My grandmother never wrote down a recipe in her life. She cooked by instinct — a handful of this, a splash of that, cook it “until it’s done.” When I asked her how much salt, she’d hold up her fingers and say “this much.” When I asked how long to cook the rice, she’d say “you’ll know.”

This is how Afghan cooking has been transmitted for centuries: mother to daughter, aunt to niece, grandmother to the child sitting on the kitchen floor watching. It’s a system that worked beautifully for generations. But it’s fragile, and right now it’s at risk.

What’s Being Lost

The Afghan diaspora is scattered across dozens of countries. Families that once lived in multi-generational homes in Kabul, Herat, or Mazar-i-Sharif are now spread across Sydney, Toronto, Hamburg, and Sacramento. The physical proximity that enabled oral recipe transmission — that kitchen-floor education — has been disrupted by displacement.

At the same time, the generation that holds the deepest knowledge of Afghan cooking is aging. My grandmother passed away in 2019. When she died, she took with her the exact method for her ash-e reshteh (noodle soup), a dish I’ve never been able to fully replicate despite years of trying. I have fragments — the spices she used, the way she browned the onions — but the complete recipe exists only in my imperfect memory.

This is happening across the Afghan community. According to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage programme, food traditions are among the most vulnerable forms of cultural heritage, precisely because they rely on oral transmission and embodied knowledge (knowing by touch, taste, and smell rather than measurement).

Community Efforts to Document

Several initiatives have emerged to address this.

The Afghan Cuisine Foundation project has been collecting recipes from Afghan families worldwide, recording not just ingredients and methods but the stories and contexts behind each dish. When did your family make this? Who taught you? What variations exist between regions?

In Australia, the Afghan women’s groups in Auburn and Dandenong have organised cooking documentation sessions — essentially intergenerational cooking classes where younger members learn from elders while everything is photographed, filmed, and written down. I’ve participated in several of these in Sydney, and they’re extraordinary. Watching an 80-year-old woman demonstrate how to stretch ashak dough by hand while her teenage granddaughter films it on an iPhone is both heartwarming and practical.

Individual efforts matter too. Several Afghan-Australian food bloggers and Instagram accounts are building searchable archives of recipes with measurements standardised for Western kitchens. Converting “a handful of coriander” into “one cup of chopped coriander” doesn’t capture the original spirit, but it makes the recipes reproducible.

The Digital Preservation Challenge

Documenting recipes seems straightforward, but there are real challenges.

Measurements. Afghan cooking rarely uses precise measurements. Adapting recipes for written formats requires testing and standardising quantities, which introduces an inevitable tension between authenticity and accessibility. Every time I write “1 teaspoon of turmeric” I’m making a choice that my grandmother would have made differently on any given day depending on the freshness of the spice, the mood of the meal, and a dozen other variables.

Technique. Some techniques don’t translate well to text or even video. The way my mother tests whether oil is hot enough for bolani — she flicks a drop of water and listens to the sound — is almost impossible to learn from a YouTube video. You need to stand next to someone and hear it yourself.

Regional variation. Afghanistan isn’t one cuisine. A dish made in Kabul will differ from the same dish made in Herat, which will differ again from Mazar-i-Sharif’s version. Documenting one version risks flattening this diversity. Documenting every version requires resources that most community projects don’t have.

Language. Many recipes use Dari or Pashto terms that don’t translate neatly into English. Describing the texture of properly prepared chainaki (a slow-cooked meat and vegetable dish) requires vocabulary that English cooking terminology doesn’t quite cover.

Modern AI-powered language and translation tools are beginning to help with this challenge. Machine translation has improved dramatically, and some cultural organisations are using AI to process and cross-reference oral history recordings in Dari and Pashto — identifying recipes, techniques, and ingredient lists from hours of recorded conversations. It’s early days, but the potential for preserving knowledge that exists only in spoken form is real.

What You Can Do

If you have Afghan family members who cook, here’s my practical advice:

Record them cooking. Not just a photo of the finished dish — video the entire process from start to finish. Ask questions while they cook. “How do you know when the onions are ready?” “Why do you add the tomatoes now and not earlier?” The answers contain the real knowledge.

Write it down, even imperfectly. An approximate recipe with notes like “add more salt than you think” is infinitely better than no recipe at all. I keep a notebook specifically for family recipes, and some entries are barely legible — but they’re mine, and they capture something that would otherwise disappear.

Cook together. This is the most obvious advice and the most important. The kitchen-floor education that sustained Afghan food traditions for centuries still works. It just requires choosing to make time for it in lives that have become much busier and more geographically scattered.

The Bigger Picture

Afghan cuisine is one of the world’s underappreciated food traditions — a crossroads cuisine influenced by Persian, Central Asian, Indian, and Chinese cooking over millennia. It deserves the kind of documentation and celebration that Thai, Japanese, and Mexican cuisines have received.

The knowledge to do this still exists. The generation that holds it is still with us, in Auburn kitchens and Dandenong living rooms and Merrylands community centres. But the window is narrowing. Every year, the chain of oral transmission stretches thinner.

What we document now — however imperfectly — is what the next generation will have to work with. I’d rather they have an approximate recipe with a story attached than nothing at all.

Mariam Ahmadi writes about Afghan food, culture, and the Sydney-based diaspora community.