12 february 2018 http://www.openthemagazine.com 89
manuals became more strident.
There is a debate between scholars who claim that the Brit-
ish consumed a diet different from local people in order to sepa-
rate themselves as rulers (eM Collingham, nupur Chaudhuri,
uma narayan and Susan Zlotnick) and those who say that there
was no clear-cut divide between the rulers and the ruled in
relation to food and that a close relationship existed between
the British colonisers and their subjects (see leong-Salobir).
The recipes in these cookbooks make it clear that ‘being
hybrid’ was the primary characteristic of the food that colonis-
ers ate. Take the recipe for Bombay toast in Mrs John gilpin’s
Memsahib’s Guide to Cook-
ery in India. It uses minced
anchovy or redfish while
another breakfast dish is
‘curry balls’, consisting
of rice cooked with curry
powder, sugar and salt,
chopped apple and onion,
then rolled into balls with
minced meat, parsley and
egg and fried or baked.
Colonial food incorpo-
rated the dishes most
familiar to the British, but
also embraced indigenous
ingredients and cooking
techniques of Britain’s
colonies.
a similar process of
hybridisation was occur-
ring in the culinary world
of middle and upper-class
Indians in the 19th and
20th centuries. Maga-
zines such as Bengal’s
Pak-Pranali listed recipes
and prescribed cooking
habits for an ideal modern
housewife—she was
supposed to be skilled in
traditional and modern
ways of cooking.
another type of cookbook is the one that explains India to
a foreign audience. Santha Ram Rau wrote The Cooking of India
for Time-life Books in 1970. These books discussed the culinary
tradition of a country within the geographical, cultural and
historical milieu. She struggled to find a common theme of
Indian food and then concluded that ‘there is no major body of
dishes and techniques of cooking that one can combine to call
a “national cuisine”’. In the words of one scholar, Rau’s work
ended up being part autobiography, part travelogue, part social
and cultural history, and part political platform.
Some, like Mrs Balbir Singh’s cookbook, are timeless.
Bhavani Singh cooked for my husband’s family for over 40
years. his dals, shammi kebabs, and kofta curry were legendary.
after he passed away, having retired about ten years prior to
that, I thought that we would never be able to taste those kebabs
and koftas again. Well, it turns out that Bhavani Singh followed
the directions given in Mrs Balbir Singh’s cookbook. I promptly
handed the recipe to the cook. yesterday, for lunch, he made
the meat kofta curry. Delicious. The kofta was fragrant and light,
while the sauce was perfectly balanced.
The structure of a cookbook also offers us interesting
insights into the way a country or a region consumes food. are
the recipes arranged ac-
cording to courses (as the
French ones are), or is the
classification system dif-
ferent? The ni’matnama
manuscript of the Sultans
of Mandu, the earliest
Indo-Persian cookbook
still available, arranges
recipes in no particular or-
der. Sweet and savoury are
mixed. It shows a strong
western and central
Indian influence: khichri,
bhaat, khandawi, bhuji
(fried vegetables), rabari,
khaj , etcetera. There are
also recipes drawn from
the Persian lineage—pilaf,
sikh, yakni, shorba, kufta,
kebab, sambusas (like
a samosa), and a large
variety of meats such as
mountain sheep, beef, rab-
bit, quail, pigeon, and so
on. The recipes are neither
detailed nor precise; quan-
tities are not mentioned.
This mish-mash of an
arrangement is followed
by the cookbook writers
of the 1950s and 60s such
as Mrs Balbir Singh and Meenakshi ammal. But the modern
Indian cookbooks (Tarla Dalal, Madhur Jaffrey, Monish gujral,
Sanjeev Kapoor) display a soup, salad, vegetables, meats, fish,
rice, and dessert classification—reflecting perhaps the way we
now consume our food.
If Jeremy MacClancy is right that cookbooks may also
appeal to the aspirations of their readers, feeding their fantasies
about the identities they wish to achieve rather than lending
substance to those they already possess, then each of us has to
examine our personal favourites to discover what underpins
our aspirations. ncookbooks also appeal to the
aspirations of readers, feeding their
fantasies about the identities they wish
to achieve rather than lending substance
to identities they already possessSaurabh Singh