Your nani was right

Long before food science caught up, our grandmothers were soaking, fermenting, and timing spices with precision.

Turmeric milk is ₹350 at the café on the corner. Soaked almonds are sold as ‘activated nuts’ at a markup that would make your granny giggle. Ghee is now a superfood with a branded jar and a wellness origin story. If you grew up in an Indian kitchen, you will have noticed this: the practices that were so ordinary they barely had names are being rediscovered, repackaged, and sold back as innovations, often to the same communities that never stopped doing them.

Indian food traditions encoded nutritional intelligence so precisely that modern food science has spent decades reverse-engineering what Indian kitchens already knew. And we nearly lost that knowledge, not because it stopped working, but because we were convinced it was old-fashioned. The soaking, fermenting, and spice pairing were not rituals for their own sake; they were precision arrived at without laboratories, shaped over centuries by Ayurvedic knowledge, regional observation, and the kind of empirical learning that comes from feeding people well across generations. What follows is some of what modern science has since confirmed, and what Indian kitchens have long known.

Soaking

The instruction to soak dal, rice, and any other beans and legumes overnight is so embedded in Indian cooking that it rarely gets explained; it just gets passed on. Start the dal the night before. Soak the rice before cooking. Put the chana in water this morning if you want it for dinner.

The reason goes deeper than reducing cooking time. Plants produce phytic acid as a defence mechanism, a chemical coating on seeds and grains designed to discourage animals from eating them by making digestion difficult and nutrient absorption worse. It works by binding to minerals like iron, zinc, and calcium in the digestive tract, forming compounds the body cannot break down, which means those minerals pass through largely unabsorbed. Soaking triggers the seed’s own germination processes, which break down phytic acid substantially and neutralise the defence. The result is food that gives you significantly more of what it contains.

Soaking also begins to break down complex oligosaccharides, the sugars responsible for fermentation in the gut and the bloating that follows. Properly soaked dal digests differently, and anyone who has eaten both versions knows this without needing it explained. The wellness industry now sells ‘activated’ nuts and ‘sprouted’ grains at a premium, framing the practice as a biohack. Indian kitchens have been doing it for centuries because it makes the food work better. The insight is identical; it’s just the branding that’s new.

Fermenting

Dosa batter left overnight to sour. Idli batter that rises and develops a particular smell before it is ready. Dhokla, kanji, homemade dahi, the small earthen pot of pickle that sat on every kitchen counter. Fermentation was never a trend in Indian cooking. It was just how things were made.

What fermentation does, metabolically, is significant. It essentially pre-digests food: breaking down starches and proteins into simpler forms, reducing the work the gut has to do, and in the process producing short-chain fatty acids that feed the gut lining and support the microbiome. It also dramatically increases the bioavailability of nutrients that would otherwise pass through partially absorbed, and, in a direct echo of the phytic acid story, fermentation further reduces the antinutrient load that soaking began to address. The two processes work in sequence, which is why so many Indian recipes call for both.

Fermented rice and lentil batters develop substantially higher levels of B vitamins, including B12, which is vanishingly rare in plant-based foods. This is one reason traditional South Indian diets were able to sustain large vegetarian populations across generations without the deficiencies that might be expected from diets with little to no meat.

The current fascination with gut health has generated an entire industry of expensive probiotic supplements, kombucha brands, and fermented food products marketed as novel interventions. Much of what they are offering, the beneficial bacteria, the digestive support, the microbiome nourishment, is what dahi, kanji, and idli have always provided.

Turmeric and pepper

Haldi doodh has been a home remedy across the subcontinent for as long as anyone has been writing things down. Sore throat, turmeric milk. Cannot sleep, warm milk with turmeric and a little black pepper. Inflammation, fever, and recovery from illness are the same thing. The combination was not incidental. It was always turmeric and pepper together, in the same way that certain spice pairings in Indian cooking recur so consistently across regions and centuries that they read as instinct rather than instruction.

Turmeric contains curcumin, one of the most studied anti-inflammatory compounds in nutritional science. It is also, on its own, poorly absorbed by the human body, metabolised too quickly to have much systemic effect. Pair it with black pepper and bioavailability increases by up to 2,000 per cent, because piperine, the active compound in pepper, inhibits the enzymes that would otherwise break curcumin down before it can be absorbed. This mechanism required considerable effort on the part of researchers to establish. In Indian kitchens, the pairing simply existed, encoded in recipes and remedies across generations because, empirically, it worked better that way.

Ghee

Ghee occupied a strange position for several decades. Inside Indian homes, it remained what it had always been: a cooking fat, a finishing drizzle, a spoonful in dal, a smear on roti, something added without much deliberation because that was simply how food was made. Outside, particularly in nutrition advice filtered through Western dietary guidelines from the 1970s and 80s, it was treated as a health hazard, saturated fat to be avoided and replaced with vegetable oil or margarine. A generation of Indian families absorbed the message that what their kitchens had always done was wrong.

The science has since moved significantly. The link between saturated fat from whole food sources and cardiovascular disease has been substantially revised, and the vegetable oils and hydrogenated fats that replaced ghee in health-conscious kitchens have their own considerable problems. Ghee is rich in fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. It contains butyric acid, a short-chain fatty acid that feeds the cells lining the gut, supports intestinal barrier function, and has anti-inflammatory properties. Its high smoke point makes it chemically stable at the temperatures Indian cooking actually requires, unlike many of the oils recommended as substitutes.

Tadka

The tadka is the last step, and in many dishes, the most important one. Hot ghee or oil, whole spices added and watched carefully until they bloom and release their fragrance, the whole thing poured over the finished dish in a brief, aromatic flourish. It looks like a finishing touch. It is doing considerably more than that.

Many of the active compounds in spices, including the curcumin in turmeric, the volatile oils in cumin, coriander, and mustard seed, and the beneficial compounds in curry leaves and dried chillies, are fat-soluble. They need fat present to be absorbed by the body. Tempering spices in ghee is not just a flavour technique; it is a delivery mechanism, making those compounds bioavailable in a way that adding the same spices to a water-based dish would not.

The temperature and timing matter too. Brief high heat activates and transforms certain compounds beneficially. Prolonged heat degrades them. This is why the tadka is fast, attentive, and done at the end rather than cooked into the base of the dish from the beginning. The sequence is precise, and the precision is the point. It was arrived at through generations of cooking, tasting, and adjusting, long before anyone had the language of fat solubility or bioavailability to describe what was happening.

These are not isolated folk remedies

This is a lovely, coherent system, one that modern nutritional science arrived at through controlled studies, peer review, and decades of iteration… while Indian culinary tradition arrived at the same conclusions through feeding people well across generations and paying attention to cause and effect. What was nearly lost in the middle, the decades when ‘traditional’ became a polite word for outdated, was not just a set of recipes but a way of understanding food as something that works on the body in specific, interconnected ways, and a body of practical knowledge precise enough that science keeps finding it was right. That knowledge belongs to the culture that developed it; the least we can do is understand what we inherited.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com