“It’s not a season—it is an emotion,” restaurateur, celebrity chef and author Asma Khan says when we ask her what makes the monsoon season so special. “The monsoon was also mango season. The excess waterlogging meant we were unable to go to school. Long nights of no power because the water damaged the electric supplies. A time for pakoras and tea and lots of innovative ways to eat eggs, as that was the only thing we had at home apart from some staples. It was as if we were marooned on an island! It was also the time when the whole family was home. Now I look back and think those days were the happiest days of my life,” says Asma.
This deeply personal tether to the rains has found its way into Asma’s newest and most intimate cookbook, Monsoon. It’s a tender, evocative journey into the kitchens of her childhood in Kolkata, the kitchens of longing in Cambridge, and the quiet resilience of a woman raised by a trailblazing matriarch.
Asma never set out to be a chef. She trained in law, not hospitality. But fate, as she’s fond of saying, had other plans. Her restaurant, Darjeeling Express, located in London’s vibrant Carnaby Street, began as a supper club and grew into a sort of pilgrimage site for lovers of authentic Indian food. More than the food, though, it’s her unapologetic storytelling and reverence for the home cook that sets Asma apart. She built the restaurant with an all-women kitchen team, many of whom had never worked professionally before.
She remains vocal about gender gaps in restaurant kitchens. At Darjeeling Express, she uplifts, mentors, and insists that legacy is not defined by fame, but by integrity. “Any positive change is welcome, but Indian restaurants in the West are still almost entirely staffed by men. There are very few women in positions of power and ownership.”
In Monsoon, she invites us back not to glossy restaurant kitchens, but to modest homes and intimate spaces where intuition rules, halogen lights flicker, and stories simmer with every pot. “I wrote this book to demystify Indian food,” she says. “To open the world of Indian flavours to a broader audience.”
The book reads like a memoir with recipes. A plate of pakoras becomes a thunderstorm remembered. A pot of dal, simmered with coconut and the gentlest whisper of sweetness, becomes a symbol of comfort, of togetherness, of an entire Bengali childhood. “If someone could cook only one dish to taste the season, I’d say it would be pakoras. There’s something so special about chai and pakoras in the monsoon.”
Asma possibly gets her grit and her work ethic from her mother. Her recollection of her mother’s catering empire in 1980s Calcutta is vivid. Long before hashtags and hospitality influencers, Faizana Khan built Lazeez Catering, one of the city’s most sought-after businesses, serving clients like Tata and iconic colonial clubs like the Tolly Club, Royal Calcutta Turf Club and Calcutta Cricket and Football Club. “She didn’t go to college, but she was the biggest food personality in the city. No Instagram. No TikTok. No mobile phones. Just word of mouth,” Asma recalls. “The most important thing I learnt from her was the importance of building a team. She always remained calm. Never blamed anyone. Always shared credit.”
That quiet strength would become Asma’s compass years later, when she found herself in Cambridge, newly married and alone in a cold flat, reading hand-written letters from her father and missing the sounds of her mother’s kitchen. “My first monsoon away from home deepened my sense of isolation,” she says. “30 years ago, there was no FaceTime—just a line in my father’s slanted handwriting: ‘The monsoons have finally arrived.’ I yearned to be with my family, to sit on the windowsill and watch the rain with my siblings.”
It was in that aching solitude that Asma taught herself to cook—not from cookbooks, but from memory. She didn’t need instructions. She had already absorbed the cadence of caramelising onions, the music of crackling mustard seeds. While the recipes in Monsoon reflect a vast culinary range, from narangi salad with tempered nigella to omelette curry resurrected from forgotten memories, they are all rooted in lived experience. “I had forgotten about omelette curry,” she says. “ Even though I would cook it intermittently in London, it was only when I was writing Monsoon that all the memories came back. It made me so happy as I remembered my sister removing all the green chillies from my omelette because I didn’t like them. We’d eat together.”
That tenderness underpins Monsoon. It’s not food for performance. It’s food that understands weather, grief, joy, and how ingredients adapt to place and season. And yet, Monsoon is not frozen in nostalgia. It balances classical techniques with modern sensibilities. One such example is her narangi salad. Juicy oranges and crisp cabbage in a punchy dressing rooted in a tempering of traditional kalonji. “It feels modern, but the technique is deeply old-school,” she explains.
When asked which Bengali dish deserves more global attention, she doesn’t hesitate: “Bengali-style aloo dum. I love the undertone of sweetness in it—oh, and chholar dal too! Both recipes are in the book.”
Ultimately, though, Monsoon is not just about food—it’s about presence. Her hope? That the next generation of cooks will return to seasonality, to context, to the quiet joy of slowing down. “I hope the book encourages people to cook seasonally and for food writers to not dumb down dishes to make them accessible and quick. So many of our traditional dishes are quick and easy to make, too. In a hot, often humid country without universal refrigeration, our food evolved to be nutritious and flavour-packed. The spices add layers of healing properties. I hope more books are written that highlight homestyle cooking.”As the rain returns each year, so do the memories. And in Monsoon, Asma captures them with the reverence they deserve. The book is a reminder that food can hold history, heartbreak, healing, and home.
