Tag Archives: Family recipes

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Posts, Summer 2026

Marton Family Crescents: Adapting Vanillekipferls with Walnuts

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By Jacquelyn D. Deppe (Marton)

Vanille-Kipferl ohne Ei, found in Die Süddeutsche Küche by Edle von Katharina Prato Scheiger (1903), is one of the earliest published mentions of vanillekipferls – small, crescent-shaped biscuits or cookies, traditionally made with almonds and vanilla sugar during Christmas time. Although these cookies originated in Vienna, Austria, they have since become a part of German, Swiss, Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian culture.

Recipe for Vanille-Kipferl ohne Ei in German found in Die Süddeutsche Küche by Edle von Katharina Prato Scheiger from 1903.
Vanille-Kipferl ohne Ei recipe from Die Süddeutsche Küche by Edle von Katharina Prato Scheiger (1903). Image credit: HathiTrust from the University of California, digitized by Google.

The Vanille-Kipferl ohne Ei recipe roughly translates as follows:

“Cut the dough—made from 280g flour, 210g butter, 100g blanched and finely ground almonds, and 70g sugar—into walnut-sized pieces. Shape these into slender little rolls, curve them into crescent shapes, and bake them gently until pale golden. Remove them from the baking sheet while they are still piping hot, immediately roll each one in vanilla sugar, place them on paper, and let them cool completely.”

When Austrians immigrated to the United States, recipes like vanillekipferls came with them. However, the name changed through a mix of translation, assimilation, and Americanization, as its original German name was unfamiliar to many Americans. Its ingredients also changed due to socio-demographic characteristics and availability of ingredients. By examining different cookbooks published in the United States along with an unpublished family recipe, these changes can be seen.

Recipe for butter almond crescents in English as found in The Settlement Cook Book from 1921.
Butter almond crescents recipe from The Settlement Cook Book (1921). Image credit: HathiTrust from the University of California, digitized by Google.

In the 11th edition of The Settlement Cook Book (1921), vanillekipferls adopted a new name, butter almond crescents. The recipe calls for flour, butter, blanched almonds, powdered sugar, and vanilla bean. With directions that say to:

“[p]ut flour into bowl, add butter, grated sweet and bitter almonds and 2 or 3 tablespoons powdered sugar, and knead into a dough. Roll quite thin, put into small rounds, then into half moons or crescents. Place in tins and bake all at one time in a moderate oven. Grind vanilla bean, add powdered sugar, dip the hot cakes in the sugar mixture.”

While The Settlement Cook Book compiled by Mrs. Simon Kander (1901) was published to help Eastern European Jewish immigrant families adapt to life in the United States, the cookbook contains recipes from other parts of Europe. The cookbook serves as an early example of how traditional European and Jewish recipes blended with American cooking, and specifically, how vanillekipferls started to change in the United States.

Moving into the postwar period in the United States, the name changed again. The Meta Given’s Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking by Meta Given (1957) refers to vanillekipferls as almond crescents. The recipe calls for almonds, flour, salt, butter or margarine, packed xxxx sugar (fine confectioner’s sugar), vanilla extract, and almond extract. With directions that say to:

“[p]ut almonds through nut or food chopper using coarse blade. Sift flour, measure, resift with salt. Cream soft butter until shiny, add sugar, put through sieve; cream well. Stir in flavorings, then almonds and flour. Knead dough to blend smoothly. Divide dough in half, then lay on board and with palms of hands roll each into a rope 15 inches long. Cut ropes into 1-inch lengths, then roll each piece between palms until 2 inches long. Place on baking sheet, curving into crescent-shape. Bake 15 to 17 min or until a pale golden color. Remove at once to cake rack, then sift xxxx sugar over tops. Attractive, crunchy, good keepers if you can keep them. 30.”

Similarly, in the Acornucopia, a community cookbook compiled by the Valley Hospital Auxiliary of Ridgewood, New Jersey (June 1989), the vanillekipferl also appears as almond crescents. These almond crescents, credited to Mrs. George Young, include sweet butter, confectioner’s sugar, flour, and almonds. The directions say to:

“[b]reak off pieces [of the batter] and roll in palm of hand. Shape into crescents. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet about 10 minutes until very light brown. Cool thoroughly and then roll in additional confectioner’s sugar.”

Although both recipes differ in measurements, Meta Given’s recipe calls for vanilla beans, allowing bakers to create a coating similar to vanilla sugar,while Mrs. George Young’s recipe omits vanilla entirely, relying instead on only confectioners’ sugar.

Each recipe from these three published cookbooks contain almonds as an ingredient, while two contain ingredients and directions to make an adaptation of vanilla sugar. As Susan Kalc̆ik discusses in Chapter 2 of Symbol and the Performance of Identity in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States (1985), immigrant families adapted traditional recipes in response to economic conditions and ingredient availability while preserving cultural meanings attached to recipes.

This can further be seen in a family recipe from the Marton family, where vanillekipferls are called crescents. The recipe is quite different from early renditions, using walnuts and confectioner’s sugar rather than almonds and vanilla sugar. The recipe also calls for chilling the dough overnight and sifting confectioner’s sugar over them after baking as opposed to baking them without chilling and rolling them in either confectioner’s or vanilla sugar while still warm. This variation developed due to a lack of income and the inability to acquire all the correct ingredients after the Martons immigrated to the United States. By using a cheaper nut and confectioner’s sugar, they were able to continue making these cookies, preserving their family traditions and culture. As Norma Baumel Joseph discusses in Cookbooks Are Our Texts, this blending of old and new helps to preserve recipes.

As the vanillekipferl demonstrates, recipe adaptations found in published cookbooks and family recipes help preserve family and cultural traditions. The persistence of the crescent shape alongside changes in names and ingredients illustrates that the survival of any immigrant recipe often depends on adaptation rather than exact replication.

Jacquelyn D. Deppe (Marton) is the Technical Services Archivist at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey where she catalogs materials and processes archival collections. Deppe holds an MI with a concentration in Archives and Preservation from Rutgers University and an MS in Professional Communication and Digital Media Arts from Seton Hall University. She has a passion for studying published and unpublished cookbooks and recipes from tracing recipe adaptations to the way in which people interacted with these texts.

American Studies, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026, Teaching Resources, Women and Gender

Teaching Grandma Peg’s Recipes

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By Jennifer Cognard-Black

We begin with recipes. On day one of my “Books that Cook” class—an upper-level seminar on the literatures of food in which we study novels, memoirs, and films with recipes—I pass out pens and index cards and ask my students to jot down a recipe they know by heart. To assure those who don’t identify as cooks, I tell them that if they know how to make, say, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich or a cheese quesadilla, that counts as a recipe.

Students then swap their cards and examine their peer’s recipe. We start by thinking like rhetoricians, talking about the rhetorical form of modern recipes, meaning their components (title, ingredients, and instructions) and why they’re structured in this way, linking form to function.

From there, I talk about the history of this genre in North America—from oral traditions to commonplace books to cookbooks and the rise of nutritionism and level measurement—before suggesting something that I’ve written about in Melissa Goldthwaite’s anthology Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics: that recipes are embodied stories.

Considering recipes as stories leads us to think like anthropologists, examining our recipes as artifacts of culinary cultures—ones that reveal familial, ethnic, religious, economic, and agricultural traditions and values. We also discuss how recipes produce bodies: the writer’s, of course, but also ancestral and future bodies and even the reader’s body should they make the dish. As Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster argue so well in The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, “The recipe. . .[puts] the reader in contact with the writer, making personal connections with a cultural moment or a community, and allowing the reader to interpolate [themselves] into the text, making the narrative [their] own.”

Importantly, though, we also discuss how recipes can exclude as well as include, coding certain bodies as other and/or usurping aspects of someone else’s culinary culture without giving them credit. In the U.S., that might mean erasing the origins of recipes, as has happened repeatedly to Black women who, as Toni Tipton-Martin explains in her book The Jemima Code, “did much of the cooking in early American kitchens.” Similar erasures and exclusions have occurred with recipes first developed by Indigenous, Latin American, and Asian communities.     

In every food-based class I teach, I encourage learning that’s sensory, creative, and collaborative. And so I do the assignments alongside my students, including this exercise. For the recipe I know by heart, I use my paternal grandmother’s for banana bread—one she snail-mailed to me when I was a graduate student, suggesting I could save money by repurposing blackened bananas into a “Delicious Treat!”

Many of my best-beloved recipes come from this grandmother, Nellie “Peg” Cognard. When Peg died in 2004 at the age of 89, my father asked if I wanted anything of hers. Immediately I said, “her recipe box”—which is actually a 1970s index-card organizer, 14 inches long and missing a lid. This unassuming container holds around 1400 recipe cards, spattered with grease and mostly written in my grandmother’s hand: an archive of her cooking culture, particularly among her fellow homemakers in Omaha, Nebraska. These recipe cards range from the 1940s through the mid-80s, when my Grandma and Grandpa Cognard moved to Texas, far from brisk Nebraska winters.

Grandma Peg’s 1400 recipes are for mid-century midwestern delicacies such as Ham Loaf, Hamburger Pie, Butterhorn Rolls, Waldorf Astoria Salad, Dump Cake, Milky Way Cake, and my father’s favorite, Toll House Cookies with Oatmeal.

Fig. 1. Toll House Cookies. Image Credit: Personal Collection.
Fig. 2. Toll House Cookies. Image Credit: Personal Collection.

On the second day of “Books that Cook,” I bring in loaves of Grandma Peg’s banana bread along with the entire “Desserts” section of her recipe box. As I hand out fistfuls of cards, I tell them that, today, we’re going to think like historians.

The first thing students notice is the handwriting, a slanting cursive with looping O’s and tight S’s. They enjoy the tactility: the bodily trace of Grandma Peg as their thumbs brush over her words—which is part of what turns such functional texts into heirlooms.

Then they notice the names. While my grandmother made all these dishes herself, she gave other cooks their due, writing their name in the corner. Most recipes came to my grandma by way of friends in her United Methodist women’s group—including her closest friend Gen May—or from family members, such as her daughter Shirley or my mother Anne. This practice of attribution underscores the collaborative nature of my grandma’s cooking circle, while also building an archive of communal knowledge.

Fig. 3. Recipe Attributions. Image Credit: Personal Collection.

Students are also struck by the distinct modalities of the cards, which reveal how twentieth-century American cooking was influenced by the rise of consumer culture—in everything from the abundance and branding of processed foods (e.g., Angel-flake coconut) to the personalized recipe cards. They also note profound shifts in communication technologies, with some recipes plunked out on a typewriter and others cut-and-pasted from newspapers or magazines.

Fig. 4. Recipe Card Modalities. Image Credit: Personal Collection

What becomes clear through our historical analysis is that these stay-at-home women forged a kind of amateur professionalism as home cooks. Their recipe exchanges gave them agency, community, and sometimes celebrity; a woman could build a reputation on her perfect ice-box cakes.

As our conclusion to this work—and to set up future class discussions—I then bring out some of Grandma Peg’s recipe cards from beyond the “Desserts” section, including ones for Oriental Tuna Salad, Old Virginia Peanut Soup, Taiwanese Special, Dead Bread (“Pan de Muerto”), and Poor Man’s Liver Paté. Why? Because my grandmother’s recipes are products of the politics, economy, and social hierarchies of her day, and ephemera such as handwritten recipes record it all: not just how food can create belonging, but how culinary cultures can appropriate and exclude as well. As Abby M. Dubisar puts it in her article on “Jell-O Constructions of White Femininity,” through cookbooks—but also through caches of handwritten recipes—“white stories about race and class and food…are maintained.”

Fig. 5. Dead Bread. Image Credit: Personal Collection
Fig. 6. Dead Bread. Image Credit: Personal Collection

Beginning my “Books that Cook” classes with this personal recipe collection accomplishes a number of pedagogical goals. It asks students to think critically through distinct disciplinary lenses. It also asks them to think with their bodies as they touch and taste history, handling these cards and eating a slice of Grandma Peg’s banana bread. And, finally, it asks that they consider the complexity of cooking communities in light of identity and inequality.

At the end of our first week, I ask everyone to take their peer’s recipe home and turn it into the page of a cookbook using old-school tools: pens and markers, tape and glue. By week two, these pages become a class cookbook zine. I scan their pages and add a cover, epigraph, and table of contents before making hard copies for everyone—which accomplishes yet another pedagogical goal (and perhaps the one that’s most important to me): starting our own culinary community.

Jennifer Cognard-Black is Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a public honors college fastened to a shore in Southern Maryland. A Fulbright Scholar to Slovenia and the Netherlands, she received the 2020 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, considered the “Nobel Prize” for teachers. Jennifer is the author or co-editor of six books, including Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal (NYUP 2014) and Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically (NYUP 2024), both with her long-time collaborator Melissa A. Goldthwaite. Jennifer also publishes essays and short fiction, and she’s produced various lecture series for The Great Courses and Audible, including an Audible Original titled “Books that Cook: Food & Fiction” (2021).

Family and Household, Food and Drink, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026, Women and Gender

A Recipe for Beans (Without the Beans)

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By Sarah Conrad Gothie

What makes a recipe a recipe? When I taught a first-year writing course on food and identity at the University of Michigan in 2010, I assigned a creative final project: craft a short essay translating a specific place, practice, or life philosophy into the rhetorical format of “a recipe for a life worth living,” taking stylistic cues from the conventions of the recipe genre. For inspiration, we examined creative works such as Joanna Scott’s essay, “Stuffed Peppers (A Recipe for Beauty),” and Nancy Willard’s poem, “How to Stuff a Pepper,” alongside traditional cookbook recipes. We reached consensus that a written recipe must have 1) a descriptive, perhaps also enticing, title; 2) a list of ingredients with measurements; and 3) procedural instructions. A recipe’s voice should be imperative, directing an understood subject to perform a series of tasks chronologically. We left little to chance. We knew, with certainty, what made a recipe a recipe.

A few years later, exploration of my late grandmother’s recipe collection unsettled my confidence in recipe conventions. Married in 1950 to a WWII veteran who built the postwar ranch home where they raised their five children, my grandmother presided over a spacious and well-equipped kitchen that included a Tappan Model RL-1 microwave oven, the first of its kind manufactured for home use. The influence of packaged convenience foods was strong in her oeuvre—I fondly recall mac and cheese made from “scratch” with Velveeta and pressed Christmas cookies tinted with Jell-O powder, as well as Pennsylvania Dutch classics like brothy beef with egg noodles for Sunday dinner. In addition to a modest shelf of cookbooks, she kept recipes in a small tin box adorned with folksy birds, flowers, and strawberries. It housed a thick deck of 3.5” x 5” cards inscribed in tidy cursive, plus clippings from magazines and newspapers, tucked between tabbed alphabetical dividers. Surprisingly, only a handful of recipes in the box were recognizable to me—Jell-O cookies, thick sugar cutout cookies, and Depression-era ‘Wacky Cake’ among them. Rather than being the written record of my grandmother’s signature dishes, this collection felt more like an aspirational Pinterest board of possibilities.

But more intriguingly, this time capsule of cookery also revealed an apparent disregard for method. Many of my grandmother’s handwritten recipes consisted of a title and ingredient list—some, an ingredient list alone! Perhaps in the spirit of efficiency, she omitted the obvious, knowing she would require only a reminder of what to combine. Upon reflection, this made perfect sense; when I was first living on my own, I phoned my grandmother to ask for her potato salad recipe. She was highly amused at the request. She told me to boil some potatoes and eggs, cube them, then chop celery and make a dressing. She would fondly laugh about that for years to come; for her, potato salad wasn’t the sort of thing that required a recipe.

Fig. 1. “Beans” recipe card handwritten by Marcella Muri Conrad (1929-2012). Image courtesy of the author.

I was delighted to discover a card titled “Beans,” which I assumed must be the saucy terra cotta-colored baked beans we ate at every summer picnic alongside that off-the-record potato salad. The card bore a cryptic list of ingredients and no method. It started with “2 tlbs [sic] syrup.” Maple syrup, I assumed. The next ingredient was “1/2 juice.” Juice of what? Fruit juice for sweetness, perhaps. Or maybe “juice” referred to the cooking liquid from the beans? Half of what measure—a 1/2 cup? Half of what remained once the beans were cooked? “One onion” was fairly straightforward, but “1/2 jar ketchup” left me estimating by memory the volume of the thick glass Heinz bottles of my youth. “2 tbls vinegar, 1/2 tsp dry mustard, 6 tbls brown sugar, and 2 tsp salt” rounded out the list. No mention was made of the bacon or ham that gave textural contrast to the small, velvety beans. Furthermore, this recipe for “Beans” made no mention of beans beyond the title. No variety or quantity of beans, no indication of dry or canned, no cooking time or temperature. 

My attempt at parsing this card and recreating the beans of my youth was a flop, but a flop with an important lesson to impart. A published recipe is a set of instructions for the unfamiliar or uncertain; it aims to contain all the knowledge required to produce a dish. A personal recipe card, however, may function more as a prompt—a series of nudges recorded by and for a single cook. The knowledge lives at the intersection of the text and the reader who knows how to interpret it.

As a composition instructor, I had generalized all recipes into a written genre based on the conventions of recipes published in books. But as a home cook who inherited someone else’s collection, I realized that what initially felt like a series of accidental absences were actually deliberate ellipses; my grandmother’s embodied knowledge filled in the blanks. The farther a recipe must travel—across time, borders, cooks, kitchens—the more comprehensive it must become. My grandmother’s bean recipe was never intended to journey beyond her stovetop. For those who inherit or study personal recipe collections, it may be easy to read an ellipsis as an omission, but to do so is to misinterpret the archive—to miss evidence of tacit wisdom that once lived beyond the card.

Fig. 2. The beans at a Sunday dinner in Summer 2001, adjacent to the elusive potato salad. Image courtesy of the author.

Dr. Sarah Conrad Gothie is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar and educator. She holds a PhD in American Culture, with a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies, from the University of Michigan. She is the author of Damsons: An Ancient Fruit in the Modern Kitchen (Prospect Books, 2018) and food essays including “Pandemic Pantry in the Big Woods: A Quest for Certainty During COVID-19” in DIGEST and “No Food or Drink in the Museum?: The Challenges of Edible Artifacts” in The Food and Folklore Reader. Her current food studies project is a work of middle grade narrative nonfiction that introduces readers ages 8-12 to culinary history through the life and legacy of Janice Bluestein Longone, a woman whose curiosity, generosity, and persistence helped shape the academic study of food in the United States. She teaches academic and creative writing at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia, PA, and posts about food, museums, reading, and gardening on Instagram: @sarahconradgothie

Culinary History, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Posts, Spring 2023, Women and Gender

Unlearning Patriarchy: Flavors of Change in the Kitchen

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By Niharika Tripathi

In the heart of our family kitchen, where the flavors of tradition and conformity converged, I witnessed a peculiar blend between food and patriarchal influence. As a child, I observed how my father’s preferences dictated our kitchen. His love for pumpkin permeated every dish, while the absence of spices like amchoor reflected in our meals. The very clear patriarchal hierarchy fueled by the society shaped our family dynamics. However, amidst this influence, my mother quietly rebelled by striving to please my brother and me with foods that catered to our tastes. It was a small rebellion, but it stood out as a symbol of individuality in a household that often adhered to traditional norms. Little did I know then that this seemingly mundane aspect of our daily lives held a deeper connection to the journey of unlearning patriarchal codes and the pursuit of personal rejuvenation, reimagination, reconception, and rebirth.

An image of kaddu ki sabzi (pumpkin dish), lovingly prepared by my mother.

Thinking back on the food choices that were made, one ingredient stands out in my memory: khatai. This small, pickle-like condiment, with its tangy and savory notes, held a special place in my heart. Growing up, khatai was a rarity in our meals, as my father never allowed its inclusion. I could only indulge in its delightful taste when I visited my grandmother once a year.

The limited access to khatai made it all the more precious to me. It became a symbol of the connections I cherished, the memories I treasured, and the small rebellions that brought me joy. So, as I continue to infuse the flavors of khatai into my meals, I do so with gratitude for the memories it evokes and the personal liberation it represents. It’s a reminder that even the smallest additions to our kitchen can carry profound significance, honoring our past while shaping our future.

A collection of spices, including amchoor, representing the diverse flavors explored in our kitchen.

Thinking back on the food choices that were made, one ingredient stands out in my memory: khatai. This small, pickle-like condiment, with its tangy and savory notes, held a special place in my heart. Growing up, khatai was a rarity in our meals, as my father never allowed its inclusion. I could only indulge in its delightful taste when I visited my grandmother once a year.

The limited access to khatai made it all the more precious to me. It became a symbol of the connections I cherished, the memories I treasured, and the small rebellions that brought me joy. As I continue to infuse the flavors of khatai into my meals, I do so with gratitude for the memories it evokes and the personal liberation it represents. It’s a reminder that even the smallest additions to our kitchen can carry profound significance, honoring our past while shaping our future.

As I grew older, I couldn’t help but notice another aspect of patriarchal codes: the unequal distribution of food. Even as times changed, the practice of serving men first persisted within our extended family. Even now, as my cousins’ wives and my sister-in-law strive for change, my aunts and mother find solace in feeding everyone else before savoring the meals they have lovingly prepared. 

Amidst the flavors that defined our family’s culinary landscape, there was one dish that my mother held close to her heart: kadhi. Its tangy notes and velvety texture had always enticed her taste buds. However, a cloud of restriction hung over this beloved dish. My father, driven by his own preferences, made it very clear that he did not care for kadhi. The mere mention of it seemed to trigger an unspoken restriction. Although my mother had a strong fondness for kadhi, she still adhered to the restriction. It was a silent sacrifice, a relinquishing of her own desires to appease the patriarchal codes that subtly dictated our family’s culinary choices.

Kadhi Recipe

Ingredients:

1 cup yogurt

3 tablespoons gram flour (besan)

2 cups water

1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder

1 teaspoon red chili powder

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds

A pinch of asafoetida (hing)

1 tablespoon ghee (clarified butter)

Curry leaves 

Salt to taste

Fresh coriander leaves for garnish

My mother would whisk curd with gram flour to form a smooth mixture. In a pan, she would heat ghee and add cumin seeds, mustard seeds, and a pinch of asafoetida, sautéing them briefly. Then, she would add the yogurt-gram flour mixture and stir in water, turmeric powder, red chili powder, and salt. The kadhi would simmer on low heat until it thickened and the raw taste of gram flour disappeared. Finally, she would garnish it with fresh coriander leaves. While this process resulted in a delicious dish, its significance has always been beyond its flavour for me. 

Through these experiences of our kitchen, I developed a sense of self awareness of the pervasive influence of patriarchal codes and their impact on individuals and relationships around me. I started questioning the norms and expectations that permeated our family dynamics. Witnessing my mother’s quiet rebellion and the compromises she made to accommodate the preferences of others opened my eyes to the hidden sacrifices and silencing of personal desires that often accompany traditional gender roles. It became clear to my brother and I that unlearning patriarchal codes required a conscious dismantling of ingrained patterns and a reimagining of relationships rooted in equality and individual autonomy.

A bowl of tangy and velvety kadhi, representing a dish restricted by patriarchal preferences.

The change in our kitchen may have seemed subtle at first, but in hindsight, it was a much-needed and transformative shift. As I began questioning the patriarchal nature of our surroundings, a seed of change was planted within our family dynamic. The conversations initiated sparked a collective awakening, encouraging each family member to reevaluate their own beliefs and behaviors in the kitchen. We recognized the need to break free from the limitations imposed by tradition and embrace a more inclusive and authentic way of living. Gradually, our kitchen became a space where everyone’s voices were heard, preferences were respected, and contributions were celebrated. It was through this subtle revolution that we cultivated an environment of harmony, equality, and individual empowerment. The change in our kitchen rippled into other aspects of our lives, inspiring us to challenge societal norms, pursue personal growth, and forge deeper connections with one another. In hindsight, I now realize that this seemingly small shift held the power to transform not only our family’s relationship with food but also our overall sense of well-being and fulfillment.

The dining table displays a variety of dishes. In the center, a vibrant pumpkin dish stands out, accompanied by a creamy kadhi bowl.

Niharika Tripathi is a feminist researcher and writer specializing in research and advocacy. With a background in law, she brings a unique perspective to her work, focusing on gender-based violence and social change. Through qualitative research and community engagement, Niharika challenges patriarchal norms, striving for a more inclusive world.