Eating India
Exploring the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In Eating India, the award-winning writer Chitrita Banerji takes us on a thrilling journey through a national food formed by generations of arrivals, assimilations and conquests. In mouth-watering prose, she explores how each wave of newcomers brought innovative new ways to combine the subcontinent's rich native spices, poppy seeds, saffron and mustard with the vegetables, fish, grains and pulses that are the staples of the Indian kitchen. Along the way, she visits traditional weddings, tiffin rooms, city markets, roadside cafes and tribal villages, to find out how India's turbulent history has shaped its people and its cuisine. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Eating India will stand as an authority on Indian food for years to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 vegetables on one plate. The decision to allow appetite and intellectual curiosity to determine her course could easily have resulted in a similar mishmash. It is to the author's credit that her journeys to Benares, Gujarat and points south retain their unique flavors.
