The Memory of Care
How Brooklyn's DEVI Is Bringing Panjiri From Punjabi Kitchens to New Mothers Everywhere
Isha Vij, Tanushree Kulkarni
7/22/20265 min read
Whole wheat flour, roasted in a generous amount of ghee until deeply nutty, is folded with jaggery, toasted nuts, and fragrant spices. The moment the box is opened, warm notes rise into the air, tickling the senses. Panjiri has always been nurturing, warm, and inviting. In Punjabi kitchens, it is a bowl handed to a new mother with the understanding that a postpartum body requires something medicine alone cannot provide. It is care made edible, the kind that survived the trip when tradition crossed the ocean.
That was true for Isha Vij and her family, for whom making panjiri came naturally when her first child was born. A first-generation immigrant from Punjab, she was living through the loneliest stretch of the pandemic when she came to understand firsthand that recovering from childbirth isn't just a physical process. It's about being nourished, tended to, held by the people around you. Her mother and the other women in the family made panjiri for her then, working from a recipe that had never once touched paper. It lived instead in their hands, passed forward through repetition. "It was intuitive cooking," she says, which may be exactly why it's so hard to keep alive.
Traditions like this don't survive because someone wrote them down. They survive because someone kept doing them, a handful added here, a little more there, a smell in the kitchen that told you the dish was nearly ready before you'd even checked. The recipe existed only in memory, carried forward by the women who made it. Across many South Asian households, the weeks following childbirth have long been treated as something close to sacred, a stretch of time when a new mother is owed deliberate, focused attention. Food sits at the center of that recovery, not simply as calories but as a way of rebuilding strength and reminding a woman that she, too, deserves to be looked after. Although the recipe for panjiri seems standard, it varies with each family, as is typical of cultural knowledge. It even shifts with whoever happens to be standing over the pot.
It was against this backdrop that Isha started paying attention to how new mothers were cared for in America, and something felt missing. Her background in women's healthcare had shown her that the system in this country tends to focus heavily on medical recovery: tracking the healing body, watching for complications, confirming that everything looks clinically fine. Necessary work, all of it, but she found herself thinking about everything that fell outside that frame. Where was the nurturing? Where was the food made with a specific woman in mind, someone whose body had just been utterly changed by bringing a child into the world? Where was the reminder that said, you don't have to snap back to normal right away, you're allowed to be cared for too? During her first pregnancy, she began to think panjiri might be able to answer that gap, not as some novelty to be imported for the sake of curiosity, but as a genuinely human practice worth sharing more widely. The timing worked against her, though. It was the height of COVID, and people had scattered from one another in every direction. The idea stayed exactly that, an idea, until her second child arrived in 2024.
After that second birth, Isha turned to panjiri again, made once more by her family, carrying all the same familiar comfort it always had. This time it landed differently. Friends tried it, asked questions, and wanted more. Something that had always stayed inside the family circle suddenly had people outside it reaching for it too, and that's how DEVI came to be.
Named for the divine feminine, DEVI isn't only trying to introduce unfamiliar food to new palates. It's trying to reopen a much larger conversation about who gets cared for, what care is even supposed to look like, and how much wisdom gets quietly ignored simply because it doesn't fit inside modern systems. For Isha, panjiri was never a nostalgia product dressed up for sale. It's a tradition that's still very much alive, which is exactly what makes turning it into a business so complicated.
Maybe the most striking part of DEVI's story is what standardization actually asks of it. Panjiri, at its core, is about understanding how the ingredients behave, how they shift, and adjusting by feel until everything feels right. That's a difficult thing to hand off to a business. How do you preserve something whose entire character comes from being made a little differently each time? How do you build consistency without stripping out the human hand that made it worth having in the first place? Isha is honest about how hard it is to recreate the same taste twice. She keeps her ingredients as steady as she can, but the process still leans on an intuition that no spreadsheet or production manual could ever fully replace. The very thing that makes panjiri special is the same thing that resists being scaled.
That tension runs deeper than just recipe consistency, though. DEVI sits in a spot familiar to a lot of diaspora-run businesses: that uneasy moment when something deeply personal starts turning into something public. What happens when a family practice becomes a product? Some of the women in Isha's circle see it as an act of generosity, a way of stretching care past the borders of any one culture. Others have asked, and fairly so, whether something built on family and community should be sold at all. It's a tension that surfaces any time a cultural food makes the move from a home kitchen into the marketplace. Where does preservation end and commercialization begin? Where does sharing quietly turn into selling? For Isha, it all comes down to intention. She doesn't believe panjiri belongs to only one community, and she believes care itself shouldn't need a passport. "Panjiri is for everyone" comes close to being DEVI's mission statement, though accessibility, to her, was never meant to mean changing the dish until it's unrecognizable. When she describes panjiri to American ears, she often reaches for the closest familiar comparison she can find: a crumble. It's not a perfect match, but it's close enough, something warm and textured and sweet that people can picture before they've even tasted it. Even so, she's careful never to water it down. DEVI hasn't tried to Americanize panjiri, hasn't nudged its sweetness or texture toward some outside expectation. It's offered instead exactly as it is: a Punjabi tradition, a postpartum practice, a dish carrying generations of women's knowledge inside it. A reminder that cultures don't survive by staying frozen in place. They survive by being carried forward, by people willing to keep carrying them.
That same instinct to protect rather than expand shapes how Isha thinks about growth. In a business world that so often measures success by how big something gets, DEVI has chosen the opposite path. Isha isn't chasing shelf space in supermarkets across the country. She doesn't want panjiri to lose the closeness that made it matter in the first place. The goal was never to become the next mass-market wellness brand. The goal is simply to stay small-batch, reachable, and rooted in where it started. Some things are worth more precisely because they can't be rushed, because they still carry a story with them wherever they go.
Panjiri began as one woman's way of telling another, I see what your body just went through, let me take care of you now. Maybe that's exactly why it reaches people who have no connection to Punjab or Punjabi kitchens at all. At its heart, DEVI isn't only about keeping a Punjabi food tradition from fading away. It's asking something much bigger. In a world that keeps getting more efficient, more medicalized, more disconnected by the day, how do we remember to take care of one another? And what other kinds of wisdom are still sitting quietly in our kitchens, simply waiting for someone to notice them?