Meet the Women Reviving India’s Traditional Spice Blends for a New Generation

In a world increasingly drawn to the convenience of pre-packaged seasoning and algorithmic recipes, the deeply personal, hyper-regional masalas of Indian kitchens often get left behind. But ensuring a revival and awareness for the traditional spices, are a few women at the forefront determined not to let these ancestral blends vanish — not into nostalgia, and certainly not into mass-market homogeneity.

These women are not just replicating tradition — they are restoring its rightful place in everyday life. For them, spice blends are not just ingredients. They are memory, ritual, healing, and home. Whether in a quiet Mumbai suburb or across the seas in Atlanta, these matriarchs, daughters, and documentarians are honouring age-old practices while adapting them — lovingly — for the now.

The Flavour of East Indian Memory

On the fringes of Mumbai, in the coastal town of Vasai, Regina D'Souza-Pereira tends to the spice mixes of her community like one might tend to an heirloom garden — carefully, consciously, and with reverence.

Pereira is the force behind East Indian Memory Co. Fine Foods, a homegrown initiative born not out of trend, but legacy. Married into a Vasai-based East Indian family in 1981, she learned the intricacies of traditional masala making under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law, Grace Pereira. It began as documentation — a handwritten record of family recipes that might otherwise fade with time — but has since grown into something much bigger.

“My masalas use ingredients like dagad phool, triphala, and jaiphal — spices that are rare even within our community now,” she explains. Her repertoire includes blends like möile, chichoni, and teprath, each rooted in a specific geography, occasion, or mood. “People often think East Indian cuisine means Bottle Masala, but in Vasai, mutton masala and teprath masala are more commonly used. Even Bottle Masala has dozens of regional variations.”

What makes her work so evocative is not just the preservation of blends, but the preservation of context. The instructions in her kitchen journals are not quantified in millilitres or degrees Celsius, but in sensation: until the onions change texture, cut spring onions roughly, not fine. She laughs, “When I started converting the recipes, I realised how much was intuition — not just taste, but texture, sound, and smell.”

Her daughters help her translate these notes, often stopping mid-sentence to ask her: But how did Nana know when to stop roasting the chilli? These are small acts of preservation, deeply intimate but immensely communal.

Yet Pereira is also realistic. She adapts where needed — gloves replace mortar stains, shortcuts are taken for younger palates. “People don’t like bones and fat anymore, especially in red meat dishes,” she says with a smile. “But animal fat is the ingredient that makes the masala bloom. It binds the spices. Without it, something’s missing.”

Even the meats are changing. “In Vasai, we traditionally made teprath with duck or pork. Now, everyone asks for the chicken version. The taste changes. The story changes.”

But for Pereira, this evolution is part of the work. “Masalas are living traditions,” she reflects. “They’re not just about flavour — they are about family, loss, love, migration. That’s what I’m preserving.”

A Diaspora’s Spice Trail

Across the ocean in Atlanta, cookbook author and culinary anthropologist Nandita Godbole is asking similar questions of memory, spice, and belonging — from a diasporic lens. As the mind behind Curry Cravings, Godbole has spent years tracing the matrilineal culinary histories of Indian households, unearthing regional blends and the stories tucked within them.

“Spice blends are often the last thing people think to write down,” she says. “But they are the first thing people miss when they move.” For Godbole, masalas are not just edible nostalgia — they’re intellectual artefacts.

She describes how many of her readers, particularly second-generation Indian-Americans, come looking for a taste they remember from childhood, often from a grandmother's kitchen. “They will say, ‘I remember the sambhar tasting this way, but now all the store-bought mixes taste flat.’ And it’s true — because traditional blends are deeply personal. They reflect climate, crop, caste, even illness.”

In her books, Godbole meticulously maps out the micro-histories of masalas — from Maharashtra’s goda masala to the layered blends of Chettinad cuisine. She notes that what is often lumped into a catch-all “curry powder” in the West would, in an Indian kitchen, be 6–7 different masalas — each used for a specific dish, season, or stage of life.

“There’s a masala for postpartum, for fevers, for monsoons,” she says. “There are cooling blends, warming blends, blends made to aid digestion after fasting.” She’s currently working on a spice archive that documents these nuances, including not just ingredients and quantities, but origin stories and oral traditions.

Godbole is clear that her mission is not to simplify these blends for Western ease, but to invite deeper understanding. “We are not trying to gourmet-ify anything,” she says. “If anything, we’re grounding it. Putting it back in its soil.”

And like Pereira, she knows that standardisation often means erasure. “When you mass-produce a spice mix, you choose the lowest common denominator of taste. You remove the story. You lose the hand that stirred it.”

A Heritage Passed Through Hands, Not Factories

What links Pereira’s coastal Vasai kitchen to Godbole’s suburban Atlanta study isn’t just the spices — it’s the belief that preserving traditional masalas is cultural resistance. It’s a way of refusing erasure, of anchoring identity through taste.

Both women reject the idea that heritage must remain static. Pereira is constantly innovating—tweaking proportions, adapting for dietary shifts, and gently adjusting for younger family members who might baulk at strong aromas. Godbole encourages her readers to blend, taste, and adjust—to use their hands and noses, not just measuring spoons.

And both women agree that this knowledge, long passed through generations of women, must be recorded now, before it vanishes.

“Ask your mother or grandmother why they add fennel to that one blend,” says Godbole. “Write it down. Don’t wait until it’s too late.”

The Future is Fragrant — and Feminine

In an increasingly homogenised foodscape, these women — and many others like them — are re-centring the home kitchen as a space of scholarship and pride. Their work shows that spice blends are not relics of a fading past, but living, adaptable archives of community, care, and womanhood.

As Regina Pereira stirs a pot of duck möile (curry) spiced with her mother-in-law’s Bottle Masala, she smiles. “When I cook this dish, I can taste Bandra, I can taste Vasai. I can taste all the women who taught me — and somewhere in there, I can taste myself.”

In that moment, the masala is not just a blend. It’s a bridge — across time, geography, and memory. And thanks to women like her, it’s not going anywhere.