Best Book Depictions of Indian Food & Cooking

[gingerly]

fragrance thread in another forum reminded me of 'smell' by radhika jha.

[Vikram]

Sometime back I'd referred to Nilanjana Roy's upcoming anthology of food writing from Indian literature. I'm happy to announce its out now - 'A Matter of Taste: the Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food' (and with a lovely Kalighat print of a cat with a prawn in its mouth as the cover pic).

I'm still reading it so no major comments on it, but these are hardly likely to be unfavourable! Nilanjana has focussed on the literary aspect so most of the well known modern Indian writers like Rushdie are featured. (Tantalizingly, it looks like his new book, out next year I think, will have even more on food).

The only thing that occurs to me is that she could have gone into historical writing a bit more - it could have been writings on Indian food, rather than Indian writings on food. That way she could have got in Raj writers like Wyvern. There are several writers from Indian languages, but I think more could have been added - where, for example, is Ambai who has written well on food (I posted an extract in this thread). I could also have done without David Davidar's dreary mumblings on mangoes, but I suppose that was unavoidable with a Penguin book.

But then I guess that the pleasure of any anthology is the dialogue one can have with the anthologist about what should have been chosen or could have been dropped. After all, that's the best guarantee that there could be more such anthologies like this,

Vikram

[Carlovski]

'Life of Pi' has quite a few food references - lots of heart felt longing for indian vegetarian food while he is stuck on the boat.

[Monica Bhide]

Sometime back I'd referred to Nilanjana Roy's upcoming anthology of food writing from Indian literature. I'm happy to announce its out now - 'A Matter of Taste: the Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food' (and with a lovely Kalighat print of a cat with a prawn in its mouth as the cover pic).

I'm still reading it so no major comments on it, but these are hardly likely to be unfavourable! Nilanjana has focussed on the literary aspect so most of the well known modern Indian writers like Rushdie are featured. (Tantalizingly, it looks like his new book, out next year I think, will have even more on food).

The only thing that occurs to me is that she could have gone into historical writing a bit more - it could have been writings on Indian food, rather than Indian writings on food. That way she could have got in Raj writers like Wyvern. There are several writers from Indian languages, but I think more could have been added - where, for example, is Ambai who has written well on food (I posted an extract in this thread). I could also have done without David Davidar's dreary mumblings on mangoes, but I suppose that was unavoidable with a Penguin book.

But then I guess that the pleasure of any anthology is the dialogue one can have with the anthologist about what should have been chosen or could have been dropped. After all, that's the best guarantee that there could be more such anthologies like this,

Vikram

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Now if I only knew someone at Penguin who would kindly send me a review copy.