Kitchen Table Recipe Book (Shubalakshmi Shekar)

To celebrate the Kitchen Table Recipe Book, we invite you to join us on Wednesday, July 22 for a community-based conversation about memories of food and home. Check out our event page for full details. 

Kitchen Table is a collaborative cookbook and storytelling project bringing together recipes and personal narratives from people currently living in Metro Detroit. The project began as a research inquiry into home, nostalgia, and the ways food carries memory across migration and everyday life.

Developed through community participation, the book collects over 50 recipes alongside stories of childhood, family kitchens, and the cities that shaped people's identities. Rather than treating recipes as static instructions, the project positions them as lived archives—where food becomes a way of remembering, translating, and preserving personal and collective histories.

Through conversations, submissions, and gatherings, Kitchen Table explores how diasporic communities construct a sense of home through food, especially when living away from where they grew up. The project culminates in a printed publication that acts as both archive and social space, bringing together fragments of lived experience through cooking.