Food practices, which constitute the vicissitudes of everyday life, contribute to the work of imagining a home in the diaspora, especially for diasporic women. The purpose of this essay is to investigate the construction of real and imaginary affiliations with the "homeland" through food practices in fictional representations coming out of the South Asian diaspora. Two recent novels, Monica Pradhan`s Asian American text The Hindi-Bindi Club (2007) and Priya Basil`s Asian British fiction Ishq and Mushq (2007), serve as textual examples to explore the ways in which South Asian diasporic femininity is reconfigured in connection with culinary discourse. The first part of the essay explores selected critical reviews and findings of food studies in social sciences and the literary field. In the second part, the affective bond created by the "nourishing arts" of cooking between three pairs of South Asian mothers and daughters in The Hindi-Bindi Club is analyzed. In the final part, bodily imagination and the construction of selfhood in Ishq and Mushq are discussed in terms of the signifying practice of cooking and smell. Written in significantly different styles and themes and about different migratory trajectories, together the two novels shed light on the interconnectedness of foodways and the lived experiences of South Asian women in Asian America and Asian Britain and allow us to catch a glimpse of the ways in which South Asian women creatively construct their home space and their own sense of agency outside the Indian subcontinent.