88 12 february 2018velyn Waugh
said that his favourite
bedtime reading was
elizabeth David’s cookbook.
Mine used to be emily Post’s
Etiquette. Who would not
want to read her instructions
on how ‘party sandwiches’
are made (by buttering
the end of a loaf of not too
fresh bread, spreading the
filling, and then cutting off
the prepared slice as thin as
possible, not thicker than an
eighth of an inch). Or on how to eat corn-on-the-cob—one must
avoid making ferocious and snatching bites.
When I was a graduate student in new york, five of us would
get together on weekends to cook. We would first decide on
the cuisine—that would occur over a glass of white wine, and
we would browse through the photographs and recipes in the
Time-life cookbooks on my bookshelf, devoted to invoking
the spirit of latin america France, Russia, Spain, Italy, armenia,
Turkey, and so on. after settling on a Mole Poblano de Guajolote
from Mexico, two would set off to the supermarket to buy the
special ingredients—turkey, chillies and chocolate. The rest
of us, fortified by more wine or gin and tonic, would begin the
sous-chef jobs of chopping the onions and tomatoes, blanching
the almonds, powdering the sesame seeds, cloves, cinnamon,
and so on. By the end of the evening, we had savoured the com-
plex sauce made with chillies and chocolate twice—once in our
imagination, and the second time, in reality.
While reading cookbooks, we often think that they offer
a fascinating glimpse into the food habits—what constitutes
delicious fare—of a class or a region in a particular era.
anthropologist Jeremy MacClancy, however, cautions us not
to take cookbooks as indicative of what locals ate in the time
and area it was written. ‘Books, even cookbooks, are written for
a diversity of reasons and it is often more profitable to enquire
why they have been written than analyse their contents in
an uncritical manner. also, cookbooks are literary products
and have to be seen as such... all cookbooks have fictional
dimensions. The question is: of what kind and to what degree?
Some, for instance, act as deeply idealized folkloric records; the
authors of these salvage ethnographies are concerned to ‘save’
seemingly traditional recipes before they are lost.’
Recent cookbooks published in India definitely fall in this
category—they highlight recipes from their grandmothers and
mothers, or haute cuisine from another era such as The Konkani
Saraswat Cookbook by asha S Philar, Kashmiri Cuisine Through
the Ages by Sarla Razdan, and My Bombay Kitchen by niloufer
Ichaporia King. Preeta Mathur in The Courtly Cuisine: Kayastha
Kitchens Through India explains how, by virtue of being admin-
istrators and ministers under Mughal rule, this community’s
cuisine came to be influenced by the meat-loving emperors.
uttar Pradesh’s Kayasthas like red chillies stuffed with fennel
and amchoor, and pickled in mustard oil, writes anoothi vishal
in Mrs LC’s Table: Stories About Kayasth Food and Culture. lC is the
author’s grandmother. These books are also, in MacClancy’s
words, expressions of cultural nostalgia. The script here seems
to be: ‘This is the world we have already lost, but which we can
try to re-create through cooking.’
another type of cookbook is the personal memoir that
also highlights the domestic history of the author. Rukmini
Srinivas’s Tiffin combines the multi-geographic and cultural
tastes of her childhood (a Tamilian Brahmin who grew up in
Pune and Madras) and her subsequent life with her husband,
the famous sociologist Mn Srinivas. “I find my own biography,
just from living as long as I have and through the era of British
colonialism, the freedom movement, India in the 40s, 50s
and 60s and the fact that I have travelled extensively with my
husband gives me a unique perspective on how Indian women
perceive their worlds,” she said in an interview. In Berkeley,
RK narayan was a daily visitor to their home. We learn that
narayan, who had gone out with a young american scholar to
a pizzeria, mistook pepperoni for tomatoes and only after tast-
ing it realised his mistake. he later asked Rukmini to give him
rice with yoghurt as ‘cleansing food’.
While a memoir-style cookbook is more reminiscent of
the late 20th century, those written in the colonial era tend to
be more prescriptive, as revealed in the titles of the books—
C lang’ sThe English Bride in India: Being Hints on Indian House-
keeping (1909); A Friend in Need English-Hindustani Cookery Book,
compiled by the ladies Committee FInS Women’s Workshop
(1939); Dainty Dishes for Indian Tables by anonymous (1879);
agatha Florence James’ chapter ‘Indian household Manage-
ment’ in The Lady at Home and Abroad (1898), and so on.
The purpose of those tomes was two-fold: apart from provid-
ing specific instructions on how to run a household, prepare
food and entertain guests, these manuals also outlined the
values and how the imperial class ought to represent itself to
the natives. as more middle-class englishwomen travelled to
India after the 1857 uprising, the prescriptive nature of thesea moveable feast
By Shylashri Shankar
The Enduring Food Fantasy
A good cookbook does more than just offer recipes or re-create lost worlds
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