You’ve been craving butter chicken masala for weeks, but your culinary pilgrimage is perpetually stalled by imposter syndrome and 15 bottles of spices gather dust on your shelf. Questioning your capability of creating a dish half as delicious as the chefs at your local Tandoori Grill, you let visions of creamy curry dispel your apprehension. Diving online in search of a worthy (beginner-friendly) recipe, masala mayhem begins. However, as you scroll through what seems like 100s of pages of text, the recipe is nowhere to be found. Like digging through ancient scrolls to find an artifact, the actual ingredient list eludes you, slipping beneath centuries of lore. But then, the story of the recipe’s backstory catches your attention, breathing life and meaning into an already vivacious dish through the lens of family legends. 

This isn’t just any old butter chicken, this meal fed cousins, siblings, aunties, and grannies for generations, steeping in the tales of every chef who ever touched that jar of turmeric spice. So while your culinary journey was temporarily derailed by the long-winded backstory on this recipe page, perhaps the significance of the meal you’re about to consume takes on a whole new meaning, all thanks to the epic tale that precedes it.

Via u/awesomedan24