Eating India An Odyssey into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices

by Banerji, Chitrita

• ISBN13: 9781596910188
• ISBN10: 1596910186
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-07-10
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Chitrita Banerji grew up in Calcutta and came to the United States as a graduate student; she received her master’s degree in English from Harvard University. She has since become an internationally recognized writer on Bengali food, and is the author of Life and Food in Bengal, Bengali Cooking: Seasons and Festivals, and Feeding the Gods: Memories of Women, Food, and Ritual in Bengal. A two-time winner of Sophie Coe awards in Food and History, she has written about food for Gourmet, Gastronomica, Granta, the Boston Globe, and the American Prospect. She lives in Cambridge, Mass.

Table of Contents

Bengal : land of a thousand rivers	p. 3
In pursuit of the Portuguese : from Bengal to Goa	p. 29
Road food on the highway	p. 45
A southern thali in Karnataka	p. 55
The anglo-Indian table	p. 74
Pilgrimage and pageantry in Amritsar	p. 89
Banquets of the imperial palace - Muslim style	p. 106
Benaras : feasting and fasting in Shiva's City	p. 141
Art and texture on the Gujarati platter	p. 159
Bombay : city by the sea	p. 184
Kerala : Rich Cuisines of the Pepper Kingdom	p. 197
The vanishing jews of India	p. 220
The indigenous pot	p. 234
Saffron desires	p. 248
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