The granny who gets paid to teach family recipes
As millennial interest in cooking declines, one cooking school of immigrant grannies is keeping family recipes alive – and getting paid to do it.
Yamini Joshi, 66, is an Indian immigrant from Mumbai, now living in New York City. By day, she works at a jewellery company in Manhattan; at least three times per month, on weekends, she instructs a group of students – often millennials – on how to prepare her family recipes. It is what she thinks of as an extended family meal.
Joshi is an instructor with League of Kitchens, which employs immigrants in New York City and Los Angeles to teach authentic recipes. Beyond the cultural connection to the food through instructors’ family recipes, classes take places within their homes – many of which are located in concentrated immigrant pockets that members outside the communities may not frequent.
As a generation more interested in spending on experiences, millennials have gained a reputation for using their ovens more for storage than baking. This is the case when the economy is strong: in the fourth quarter 2016, as consumer confidence was higher in the UK, leisure spending including food and drink was up.
Recently, however, as financial instability has set in, fewer British consumers are eating out of the home. (This mirrors a decline seen a decade ago at the start of the global financial crisis.) So, cooking more and relying less on takeaway and pre-packaged food is perhaps more a question of economics than preference.
Some analysts predict a steep decline in younger generation cooking, regardless. In a June 2018 report, Is the Kitchen Dead?, analysts at investment bank UBS estimated the global online food ordering industry will grow to $365bn by 2030, up from $35bn today.
If delivery apps are on track to kill the kitchen, then it is the goal of instructors like Joshi to save it from certain death.
“You must learn some cooking from your family, so wherever you go you cook your own food and get your own flavour,” she says.
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