Flavours of resilience: Culinary improvisation, heritage, and cultural sustainability

This study explores how South Asian culinary heritage evolves within the cultural and environmental context of Northern Europe, particularly in Finnish Lapland, by examining the intersections of migration, memory, and adaptation in everyday cooking practices. Grounded in cultural anthropology and food studies, the research explores how diasporic individuals sustain cultural identity and belonging through food amidst material constraints and cultural dislocation. Employing a layered qualitative methodology, the study draws from autoethnography, a 16-question online survey completed by ten South Asian migrants, and unstructured conversations held in informal settings. Using embodied reflection and sensory memory to interpret culinary adaptation, these insights are enriched by the author’s situated perspective as a South Asian migrant. The findings reveal how migrants creatively reconfigure traditional recipes by substituting local ingredients and modifying cooking techniques to approximate familiar flavours, demonstrating a form of sensory negotiation and responsiveness to their new environment. Food knowledge is transmitted through embodied memory: Gestures, scents, and shared routines that reflect evolving gender roles and collaborative cooking practices. In this context, cooking becomes a grounding ritual that fosters emotional connection and coherence in unfamiliar environments. The kitchen emerges as a space where identity is anchored and re-imagined and where culinary heritage continues through adaptation rather than replication. These culinary practices do not reflect cultural loss but rather a dynamic reimagining of heritage shaped by memory, improvisation, and relational identity. By showing how culinary heritage in migratory contexts becomes a living, sensorial archive shaped by both continuity and change, the study contributes to broader conversations on food ethics, sustainability, and intercultural resilience.