More than Masala: Indian Food and Culture through Film

"A treatise in thirty chapters on reformed cookery for Anglo-Indian exiles, based upon modern English, & continental principles, with twenty-five menus for little dinners worked out in detail"

A practical handbook to the kitchen in India, adapted to the three presidencies; containing original and approved recipes in every department of Indian cookery; recipes for summer beverages and home-made liquers; medicinal and other recipes; togehter with a variety of things worth knowing

Written to show Americans that Indian food is not just curry, that it has a long and illustrious history - to make the American housewife familiar with authentic cooking from India. More than a cookbook; author writes about history of the dishes, manners and customs, Indian fables and rites etc.

With its enormous variety of cuisines, food materials, and dishes, Indian food has become popular all over the world. The dominant flavor of this gastronomic Companion is historical, and drawing on a variety of sources - literature, archaeology, epigraphic records, anthropology, philology, and botanical and genetic studies - it offers a gamut of interesting facts pertaining to the origins and evolution of Indian food. There are separate chapters on prehistoric cooking methods, regional cuisines, the theories and classification of foods, as codified by ancient Indian doctors, customs and rituals, the etymology of food-words, and the shift towards vegetarianism with the advent of Buddhism and Jainism. This companion outlines the enormous variety of cuisines, food materials and dishes that collectively fall under the term Indian food.

"The triple cookery book containing English, American and Indian dishes"

"A collection of a hundred cheap and practical recipes, mostly from Hindustan"

The Ni'matnama is a late fifteenth-century book of the recipes of the eccentric Sultan of Mandu (Madhya Pradesh), Ghiyath Shahi, collected and added to by his son and successor, Nasir Shah. It contains recipes for cooking a variety of delicacies and epicurean delights, as well as providing remedies and aphrodisiacs for the Sultan and his court. It also includes important sections on the preparation of betel leaves as well as advice on the logistics of hunting expeditions and warfare. The text provides a remarkable and tantalizing account of rarified courtly life in a fifteenth-century Indian Sultanate region.

"Comprising numerous directions for plain wholesome cookery, both Oriental and English, with much miscellaneous matter, answering for all general purposes of reference connected with household affairs likely to be immediately required by families, messes, and private individuals, residing at the presidencies or out-stations / by the author of Manual of gardening for Western India."

Recipes collected by a couple - an Indian Prince and an American woman. Includes cooking techniques, the philosophy of Indian food, sequence of the meal etc. Recipes are included from different areas of India: Rajasthan, Central India, North India and South India. Recipes include: fish to ward off evil spirits, Rajput rabbit food, fried vegetables fit for a King, the well spiced shank, corn bread etc.

Though it's primarily Punjabi food that's become known as Indian food in the United States, India is as much an immigrant nation as America, and it has the vast range of cuisines to prove it. InEating India, award-winning food writer and Bengali food expert Chitrita Banerji takes readers on a marvelous odyssey through a national cuisine formed by generations of arrivals, assimilations, and conquests. With each wave of newcomers-ancient Aryan tribes, Persians, Middle Eastern Jews, Mongols, Arabs, Europeans-have come new innovations in cooking, and new ways to apply India's rich native spices, poppy seeds, saffron, and mustard to the vegetables, milks, grains, legumes, and fishes that are staples of the Indian kitchen. In this book, Calcutta native and longtime U.S. resident Banerji describes, in lush and mouthwatering prose, her travels through a land blessed with marvelous culinary variety and particularity. REVIEWS: "Skillfully moving backward and forward in time, Banerji, a culinary historian based in the U.S. whose previous books have explored the cookery of her native Bengal (Life and Food in Bengal), regards India with the intimacy of a native, the curiosity of an outsider and the broad vantage of an expatriate. In the course of her culinary tours across the subcontinent, she poses compelling questions about the nature of authenticity in a time of great flux, the mutability of tradition and the place of food in secular life and religious culture. For answers, she looks not only to the past but to the present as it unfolds in roadside shacks, sweet shops or a temple canteen, describing how outside influences such as colonialism and immigration have shaped India's regional cuisines. Early in this engaging work, Banerji recounts how whenever she invites Americans to her home for an elaborate meal, rather than sampling each dish in sequence-the better to appreciate its subtle flavors-her guests heap together meat, rice and

As the pungent fragrance of spices transports the author back into memories of childhood, we too are plunged headlong into the rich tastes, textures and colours of food in her native Bengal. Here, food is a ritualised and intrinsic part of the culture, particularly of the culture of women´s lives. Beyond the meals prepared and cooked for everyday life, food offerings blessed by the gods are shared by devotees in daily ceremonies of worship, special dishes are cooked on auspicious days, and ritual ways of preparing foods are carefully mastered. Feeding the Gods paints an extraordinary picture of food and ritual in Bengal. These complex rituals reveal not only an astonishingly rich culinary culture but also a social structure in which certain foods are forbidden. Combining social critique with the intimacy of memoir, Banerji writes of growing up from girlhood to womanhood in Bengal, a land where food and ritual are intimate experiences which shape day-to-day life.

Hardeep Singh Kohli loves many things in life -but none more than food. He loves to eat, he loves to cook. So when he decided to travel around India in search of his roots, what seemed the obvious thing to take with him? Not a Lonely Planet guide. Not a BBC camera team. No! It was shepherd's pie and Yorkshire pudding. Indian Takeaway is the hilarious story of Hardeep's attempts to cook his way around India, dishing up very British meals for the people he meets. How will a Goan garage mechanic, a Delhi socialite or a Mysore hippie cope with fish and chips, or a Full English Breakfast? Will they survive to tell the tale? And will Hardeep find a kitchen to call home?

To most of us the food that we associate with home--our national and familial homes--is an essential part of our cultural heritage. No matter how open we become to other cuisines, we regard home-cooking as an intrinsic part of who we are. In this book, Krishnendu Ray examines the changing food habits of Bengali immigrants to the United States as they deal with the tension between their nostalgia for home and their desire to escape from its confinements.As Ray says, "This is a story about rice and water and the violations of geography by history." Focusing on mundane matters of immigrant life (for example, what to eat for breakfast in America), he connects food choices to issues of globalization and modernization. By showing how Bengali immigrants decide what defines their ethnic cuisine and differentiates it from American food, he reminds us that such boundaries are uncertain for all newcomers. By drawing on literary sources, family menus and recipes for traditional dishes, interviews with Bengali household members, and his own experience as an immigrant, Ray presents a vivid picture of immigrants grappling with the grave and immediate problem of defining themselves in their home away from home.

Today’s most highly regarded writer on Indian food gives us an enchanting memoir of her childhood in Delhi in an age and a society that has since disappeared. Madhur (meaning “sweet as honey”) Jaffrey grew up in a large family compound where her grandfather often presided over dinners at which forty or more members of his extended family would savor together the wonderfully flavorful dishes that were forever imprinted on Madhur’s palate. Climbing mango trees in the orchard, armed with a mixture of salt, pepper, ground chilies, and roasted cumin; picnicking in the Himalayan foothills on meatballs stuffed with raisins and mint and tucked into freshly bakedpooris; sampling the heady flavors in the lunch boxes of Muslim friends; sneaking tastes of exotic street fare—these are the food memories Madhur Jaffrey draws on as a way of telling her story. Independent, sensitive, and ever curious, as a young girl she loved uncovering her family’s many-layered history, and she was deeply affected by their personal trials and by the devastating consequences of Partition, which ripped their world apart. Climbing the Mango Treesis both an enormously appealing account of an unusual childhood and a testament to the power of food to evoke memory. And, at the end, this treasure of a book contains a secret ingredient—more than thirty family recipes recovered from Madhur’s childhood, which she now shares with us.

Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY Awards) gold medalist Khabaar is a food memoir and personal narrative that braids the global journeys of South Asian food through immigration, migration, and indenture. Focusing on chefs, home cooks, and food stall owners, the book questions what it means to belong and what does belonging in a new place look like in the foods carried over from the old country? These questions are integral to the author's own immigrant journey to America as a daughter of Indian refugees (from what's now Bangladesh to India during the 1947 Partition of India); as a woman of color in science; as a woman who left an abusive marriage; and as a woman who keeps her parents' memory alive through her Bengali food.

"Please teach me Indian cooking! I will bring ingredients and pay you for your trouble. I would like to know about your culture as well." And with this posting on Craigslist, so begins Nani Power's journey to learn traditional Indian cooking in the most ancient of ways -- woman to woman. Welcomed warmly into the homes of strangers, Power meets women of all ages and backgrounds, and from them learns the skills that were passed on to them from their own mothers. Power takes the reader into a culture, a cuisine, and the female psyche, with recipes and stories from each chapter revealing the struggle of modern women, both American and of Indian descent, searching for identity and a definition of what it means to be a woman today. The recipes shared in this collection are far from ordinary; they are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in India -- from homemade cheese cubes in a rich cilantro and almond curry to coconut-stuffed okra and luscious potato-curry dumplings. Power's recipes and stories pave the road to understanding a culture that is at the same time ancient and so very much part of our modern world.

Follow a food trail and you'll find yourself crisscrossing oceans. Join M. F. K. Fisher Grand Prize for Excellence in Culinary Writing award-winning author Nina Mukerjee Furstenau as she picks through lost tastes with recipes as codes to everything from political resistance to comfort food and much more. Pinpoint the entry of the Portuguese in India by following green chili trails; find the origins of limes; trace tomatoes and potatoes in India to the Malabar Coast; consider what makes a food, or even a person, foreign and marvel how and when they cease to be. Food history is a world heritage story that has all the drama of a tense thriller or maybe a mystery. Whose food is it? Who gets to tell its tale? Respect for food history might tame the accusations of appropriation, but what is at stake as food traditions and biodiversity ebb away is the great, and not always good, story of us.  

At once a traveler's tale, a memoir, and a mouthwatering cookbook, Biting through the Skin offers a first-generation immigrant's perspective on growing up in America's heartland. Author Nina Mukerjee Furstenau's parents brought her from Bengal in northern India to the small town of Pittsburg, Kansas, in 1964, decades before you could find long-grain rice or plain yogurt in American grocery stores. Embracing American culture, the Mukerjee family ate hamburgers and softserve ice cream, took a visiting guru out on the lake in their motorboat, and joined the Shriners. Her parents transferred the cultural, spiritual, and family values they had brought with them to their children only behind the closed doors of their home, through the rituals of cooking, serving, and eating Bengali food and making a proper cup of tea. As a girl and a young woman, Nina traveled to her ancestral India as well as to college and to Peace Corps service in Tunisia. Through her journeys and her marriage to an American man whose grandparents hailed from Germany and Sweden, she learned that her family was not alone in being a small pocket of culture sheltered from the larger world. Biting through the Skin shows how we maintain our differences as well as how we come together through what and how we cook and eat. In mourning the partial loss of her heritage, the author finds that, ultimately, heritage always finds other ways of coming to meet us. In effect, it can be reduced to a 4 x 6-inch recipe card, something that can fit into a shirt pocket. It's on just such tiny details of life that belonging rests. In this book, the author shares her shirt-pocket recipes and a great deal more, inviting readers to join her on her journey toward herself and toward a vital sense of food as culture and the mortar of community.

The Great Indian Food Trip is an entertaining and erudite adventure through culinary landscapes, showing how three decades of eating, drinking and travelling have helped Zac O'Yeah to understand India, his home of many years. This fast-paced yet profound account charts a writer's untiring quest for new cultural and culinary experiences. We accompany O'Yeah on a "spare parts" tour of Shivajinagar, Bengaluru's slaughterhouse area. He shares the pleasures of drinking beer in Karnataka, toddy in Kerala; eating boiled vegetables and masala-less curries in the Mahatma's ashram, and savoring the rich red lal maas (spiced goat) of princely Rajasthan. He discovers Goa's literati sipping cashew feni with Orhan Pamuk and Amitav Ghosh, and finds two of his favorite foods--mushrooms and cheese-- in Bhutan's shamudatsi. Whether you're a lover of Indian cuisine, at home or abroad, or a wanderer seeking inspiration for your own voyage of discovery, this multi-course meal promises many delightful surprises about India's delicacies, their origins and their locales. O'Yeah captures India in a nutshell--a big, coconut-sized one.

The extreme diversity of Indian food culture--including the dizzying array of ingredients and dishes--is made manageable in this groundbreaking reference. India has no national dish or cuisine; however, certain ingredients, dishes, and cooking styles are typical of much of the subcontinent's foodways. There are also common ways of thinking about food. The balanced coverage found herein covers many states ignored by previous food writers. Students will find much of cultural interest here to complement country studies and foodies will discover fresh perspectives. From prehistoric times there has been considerable mixing of cultures and cuisines within India. Today, the endless variations in cuisine reflect religious, community, regional, and economic differences and histories. Sen, a noted author on Indian cuisine, consummately encapsulates the foodways in historical context, including the influence of the British period (the Raj). Among the topics covered are the restrictions of various religions and castes and the northern wheat-based vs. the southern rice-based cuisine, with an extensive review of each regional cuisine with typical meals. She characterizes the only-recent restaurant culture, with mention of Indian fare offered abroad. In addition, the Indian sweet tooth so apparent in the dishes made for many festivals and celebrations is highlighted. The roles of diet and health are also explained, with an emphasis on Ayruveda, which is gaining support in Western countries. A plethora of recipes for different regions and occasions complements the text.

When encountering unfamiliar environments in India and the Philippines, the British and the Americans wrote extensively about the first taste of mango and meat spiced with cumin, the smell of excrement and coconut oil, the feel of humidity and rough cloth against skin, the sound of bells and insects, and the appearance of dark-skinned natives and lepers. So too did the colonial subjects they encountered perceive the agents of empire through their senses and their skins. Empire of course involved economics, geopolitics, violence, a desire for order and greatness, a craving for excitement and adventure. It also involved an encounter between authorities and subjects, an everyday process of social interaction, political negotiation, policing, schooling, and healing. While these all concerned what people thought about each other, perceptions of others, as Andrew Rotter shows, were also formed through seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. In this book, Rotter offers a sensory history of the British in India from the formal imposition of their rule to its end (1857-1947) and the Americans in the Philippines from annexation to independence (1898-1946). The British and the Americans saw themselves as the civilizers of what they judged backward societies, and they believed that a vital part of the civilizing process was to properly prioritize the senses and to ensure them against offense or affront. Societies that looked shabby, were noisy and smelly, felt wrong, and consumed unwholesome food in unmannerly ways were unfit for self-government. It was the duty of allegedly more sensorily advanced Anglo-Americans to educate them before formally withdrawing their power. Indians and Filipinos had different ideas of what constituted sensory civilization and to some extent resisted imperial efforts to impose their own versions. What eventually emerged were compromises between these nations' sensory regimes.A fascinating and original comparative work, Empires of the Senses offers new perspectives on imperial history.

From dal to samosas, paneer to vindaloo, dosa to naan, Indian food is diverse and wide-ranging--unsurprising when you consider India's incredible range of climates, languages, religions, tribes, and customs. Its cuisine differs from north to south, yet what is it that makes Indian food recognizably Indian, and how did it get that way? To answer those questions, Colleen Taylor Sen examines the diet of the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years, describing the country's cuisine in the context of its religious, moral, social, and philosophical development.             Exploring the ancient indigenous plants such as lentils, eggplants, and peppers that are central to the Indian diet, Sen depicts the country's agricultural bounty and the fascination it has long held for foreign visitors. She illuminates how India's place at the center of a vast network of land and sea trade routes led it to become a conduit for plants, dishes, and cooking techniques to and from the rest of the world. She shows the influence of the British and Portuguese during the colonial period, and she addresses India's dietary prescriptions and proscriptions, the origins of vegetarianism, its culinary borrowings and innovations, and the links between diet, health, and medicine. She also offers a taste of Indian cooking itself--especially its use of spices, from chili pepper, cardamom, and cumin to turmeric, ginger, and coriander--and outlines how the country's cuisine varies throughout its many regions.             Lavishly illustrated with one hundred images, Feasts and Fasts is a mouthwatering tour of Indian food full of fascinating anecdotes and delicious recipes that will have readers devouring its pages.

Curry is one of the most widely used--and misused--terms in the culinary lexicon. Outside of India, the word curry is often used as a catchall to describe any Indian dish or Indian food in general, yet Indians rarely use it to describe their own cuisine. Curry answers the question, "What is curry?" by giving a lively historical and descriptive account of a dish that has many incarnations. In this global history, food writer Colleen Taylor Sen describes in detail the Anglo-Indian origins of curry and how this widely used spice has been adapted throughout the world. Exploring the curry universe beyond India and Great Britain, her chronicles include the elegant, complex curries of Thailand; the exuberant curry/rotis of the Caribbean; kari/raisu, Japan's favorite comfort food; Indonesian gulais and rendang; Malaysia's delicious Nonya cuisine; and exotic Western hybrids such as American curried chicken salad, German currywurst, and Punjabi-Mexican-Hindu pizza. Along the way, Sen unravels common myths about curry and Indian food and illuminates the world of curry with excerpts from popular songs, literary works, historical and modern recipes, and illustrations depicting curry dishes and their preparations. A vibrant, flavorful book about an increasingly popular food, Curry will find a wide audience of cooking enthusiasts and hungry fans of Indian food.

This reference work covers the cuisine and foodways of India in all their diversity and complexity, including regions, personalities, street foods, communities and topics that have been often neglected. The book starts with an overview essay situating the Great Indian Table in relation to its geography, history and agriculture, followed by alphabetically organized entries. The entries, which are between 150 and 1,500 words long, combine facts with history, anecdotes, and legends. They are supplemented by longer entries on key topics such as regional cuisines, spice mixtures, food and medicine, rites of passages, cooking methods, rice, sweets, tea, drinks (alcoholic and soft) and the Indian diaspora. This comprehensive volume illuminates contemporary Indian cooking and cuisine in tradition and practice.

Challenges popular generalizations about cow protection and beef consumption Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu nationalism has further polarized traditional views: Dalits, Muslims, and Christians protest threats to their beef-eating heritage while Hindu fundamentalists rally against those who eat the sacred cow. Yet close observation of what people do and do not eat, the styles and contexts within which they do so, and the disparities between rhetoric and everyday action overturns this simplistic binary opposition. Understanding how a food can be implicated in riots, vigilante attacks, and even murders demands that we look beyond immediate politics to wider contexts. Drawing on decades of ethnographic research in South India, James Staples charts how cattle owners, brokers, butchers, cooks, and occasional beef eaters navigate the contemporary political and cultural climate. Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian offers a fine-grained exploration of the current situation, locating it within the wider anthropology of food and eating in the region and revealing critical aspects of what it is to be Indian in the early twenty-first century.

This book provides detailed information on the various ethnic fermented foods and beverages of India. India is home to a diverse food culture comprising fermented and non-fermented ethnic foods and alcoholic beverages. More than 350 different types of familiar, less-familiar and rare ethnic fermented foods and alcoholic beverages are traditionally prepared by the country's diverse ethnic groups, and include alcoholic, milk, vegetable, bamboo, legume, meat, fish, and cereal based beverages. Most of the Indian ethnic fermented foods are naturally fermented, whereas the majority of the alcoholic beverages have been prepared using dry starter culture and the 'back-sloping' method for the past 6,000 years. A broad range of culturable and unculturable microbiomes and mycobiomes are associated with the fermentation and production of ethnic foods and alcoholic drinks in India.  The book begins with detailed chapters on various aspects including food habits, dietary culture,and the history, microbiology and health benefits of fermented Indian food and beverages. Subsequent chapters describe unique and region-specific ethnic fermented foods and beverages from all 28 states and 9 union territories. In turn the classification of various ethnic fermented foods and beverages, their traditional methods of preparation, culinary practices and mode of consumption, socio-economy, ethnic values, microbiology, food safety, nutritional value, and process optimization in some foods are discussed in details with original pictures. In closing, the book addresses the medicinal properties of the fermented food products and their health benefits, together with corresponding safety regulations. 

The cuisine of India is as ancient as it is varied, and in this attractive, oversized volume, food expert A.K. Achaya captures the full range and history of the Indian diet, from prehistoric times to the modern era. An informative volume that boasts over 150 black-and-white illustrations (including line drawings, photographs, and maps) and 55 color photographs on 20 plates, Indian Food draws on archaeology, anthropology, literature, philology, and botany to cook up a smorgasbord of fascinating facts about this exotic fare. Achaya begins with the earliest food preparations of paleolithic and neolithic times, the cooking of the Harappan people (archeological evidence suggests they may have eaten baked chapati--griddle-roasted wheat cakes--food still popular today). He covers the diet of the Aryans (using information found in their rich Vedic literature); examines regional cuisines, such as those of Karnataka, Hyderabad, Bengal, Gujarat, Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh; describes the customs, rituals, and beliefs observed by different communities and religious groups; and traces the gradual shift towards vegetarianism with the advent of Buddhism and Jainism. In thirty-three boxed sections, he takes the reader on various sidetrips, touching on the Indian use of Bhang (cannabis) and opium, the history of ice cream (ranging from Marco Polo to Dolly Madison), the use of natural grains as the basis of early weight systems (3 black mustard seeds equaled 1 white mustard seed; 6 white mustard seeds equaled 1 middle-sized barley corn), and the names of alcoholic drinks that appear in Sanskrit literature, ranging from pre-Aryan Sura (made from barley or rice flour) to Harahuraka (wine made from black grapes from Afghanistan). Achaya also discusses non-Indian foods, such as tapioca, which was an important commodity for trade in South America as far back as 3000 BC, and the potato, first domesticated near Lake Titicaca, sometime between 5000 and 2000 BC. Indeed, the book provides a wealth of historical information on food in general, revealing that coffee may have been first used in Ethiopia, that the coconut evolved 20 million years ago in New Guinea, that carrots were first domesticated in Afghanistan (where they were greenish colored and rich in anthocyanin), and that the word banana is of African origin and may be connected with the Arabic word banan (fingers or toes). With illustrations ranging from neolithic cave paintings from Madhya Pradesh, to full color photographs of modern Indian foods, Indian Food offers a rich cornucopia of information on this flavorful and popular cuisine.

Food practices of a people is the product of multiple factors. Endogenous as well as exogenous factors influence people's opinion and preferences about food. In India and its neighbouring countries, food practices are often delimited by economic standing, religion, caste and analogous systems of social ranking of the consumers. State and market forces also influence food behaviour by exercising control over production and trade. Food and Power: Expressions of Food-Politics in South Asia studies power relations between those who eat and those who decide (or at least try to decide) what people should eat. It raises questions pertaining to the politicization of ethnographic tradition in South Asia in relation to the intersection of religion, economy and food. This book explores how traditional food practices have undergone change owing to the influences of migration globalization and popular media to understand how ethos of the powerful affects the foodways of relatively weaker ethnic, religious, occupational and gender groups

Traces the history of Indian cuisine from the imperial kitchen of the Mughal invader Babur to the cookhouse of the British Raj, profiling traditional dishes based on a long history of invasion and the fusion of different food traditions

This book discusses food in the context of the cultural matrix of India. Addressing topical issues in food and food culture, it explores questions concerning the consumption, representation and mediation of food. The book is divided into four sections, focusing on food fads; food representation; the symbolic valence of food; modes and manners of resistance articulated through food. Investigating consumption practices in both public and ethnic culture, each chapter introduces a fresh approach to food across diverse literary and cultural genres. The book offers a highly readable guide for researchers and practitioners in the field of literary and cultural studies, as well as the sociological fields of food studies, body studies and fat studies.

This book utilizes cuisine to understand the construction of the colonial middle class in Bengal who indigenized new culinary experiences as a result of colonial modernity. This process of indigenization developed certain social practices, including imagination of the act of cooking as a classic feminine act and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. The process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice that was imbricated in the upper caste and patriarchal agenda of the middle-class social reform. However, in these acts of imagination, there were important elements of continuity from the pre-colonial times. The book establishes the fact that Bengali cuisine cannot be labeled as indigenist although it never became widely commercialized. The point was to cosmopolitanize the domestic and yet keep its tag of 'Bengaliness'. The resultant cuisine was hybrid, in many senses like its makers.