Chicago author Colleen Taylor Sen has written several books on Indian food, including “Curry: A Global History,” “Food Culture in India” and “Pakoras, Paneer, Pappadums: A Guide to Indian Restaurant Menus.”
Yet when she decided to tackle India’s culinary history, she found few books on the subject. So she scoured libraries and online booksellers, here and in India, for sources, accumulating more than 100 books now stacked on 30 shelves in her office.
“I always wanted to write this because I’ve been collecting material for 30 years,” she told us. Thanks to an insistent publisher in London, Taylor Sen finally did.
“Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India” (Reaktion Books, $39) which is being distributed in North America by the University of Chicago Press, is a richly detailed volume, with colorful historic images, some poetry (“Ode to Ghee”) and a few ancient recipes. It begins with the prehistoric era and moves on to religious influences, the arrival of Marco Polo in 1292, the development of regional variations, the Partition of India in 1947 and the creation of tandoori chicken, a relative newcomer to the Indian table.
What sets “Feasts and Fasts” apart from her previous volumes, she says, is that “this book is actually a history of Indian food.”
Other than two volumes by author K.T. Achaya (a history and dictionary), there is little history-focused literature on this ancient cuisine, she said. “It is so shocking when you think about how many histories there have been of every other cuisine.”
Perhaps other food historians found the challenges too great. India’s eight regions are spread over a vast area, which has created wide regional differences, with much determined by geography as well as food habits, she explained. “Having said all that, what is it that all these things have in common? I think the most common is the use of spices and why people use spices,” whether for their health benefits or to season foods.
Another challenge? Dealing with translations from Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, and recipes dating to the 14th century. “I can kind of pick out letters (in Sanskrit), which is useful because some of the people who did the translations didn’t know how to cook,” she said; that helped her decipher some ingredients — as did a Sanskrit professor.
Those 14th century recipes in the book have not been tested. “They’re just historical recipes for illustration,” she said. “I tried to make a couple of them. They used a lot of unusual spices. … (And) some of the recipes people still eat today. One of them is sattu. It’s just basically ground (chickpea) flour with a little onion and chili pepper on the side. It’s very simple.”
It took Taylor Sen three years to write “Feasts and Fasts,” but she has been feeding her appetite for India’s culinary history much longer than that. She first traveled to India in 1972 and added another dozen plus trips since then — always writing articles for newspapers and magazines in addition to her books.
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