Just when we were getting used to hot saunas and ice-cold plunges, wellness retreats have doubled down with new ways of making travel feel like a getaway where you can finally reach all your health goals. You can now sign up for the perfect diet to match your chakras, register for sound baths, cryotherapy, cacao ceremonies, or a longevity course, all while on vacation.
But what if you could take some of this wisdom home after check-out? Just last month, Six Senses Vana launched their cookbook, Anayu: Recipes and Stories from Vana, bringing their decade-long culinary practice and recipes to your home. ‘Anayu’ comes from ‘anna’ (food) and ‘ayu’ (life or longevity), and the 258-page tome comprising 77 recipes is where the two meet.
Vana is not the first wellness destination to make their health-oriented offerings a little more tangible for their guests. In the past, Vivamyr, the preferred holiday hangout of holistic high rollers in Austria, launched a cookbook that made guests put aside that box of Ossetra caviar. Wellness destinations like Thailand’s Chiva Som, Switzerland’s Chenot Palace Weggis and Spain’s Sha Wellness Clinic have toyed with the idea with great success. There is, for instance, Chenot’s detox-from-home cookbook with Mediterranean recipes, and Sha’s cookbook filled with nutritional detoxes such as its ‘360 method’.
But Vana’s book is special because it looks at Indian pantries holistically. I’ve been to Six Senses Vana in Dehradun on several occasions, and each time anyone asks me about it, I go back to their food—a surprising treat to expect from a wellness destination. On my past visits, I’ve had a Garhwali thali, Goan fish curry, perfectly grilled chicken, kheer, sago pudding, and chocolate mousse—all done the Vana way with the correct proportions and clean ingredients and made according to the principle that nourishment and satiety are key to wellbeing.
Authored by Delhi-based anthropologist and writer Meher Varma, their latest cookbook draws from the vision of founder Veer Singh, who believes that the food at Vana should never be simply reduced to the idea of wellness cuisine but instead be delicious, abundant, and guided by Ayurveda with a strong focus on nourishment. “Cooking at Vana has always been about listening,” says chef Rajesh Sharma. “Listening to the body, to the seasons, and to the ingredients themselves. The recipes in this book come from that quiet attention. They are meant to be cooked without hurry, adjusted with intuition, and shared with care.”
Varma, who writes about food from an anthropological lens and brings her ideas to her podcast Bad Table Manners, shares more details about the cookbook:
What drew you to this project?
Vana has mastered the art of seeing food as something that heals. This book is to make that information accessible. It sits in the genre between cookbook and non-fiction. It’s a combination of recipes, musings, essays, drawings, and facts, all put together in a way that it travels from bedroom to kitchen and back again.
Why is it not just another cookbook... can you share some highlights?
The highlight of this book is its simplicity. It’s understandable and relatable, even to non-experts. You don’t have to be a professional chef to learn from it. We took great care to simplify the recipes, to make sure we didn’t cross a certain number of ingredients and steps, while also ensuring that everything we were cooking with was accessible to Indian audiences. So, there’s a very minimal use of ‘fancy’ ingredients and the focus is on items that are in season and easily purchasable. Personally, just distilling something as complex as Ayurvedic knowledge into something simple and beautiful is something I’m proud of.
Take us through how you approached this book...
Instead of simply copy-pasting recipes, I bring the idea of Ayurvedic eating into a broader context. For example, I’ve written about the relationship between the farmer and the eater; the act of eating across cultures; the healing nature of food; and the ingredients that connect the body to the land and vice versa. Every meal is a chance to nourish your body, to transfer the energy of an ingredient to your body, to sharpen your mind.
What’s your favourite dish at Vana?
I’m a big fan of their pastas; it’s a chance to eat pasta that is nourishing. It’s perfectly portioned, the vegetables are cooked lightly, and the sauces are not too heavy. You eat a plate of this pasta and feel energised. It changed my perception of eating it only as a treat or a cheat meal.
Anayu is currently available at the Vana Dukan in Vana. Orders can be placed over the phone, and shipped across India.
