Memory made edible

REVIEW: Shahnaz Ahsan’s paean to food, family, and the fragments of belonging

I received The Jackfruit Chronicles from HarperCollins a few weeks ago — one of several books that have recently found their way to me for review. As it releases tomorrow, thought it was the perfect time to share my thoughts. You can read all my previous reviews here (full archive available to paid subscribers).

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The Jackfruit Chronicles by Shahnaz Ahsan

HarperNorth UK, July 2025

“The diaspora experience is almost like being a child pitted between two acrimoniously separated parents,” writes Shahnaz Ahsan in The Jackfruit Chronicles. “Who do we show loyalty towards? How do we please both? How do we show that they both matter to us?”

It’s as honest and piercing a line as you’ll find, and a fitting entry point into a book that’s less about recipes and more about the long, complicated inheritance of migration. This isn’t just a cookbook, although it does carry several recipes. It’s a deeply felt meditation on what it means to carry entire lives: histories, hungers, heartbreaks across oceans, and to raise new generations in the shadow of that crossing.

Ahsan, the daughter of a Bangladeshi father who came to the UK as an adult and a mother who grew up in Manchester, writes across generations. Her narrative reaches back to her grandparents, part of the early wave of Sylheti migrants who arrived in the 1950s to help rebuild postwar Britain, and forward to her own children, now growing up in East Africa. In between is her own experience as a British-born Bangladeshi woman: watching, learning, cooking, carrying.

At its heart, The Jackfruit Chronicles is about how diaspora survives. And in Ahsan’s telling, it survives not through grand declarations, but through food — that quintessentially South Asian language of love, care, and memory.

The recipes, scattered throughout the book like small inheritances, are part archive, part act of devotion. There’s Mangshor jhol, a rich, slow-cooked lamb curry, and Bagar dal, tempered lentils. Spiced fish stews that recall the riverine landscape of Sylhet sit alongside dishes that speak to syncretism, like Aunty Mahroof’s tuna jacket potatoes — a kind of Anglo-Bengali comfort food that makes perfect sense in a Mancunian or Bradford kitchen.

What I found particularly touching about the book was that Ahsan doesn’t see migration as a singular event, but as a generational unfolding. Her grandparents arrived in a Britain still reeling from war, where immigrants were both desperately needed and routinely resented. As she reminds us, few today acknowledge just how battered Britain was: broke, bombed out, and depleted — and how much it relied on workers from its former empire. “Pioneers,” she calls them: a deliberate, powerful choice.

But even now, that debt remains unspoken. Instead, as Ahsan writes:

The tightrope that ethnic minority communities across the UK are expected to walk, even today, is impossible: we are to succeed without appearing successful, work without taking anyone else’s jobs, pay taxes but not claim any benefits, we are to be part of society but not be visible.

To draw attention, then, is a risk. One that might not be worth taking. These lines capture the contradictions that continue to define British multiculturalism, where to belong is always to prove and to integrate is always to edit. Even when you do everything “right”, you’re still seen as an asterisk.

Ahsan doesn’t pretend that food solves this, but it offers something else: a kind of anchoring.

“It is the fate of children of the diaspora to be viewed always as an addendum to their country ‘of origin’,” she writes elsewhere, “as though we somehow collectively cash in our Bangladeshi-identification rights because we are birthed on foreign soil.”

But in food, you can claim it all — the soil, the salt, the story.

There’s a quietly devastating moment in the book when she writes about visiting Bangladesh in the hope that it might offer answers, a way to make sense of who she is:

For a while, I was under the impression that visiting Bangladesh would help me make sense of myself, and somehow offer some answers as to to how I conceived of, and reconciled different parts of, my identity.

But it doesn’t quite. The trip back “home” becomes a kind of test — not of belonging, but of believability. Are you Bangladeshi enough? Too British? A tourist? A translation?

It’s something I’ve struggled with myself, and written of before. Still, what this book affirms is that belonging isn’t a fixed point. It’s a practice. A recipe, tried again and again, until it feels like yours.

All that said, if there’s a minor structural note, it’s that the book isn’t linear. It moves between essay, memoir, and kitchen notebook, with stretches where recipes crowd the page and others where they vanish entirely. But then again, diasporic memory doesn’t unfold in straight lines. It simmers, scatters, and splatters until it returns.

I think it would be easy to read The Jackfruit Chronicles as a book where food becomes metaphor — where jackfruit (katthal, the national fruit of Bangladesh) stands in for home, or spice for identity. But Ahsan resists easy symbolism. Her writing is more grounded, more intimate. Food here isn’t just a placeholder for something else; it is memory made edible … a way of loving, remembering, and finding your place in the world.

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