Kitchen Qissas
Only some of the courses in this anthology of food writing satisfy the appetite
SPICED, SMOKED, PICKLED, PRESERVED Recipes and Reminiscences from India’s Eastern Hills
By By Indranee Indranee Ghosh Ghosh
HACHETTE HACHETTE INDIA INDIA `550; `550; 248 248 pages pages The anthology is biased towards the private kitchen rather than the great street cornucopias
If this book were a meal and if you, the reader, were a cactusy old sybarite of a begum or nawab, say a glutton chewing for flaws, you would find lots in here to complain about. In her foreword, Karachi-based writer Bina Shah writes: “Muslim South Asian kitchens are the engines of an entire culture.” If your question happens to be “how is a South Asian Muslim kitchen different as an engine of culture than other kitchens to other cultures?”, you won’t find the answer in most of the pieces in this book. The glitch, of course, is in the baghaar of the initial formulation. One could argue there is a loose homogeneity to Muslim cuisine across the sub-continent, but finding a definable shape would be hard work. Each piece in this book is accompanied by a recipe and a look at about half of them immediately throws up the question: what is particularly Muslim about palak aur methi, baingan ka bharta, vegetarian bun kabab, kaali daal, samosa, carrot kanji, lotus stem yakhni, khichri or egg, aubergine and tomato curry?
Tabish Khair’s beautiful piece Jootha perhaps best addresses the conundrum where he describes the parallel kitchens, Muslim and Hindu, set up for weddings in his home town and how the concept of jootha and various kinds of snobbery about working-class food cuts across religions. Reading it you realise how South Asian food cultures—whether Muslim, Christian, Hindu or others—are formed by melding with other local cultures and the smells and tastes of different regional landscapes.
Pushing the quibbles to one side of the plate, there are several lovely bits of writing here. The Homesick Restaurant
by Nadeem Aslam unpeels strange petals of homesickness, Kaiser Haq’s memoir-essay explores the layers of social dynamics around the consumption of a Dhakai biryani, Annie Zaidi plays games with her family’s cooking secrets and Tarana Husain Khan’s short story Aftertaste teases out the emotional piquancy of a funeral feast. The collection is biased towards the private kitchen rather than the great street cornucopias and you only get a sense of all the amazing Muslim street eateries and stalls in Haq’s piece and in Rana Safvi’s All About Qormas and Qaliyas, where she describes in detail the street food scene in Lucknow. Though the book is clearly not meant to be encyclopaedic, one still finds oneself missing writing about Hyderabadi food, Mopla food, the Muslim street food of Kolkata and Delhi, while Bohra and Memon cuisines are also completely absent. ■
—Ruchir Joshi