxicating substances, has yet to receive the historiographical attention it deserves. Environmental and garden historians have tended to focus their energies on large-scale, well-documented pleasure gardens such as Marylebone, Ranelagh, and Vauxhall. Most historians of intoxicants and intoxication, meanwhile, have generally ignored tea gardens in favour of the more familiar indoor locales of alehouse, coffeehouse, household, inn, and tavern; they get only a single passing reference, for example, in this excellent recent monograph on tea. This is possibly because, faced with London’s spiralling population and growing pressure from property developers, most of them disappeared from the urban landscape over the course of the nineteenth century.

Watercolor painting of white building with several people standing in the lawn in front of the building.
An 1853 watercolour by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd depicting Copenhagen House tea garden in Islington. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The heyday of the metropolitan tea garden was the eighteenth century into the early decades of the 1800s. Estimates of their numbers vary, from c.200 at the top end to the more conservative figure of 65 proposed by Penelope Corfield. I’ve identified around 90, the locations of 81 of which I’ve been able to pinpoint with some accuracy using the visualisation software Tableau. As the interactive map shows, tea gardens were broadly dispersed across the capital and its rural hinterland, although in the terminology of human geography five broad ‘clusters’ can be identified: there was a particularly concentrated central group around Clerkenwell; a Marylebone group; a Chelsea group; a south of the river group; and two outlying Islington and Hampstead groups scattered along the leafy roads and arteries leading out of the city to the north. Within the overarching rubric of tea garden, however, surviving visual evidence indicates there was a huge amount of spatial variety; compare Copenhagen House in Islington, a huge semi-rural tavern with extensive grounds, to the much more bounded setting of the Yorkshire Stingo public house and tea gardens in Paddington.

Water color painting of a two-story pub with fenced front yard where several patrons are sitting.
A mid nineteenth-century watercolour by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd showing the Yorkshire Stingo pub and tea garden in Lisson Grove. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Food and drink was central to the offering, and – as their name denotes – tea gardens were most closely associated with a new generation of New World intoxicants, especially caffeinated beverages, and particularly tea. There were three main ways in which they fostered the incorporation of these novel substances into the diets and habits of Londoners. First, they were highly visual environments, dedicated to spectacle, the gaze, and the pleasures of the eye. Perhaps more so than any other kind of space, this made them ideal viewing platforms for the conspicuous consumption of fashionable new commodities like coffee, sugar, tea, and tobacco, and the cultivation of polite rituals surrounding them (the tea arbour or trellis is a recurring motif within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century century artistic discourses). Second, the availability of new intoxicants at the handful of spa gardens formed around natural springs – like Bermondsey Spa tea gardens, here described by the printer George Smeeton – would have strengthened existing conceptual associations between coffee, tea, tobacco, and good health. Third, while not wishing to labour the obvious, tea gardens were botanical. Their lawns, shrubberies, and trees offered a carefully curated, sometimes exotic rusticity, while those in outlying locations to points north, east, west, and south offered vantage points from which the sprawl of the global imperial city could be appreciated and admired. They were therefore almost archetypal settings for the enjoyment of agricultural derivatives from tropical climes.

Black-and-white water color painting of many patrons enjoying tea in the gardens abutting a large house.
An 1830 watercolour by George Scharf depicting Jack Straw’s Castle in Hampstead, featuring customers taking tea in distinctive arbours or alcoves. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

However, in characteristic fashion, tea gardens were also hybridised consumption spaces that retained close associations with traditional stimulants and intoxicating spaces. They were not standalone or sui generis ventures emerging from nowhere, but were generally opened by enterprising publicans on sites contiguous with inns, taverns, and alehouses; as well as the example of the Yorkshire Stingo above, see this drawing of the Chalk Farm tea gardens in Camden, where the outdoor space is adjacent to the colonnaded public house. As such, ‘old’ intoxicants in the form of alcohols (beer, wine, and spirits) were just as likely to be served and consumed within them as caffeinated drinks. This satirical etching, for example, depicts Bagnigge Wells, a fashionable spa and resort in Clerkenwell; while a kettle sits abandoned in the distance, a grinning waiter uncorks a bottle of wine or spirits for the three fashionably dressed male customers. This chimes with our findings elsewhere in the project; coffee’s percolation throughout provincial England, for example, was facilitated not by freestanding coffeehouses but by the creation of ‘coffee rooms’ within long-established drinking houses.

Hand-colored etching of four men smoking and drinking alcohol at a table outdoors.
A satirical 1804 etching showing three men consuming alcohol at Bagnigge Wells spa and tea garden. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

“To shorten winter evenings”: Recipes as Remedies Against Seasonal Melancholy

By Anna Speyart


Fig. 1 – Playful games and tricks of the trad from the frontpiece of Simon Witgeest, Het Niew Toneel der Konsten (Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, 1679).

For anyone fearing the winter blues, a recipe collection from the seventeenth-century Low Countries presented a delightful remedy. Simon Witgeest’s Het Nieuw Toneel der Konsten[The New Theatre of Arts] (1679) aimed “to shorten winter evenings, which some find very dismal and which give rise to myriad wicked temptations” (Figure 1). In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the English physician Robert Burton had already suggested that continuous diversion was the best remedy for melancholy moods, since it kept the affected mind distracted from its cogitations. Filled with magic tricks, brainteasers, remedies, pranks, and experiments, Witgeest’s collection fulfilled its promise to provide readers with a “banquet of treats for long winter evenings.” As a diversion, the recipes themselves became a remedy, which “not only sharpen young people’s wits, but also entertain old and melancholy brains.” Though Witgeest’s emphasis on recipes as a pastime can easily be dismissed as frivolous, it is worth appreciating how the collection entertained readers by teaching them to craft remedies, curiosities, and mischief with materials found in the late seventeenth-century household.

Many of Witgeest’s tricks could be done with objects found around the dinner table, suggesting that they were intended as party tricks. Readers learned fun feats with tumblers, knives, dishes, eggs, candles, bread, and lobsters, for example. One recipe described a jug with which unwitting and thirsty guests would always spill liquids over themselves. Readers also found out how to cut an apple in two without removing it from the handkerchief in which it was wrapped (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: Apples sit central to the work of the Dutch master Floris Claesz van Dijck, Still Life with Cheeses (ca. 1615), Rijksmuseum. Source: Rijksmuseum Rijksstudio

Some recipes explicitly referred to the social settings in which the trick would be performed. “When one has gathered for a meal with good friends,” one recipe read, “it is considered dignified if one can present a few amusing tricks. This can be done with a pocket fountain, which can be used to sprinkle others with water from aside so that they do not know where it came from so suddenly.”

Specific instructions taught prospective pranksters how to maximize the desired effect on their audiences. A trickster could, for instance, bet that it was possible to poke a horse or camel through the eye of a needle. Once the bets were made, the trickster should “fool around for a while,” trying to pull the large animals through the tiny hole. Only when bystanders had laughed at the trickster for long enough, the feat should be revealed: if the eye of the needle was placed against the animal, the trickster could use another needle to poke the animal through the eye of a needle. In variations on the same word game, heads could be poked through a small ring, or large cheeses and bread loaves through the ear of a pitcher.

Some recipes described experiments that were sure to impress guests, including designs for a magic lantern and camera obscura, but also setups that could more easily be achieved in household settings. One gravity-defying experiment saw a full bucket hang from a table at an improbable angle (Figure 3).

Fig. 3 – A woodcut illustrating the setup of a gravity-defying trick from Witgeest’s Het natuurlyk tover-boek (Amsterdam, 1684), page 119.   Source: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KW 30 K 20.

Readers also learned that it was possible to throw a ring into water and pull it out without getting one’s fingers wet. “Take a flat dish, pour some water into it, and throw in your ring… Take a large tumbler or beer jug and put a burning piece of paper into it. While the paper is still burning, I place the tumbler onto the water upside down… As the air in the tumbler starts to cool, all the liquid in the dish will be pressed into the tumbler. You will see the dish empty and you will be able to retrieve your ring without wetting your hands” (Figure 4).

Fig. 4 – A woodcut illustrates how water rises into a glass with a small fire inside from Witgeest’s Het natuurlyk tover-boek (Amsterdam, 1684), page 145.
Source: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KW 30 K 20.

Whether readers practiced these recipes by the book is difficult to ascertain, but at least one reader used the margins of his or her copy to work through the numbers of a scatological brainteaser. Nonetheless, even the armchair trickster would have been able to feast on the variety of quirky tidbits in Witgeest’s collection.

Simon Witgeest, which means “white spirit,” was most probably a pseudonym chosen to dispel suspicions of black magic. Although the identity of the recipes’ compiler has not been retrievable, a polemic pamphlet circulated in 1690 gives an impression of the collection’s publishing context. The pamphlet targeted Jan ten Hoorn, the publisher of the Witgeest books, for selling a pirated Dutch translation of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (1690) in his “trashy shop.” A fictional “Doctor Witgeest” also featured in the pamphlet, blushing at the accusation of plagiarism leveled against Ten Hoorn’s collaborators.

A first edition of the Witgeest collection appeared in 1679, but subsequent editions differed significantly from the first. With diminished emphasis on artisanal practices in favor of vastly expanded tricks of all kinds, these later editions, such as the sixth, better represent what the Witgeest books came to stand for as they continued to be published in the eighteenth-century Low Countries and in Germany. In the twenty-first century, readers can glimpse the appeal of some of Witgeest’s tricks on social media channels that specialize in life hacks, where variations on the experiments with gravity-defying buckets and water rising into a tumbler continue to feature. Meanwhile, the poking game has found new life in the realm of dad jokes.