The Jackfruit Chronicles: Memoirs and Recipes from a British-Bangladeshi Kitchen

Jackfruit is the national fruit of Bangladesh, but for Shahnaz Ahsan it is also a taste of her grandparents’ house in Manchester. Her grandfather would buy the enormous fruit when the family came to visit, dividing its sweet yellow flesh among relatives and neighbors. It was a food that demanded to be shared. In The Jackfruit Chronicles, Ahsan uses it as a symbol for a family story that stretches between Bangladesh and Britain, and for the food that kept those places connected. 

The story begins with her grandfather Habib, who arrived in Manchester in 1956, part of a generation of Bengali men who cooked communally, shared rooms, and helped one another navigate a new country while imagining that they would eventually return home. Ahsan follows her family’s subsequent generations alongside the broader history of the Bangladeshi diaspora in Britain, including the racism they encountered and the complicated question of when a temporary home becomes permanent. 

Recipes run through that history. There’s sour tomato broth, jackfruit kofta curry, lentil fritters, fish cooked with clementine peel, begun bjaja (eggplant rubbed with spices and fried until soft and golden) and dim bhuna, the simple egg curry Ahsan remembers as her mother’s emergency dinner. She also shares shemai, a sweet vermicelli pudding scented with cardamom and cinnamon that, for Ahsan, smells like Eid morning. 

Underlying the cooking is antaz, the Bengali practice of cooking by estimation and intuition: the “little bit of this, little bit of that” by which recipes pass from one generation to another without necessarily being written down. Ahsan turns that inherited knowledge into recipes while resisting the idea that there can be one definitive version of Bengali food. This is as much a record of migration, memory, family, and belonging as it is a cookbook. 

Paperback.