Once a year, the smell of jaggery wafts through my house. The sugar’s aroma is warm and sweet, accompanied by laughter and an explosion of flour in the kitchen. It is Diwali, and my family is making puran poli, a sweet Indian flatbread.
We’ve been making puran poli for as long as I can remember: my earliest recollection from childhood was stealing jaggery straight from the box as I watched my mom spend hours in the kitchen, often adding to her frustrations as I scattered flour everywhere in an effort to help her. 
Over the years, I have become somewhat competent in the kitchen — enough, at least, to discover the source of my mom’s frustrations: puran poli is incredibly difficult to make from scratch.
Our original recipe was a recreation of my late grandmother’s. My mom painstakingly tested various ingredients and recipes before she finally landed on a combination that, according to my grandfather’s verdict, tasted exactly like my grandmother’s recipe. For the first few years, my family opted to follow the recipe we constructed as precisely as possible, down to using the same brand of ingredients each time we made it.
To make puran, the filling, we first boiled toor dal, a lentil, then slow-cooked it with jaggery and spices. Then, we mashed all of it into a paste by hand to create a pliable yet thick consistency. Simultaneously, we made and kneaded the dough. Then came the hardest step. Rolling out a perfect puran poli is both an art and a science: there is practiced precision in estimating the ratio of dough to filling, so the finished dish is deliciously sweet, yet holds its structure when rolled out. The entire process, despite being armed with multiple rolling pins, two burners on the stove and three people working simultaneously, took hours.
Eventually, my mom and I grew frustrated at the hours it took us to make the dish, seeing as Diwali was already jam-packed with multiple religious ceremonies, and decided to shorten the recipe. The first year, we attempted to slow-cook the dal in multiple simultaneous batches using four burners. But still, the slow cooking process required far too much time and constant stirring.
The following year, we decided to microwave the puran instead of slow-cooking it. Initially, we grappled with the decision. Multiple online recipes we’d found warned against microwaving the filling, claiming that the finished dish would be less authentic, but we decided to do it anyway purely for its practicality. Lo and behold, the preparation time dropped from 45 minutes to a mere 15.
Despite the pressure to follow our original recipe to a tee, our modified dish is no less authentic, contrary to the warnings we found online. In fact, when my grandfather tried our modified recipe for the first time, he admitted that he couldn’t taste the difference at all.
Preserving cultural tradition doesn’t have to mean you don’t adapt it to your needs. Especially for many MVHS students who are second-generation children to immigrant parents, it can be difficult to follow traditions perfectly if they involve complex ceremonies or specific ingredients. Modifying traditions to suit
one’s needs can help alleviate pressure to practice the tradition exactly right, especially for children of immigrants who may be reviving the tradition after losing touch with it, and ultimately makes them more sustainable in the long run. More than following a recipe exactly or replicating a rigidly defined tradition, preserving one’s culture is about the experiences we have and the attempts we make to interact with it.
Making puran poli is a tradition, but not one frozen in time. Far more important than following any recipe are the memories my family has formed over the years: helplessly watching our dogs wolf down a stolen puran poli, attempting to sneeze out a noseful of flour and, of course, my tradition of stealing a spoonful of jaggery every time we make the dish.
