They Were Supposed to Hate It. Instead, They're Asking Nani to Teach Them Everything.

Kirandeep Johal was seventeen when she told her mother she had no interest in learning to make saag. "I thought it was so old-fashioned," she says now, laughing at herself from the other side of a decade. "I was in high school in New Jersey. I wanted to be normal. Saag was not part of that plan."

She's 27 now. Last Thanksgiving, she drove four hours to her grandparents' house in Pennsylvania specifically to spend three days in the kitchen with her naani, learning to make saag the right way — with mustard greens sourced from a Punjabi grocery in Edison, with makki di roti patted out by hands that have been doing it for sixty years.

"I was terrified I was going to run out of time," she says simply.

The Shift Nobody Predicted

For years, the dominant narrative around second-generation immigrant kids and food went something like this: parents cook traditional food, kids are embarrassed by it, kids grow up and maybe develop a nostalgic appreciation for it, the actual techniques and recipes are lost somewhere in between. Rinse and repeat.

But something different is happening in Punjabi American communities right now, and it's visible enough that people are starting to talk about it. Young Punjabi Americans — Gen-Z and older millennials especially — are actively seeking out traditional cooking knowledge. Not passively absorbing it, not reluctantly participating in it, but chasing it down with a kind of urgency that surprises even the elders they're learning from.

"My granddaughter calls me every week to ask cooking questions," says 74-year-old Gurmail Kaur, who immigrated from Jalandhar to Fresno in 1981. "When her mother was young, I had to beg her to come into the kitchen. Now the granddaughter is calling me." She shakes her head, amused and visibly moved. "I don't understand it, but I'm not complaining."

What Changed?

Ask young Punjabi Americans why they've turned toward their culinary heritage, and you get a range of answers — but a few themes keep surfacing.

Identity pressure, reframed. Many describe a moment, usually sometime in their late teens or early twenties, when the pressure to assimilate that had shaped their childhoods started to feel less like protection and more like loss. The food they'd been vaguely ashamed of at school lunches suddenly looked like something worth knowing.

"There's a certain point where you realize that all the things you tried to minimize about yourself are actually the most interesting things about you," says Harman Sidhu, 24, a design student in Los Angeles whose parents immigrated from Amritsar. "Like, everyone at my school could make pasta. Nobody else could make dal makhani the way my mom makes it. That's actually powerful."

The pandemic kitchen. Multiple people interviewed for this story mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic as a turning point. Stuck at home, cut off from restaurants, suddenly spending real time with family members they usually only saw at holidays — many young Punjabi Americans found themselves in the kitchen not out of obligation but out of genuine curiosity.

"I watched my mom make chai every morning for like three months straight," says Priya Randhawa, 29, a marketing manager in Seattle. "And I realized I didn't actually know how she did it. Like, I'd been drinking that chai my whole life and I couldn't replicate it. That bothered me more than I expected."

Social media, for once, doing something useful. The visibility of South Asian food content on TikTok and Instagram has genuinely shifted the cultural calculus. When Punjabi food is being celebrated and aestheticized by creators with millions of followers — when making paratha from scratch is cool, not embarrassing — it becomes easier for young people to engage with it without feeling like they're choosing their parents' world over their own.

More Than Recipes

What's striking about this movement — and it does feel like a movement, even if it's decentralized and unorganized — is that it's not really just about food. The young Punjabi Americans driving it are pretty explicit about that.

"Cooking is the most direct way I have to connect to something that happened before I was born," says Simrat Gill, 22, a pre-med student in Ann Arbor who has been documenting her grandmother's recipes in a shared Google Doc. "My family's history is in Punjab. I've never been there. But when I make the dishes my naani makes, I feel like I'm touching something real."

For others, the act of learning traditional techniques is explicitly framed as resistance — pushback against a culture that has historically asked immigrants and their children to minimize their distinctiveness.

"There's a whole generation of us who spent our childhoods trying to fit in," says Manvir Brar, 31, who started hosting traditional Punjabi cooking workshops in his Brooklyn apartment two years ago. "Learning to cook this food is part of unlearning that. It's saying, this matters, I matter, this culture is worth preserving."

The Elders Who Didn't Expect to Become Teachers

One of the more touching dimensions of this shift is the reaction of the grandparents and older aunties and uncles who are suddenly being treated as repositories of essential knowledge.

Many of them spent years trying to streamline their cooking, to adapt it to American kitchens and American schedules, to make it less conspicuous. The idea that their grandchildren would want to learn the old ways — the long-simmered methods, the hand-ground spices, the techniques that can't really be written down — is genuinely surprising to some of them.

"She wants me to show her how to feel when the dough is ready," says Gurmail Kaur, talking about her granddaughter. "How do you explain that? You just have to do it until you know. But at least now she wants to learn."

Keeping It Real

None of this is without complication. Some young Punjabi Americans feel pressure from their communities to perform their heritage in particular ways — to cook the "right" dishes, to use the "right" methods, to prove their authenticity. Others are navigating the tension between honoring tradition and adapting it to lives that look very different from their grandparents'.

And not every elder is ready to be a teacher. Some find the sudden interest sweet but slightly bewildering. Others are protective of knowledge they've never had to articulate before.

But the direction of travel is clear. Something has shifted. The generation that was supposed to be the one where the recipes finally got lost is turning out to be the one that went back and asked for them.

At Punjab Bazar, we've always believed that food is how culture survives. Watching a 22-year-old in Michigan carefully document her naani's hand movements while making saag — that's not nostalgia. That's a community deciding it's worth saving.