Heartland Masala: Cooking with Auyon Mukharji
In Episode 120 of the Kitchen Confidante Podcast, Liren Baker talks with Auyon Mukharji about how he and his mother, Jyoti Mukharji, collaborated to bring their family’s recipes and history to life in their book, Heartland Masala.
On the podcast, I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Auyon Mukharji, who is a musician, writer, and culinary historian. Together with his mother, Jyoti Mukharji, who is a chef, teacher, and retired physician, Auyon co-authored Heartland Masala: An Indian Cookbook from an American Kitchen.
From their home in Kansas City, Heartland Masala takes you on a culinary journey through regional Indian flavors with an American Midwestern twist. The result is a book that blends history, humor, and heart, inviting readers to explore Indian cooking through its deep cultural roots and modern evolutions.
In this episode, we chat about how Auyon and his mother collaborated to bring their family’s recipes and history to life, the ever-changing landscape of Indian cuisine, and how storytelling and scholarship shaped Heartland Masala.
Listen to the full episode or keep reading for some of the highlights from our conversation.
How Did You Come to Write a Cookbook With Your Mom?
I came to cooking a little later in life. Growing up, I always loved my mom’s food, but I didn’t fully appreciate it until I had to cook for myself. In college, I thought cooking would be easy. I’d watched my mom do it for years, but it turned out I had no clue what I was doing. I remember one disastrous attempt at chicken curry: I didn’t have time to let it simmer, so I cranked up the heat and burned the whole thing.
My mom didn’t grow up cooking and instead focused on her studies. My parents met in medical school in India, right after high school. When she moved to the U.S., she had to learn to cook for her family. She started cooking through long-distance correspondence with her mother and grandmother, and combined her Punjabi culinary roots with my dad’s Bengali background, as well as the American influences around her.
“To talk about the cooking of India is as broad as to talk about the cooking of Europe,” I often say. “It’s vast, varied, and ever-evolving.”
My mom worked as a physician and cooked for us at home for years, and then discovered her passion for teaching later in life. Once my brother and I moved out, she got more involved in the community and began offering cooking classes from her home. Over the years, she taught more than 6,500 students from our home. Teaching became her joy, as she called it “reaching Nirvana.” While she’s a natural teacher, she’s not a fan of writing, so she asked me to help capture her recipes in a cookbook. I’m a musician by trade, but was happy to help.
Tell Us More About Your Book, Heartland Masala
The backbone of Heartland Masala is my mom’s recipes that she has cooked, taught, and perfected over the years, but I knew I wanted this book to go beyond just the recipes. While she provided the culinary knowledge, I focused on adding history and context. I dove into an independent study in Indian culinary history, and what I learned reshaped how I saw food altogether.
“The more I studied, the harder it became to generalize anything about Indian cooking. Culinary culture and cuisine are dynamic and constantly shifting.”
One example is chai. Though now considered quintessentially Indian, it’s a relatively recent creation with British colonial roots and Chinese origins.
To help balance the historical context, we wanted the illustrations and photography to help the book feel approachable and light. The illustrations bring warmth, humor, and clarity to the recipes, while the photography offers a more traditional visual experience of the dishes. To keep them distinct, we placed a dedicated photo spread in the center of the book like “old-school” books used to do, and let the illustrations carry the rest of the story.
“This book took eight years to create. It is really special, and I hope the love and the joy show through.”
Heartland Masala: An Indian Cookbook from an American Kitchen, by Dyoti Mukharji and Auyon Mukharji (The Collective Book Studio, 2025).
Learn more
Listen to the full podcast episode with Auyon here. You can learn more at heartlandmasala.com and follow on Instagram at @heartlandmasala.
COOKBOOK
Comments