For Mum Shobha and daughter Keryn Kalyan, both hailing from Lower Hutt, food is an essential part of life. Together, they’ve decided to gather multiple generations of traditional Gujarati cooking and pass it on to the rest of Wellington, and the world.
Almost two years ago, the mother and daughter duo decided to team up to create a record of the food that defines their family, the brilliantly entitled cookbook Pass It On. “We’re both born and bred here. We’re all foodies in our family” laughs Shobha. “My own Mum and Dad taught us never to waste anything. We’ve been cooking Gujarati food here for three generations.”
The Best Gujarati Food from Lower Hutt
Originally Shobha and her husband come from Gujarat and Fiji (her husband, Keryn’s father, has Fijian Indian roots). To save money, her parents would grow vegetables and herbs in their garden to include in their traditional Gujarati dishes. “My parents weren’t well to do” remembers Shobha, thinking back to her childhood. “They used to grow a lot of ingredients, like garlic, chillies, and tomatoes and were good gardeners. The food was seasonal. Mum and Dad would go to Otaki to buy bulk when it was cheaper, then bottle the produce for the year to come. My mum taught me how to clean and grind the spices.”
Shobha’s Mum didn’t use measurements when cooking. “She’d just say ‘Put a little bit in!’ but I never knew how much a little bit meant,” she says “I had to look at her cooking and watch the amounts.” Shobha’s mother refused to let her daughter make the meals because she insisted that her daughter was too slow. “You do the dishes, I’ll be faster” Mum would say. As a result, Shobha didn’t get properly into cooking until she was married when she also learned from her mother in law. Shobha’s approach to sharing her knowledge about food has been more expansive. “I wanted to teach my children how to cook for themselves,” says Shobha. “Not only our Gujarati food but all food. Each of my children has their own special style of cooking now.”
If variety is the spice of life, the Kalyan’s have it in abundance. Lamb curry, chicken curry, barbeque, samosa’s, and more make up the culinary repertoire for the family. “We eat everything in the book, and there are 103 recipes,” says Shobha. Daughter Keryn rarely ate takeaways growing up. “Mum always made time to cook” she says. Shobha nods. “I liked to make it myself so that I know what’s inside all the spices. I’ve carried on traditions which my mum taught me and I’ve passed them on to Keryn and my other two daughters Alaina and Jeena. My Mum would buy beefsteak tomatoes and turn them into sauce. We’d have enough for a whole year. We do the same” Shobha believes that eating healthy doesn’t mean it is expensive. “The food we ate growing up was always healthy and good. Take my parents: they knew how to stretch their food and make it last: if you make it today it tastes better tomorrow”. “There’s also so many vegetarian dishes and everything tastes amazing” chimes in Keryn.
Her Mother’s Daughter
From four years old, a young Keryn would stand on a little red chair next to the kitchen bench and help her mother cook. “Mum used to do cake decorating as well, so I used to make little flowers with fondant. We have photos of us when we’re little making traditional bread” she says. “Mum used to let us have a go.”
Studying at St Oran’s, Lower Hutt, Keryn enjoyed digital technology and science at school. “At Victoria university, I studied Commerce majoring in Information Systems and Management. Halfway through my degree, I got an internship at Xero. So many people that work there moonlight with another side business, which I think is because Xero supports small businesses with their products” Keryn says. “Xero have been amazing to us and so supportive,” says Shobha.
Making ‘Pass It On’
Pass It On started with a simple concept - to publish a book. Along the way, it has turned into a mother/daughter business.
Shobha has had many jobs, working as the canteen manager at St Oran’s, making cakes, working for Telecom, owning a cafe, and doing legal secretary work. “I also bought my cafe, Marion Food, and Espresso. It was a tiny shop but so super busy. I had to get up at two in the morning and would get home between four or five in the evening. It was a huge amount of hard work. I decided that after five years of running it I would stay at home. It did my head in being at home, so I got the job at St Oran’s running the canteen. I’m still there to this day!” she says.
Friends would tell Shobha that she needed to write down her recipes because they were so good. “One day, Keryn came back from work and told me ‘Mum, you need to write the cookbook.’ I said ‘Okay then - so I started making a plan on my cellphone. We never thought it would become a small business!” she laughs.
As the pair went through the project and through different phases, they realised that they were making something bigger. “The decision to self-publish was really difficult. I didn’t know the differences at the start” explains Keryn. “We talked to lots of people and realised that with self-publishing we would have so much more creative freedom and no rush on our deadlines. As we’d never done it before, it was a bit of a risk, but we knew we could design it how we wanted.”
Together, mother and daughter have shared the load. “Mum came up with the name ‘Pass It On’ in the bathroom” laughs Keryn. “We did lots of research, getting books out from the library to see how we wanted it to look.” If Shobha started a recipe but forgot to measure the amounts she put in, she’d have to start all over again. “Mum did all the cooking, and sometimes would make a dish up to ten times,” Keryn says.
To keep book production costs low, Keryn did all the photography, project management, marketing, and supported the art direction (along with their ‘amazing’ designer Jessica Read) - a huge workload on top of her full-time job. Keryn would catch the train home after work, and use Trello to manage what tasks needed to be done that night to keep the cookbook moving. “At first I used my iPhone camera,” says Keryn. “I took my photos to work and people told me it was too pixelated. I ended up using a DSLR camera and manual settings for every photo. It was a steep learning curve” she says.
Creating the book, selling, distributing, and marketing the book has taken over two years. Marketing-wise, Keryn, and Shobha started last Mother’s Day. “We wanted to take people on a journey so we started 6 months before the book came out” Keryn explains. “We started with nothing so it was about getting the word out there and building up our Instagram and Facebook. It came out at Christmas time and was so exciting. It’s been amazing to see how much beautiful feedback there has been to our book, which is all about sharing knowledge about cooking and passing down traditions.”
Promoting their brand, marketing, and managing timelines was hard, says Keryn. The first deadline was last Mother’s Day, which then moved to October 2019 and then moved to Christmas 2019. “We knew we had to get it done by Christmas because it is so crucial,” says Keryn.
For Keryn, another huge challenge was getting the book into stores. “Many bookshops naturally don’t know who we are, so are nervous about stocking someone that is self-published. I found that I needed to make myself physically available, like going to a bookshop in Auckland while on a work trip. I also needed to put information out there and promote on our website how we’ve been profiled in the media. We’re now in lots of stores all over New Zealand. People connected to our authentic story and the Mother/Daughter tale” she says. “We held each other up when the other was down,” says Shobha. “Some cocktails were also definitely part of the mix.” “The important thing in making our cookbook was making a plan about what we had to do, but also staying on task with our milestones and not getting overwhelmed,” says Keryn.
The Final Word
Shobha and Keryn have high standards about food when they go out. Surprisingly, they don’t eat Indian when they organise a night out. “You can’t buy Gujarati food out,” says Shobha. Instead, Loretta, Ortega, Highwater, or the Jardin Bar and Grill at Sofitel are their Wellington picks. “We like to try all the new ones,” says Shobha. “Mum makes it best” laughs Keryn.