Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Slice of life Chitrita Banerji

Banerji has authored Life and Food in Bengal and The Hour of the Goddess: Memories of Women, Food and Ritual in Bengal besides contributing essays to journals and anthologies. As her titles suggest, she writes about the slice of life in which food plays an important role, and cannot be classified as merely a food writer. “I don’t think I can ever really write about food,” she agrees. Food for her is always “in a context, a medium of understanding” of human experience.

“Eating India is more like a journey. It is not pretending to be the last word on anything,” she says. “I was trying to answer some of my own questions on India.”

The book, then, had to include history and observe how approaches and traditions have changed. “Too often we start thinking there is only one way of cooking and one way of eating,” remarks the author, who has written extensively on the cuisine of her native Bengal. I’ve heard people say this is not an authentic banana flower curry. So I say, well, what is authentic?” Ingredients like chillies are not native to Indian soil and now considered ‘authentic’. What would have spiced up the food before their advent? “I’ve read a lot of narrative poems in Bengali. And there’s a lot of mention of black pepper and ginger.”

But the book is not meant only for American readers. She hopes Indian readers will consider how best to preserve traditions that are in danger of being lost as a result of lifestyle changes. “The break-up of the joint and even nuclear family means generations of recipes going out.”

Like art patrons, there could be food patrons who could maintain a set of traditional cooks, says the author who believes it is the era in which “food should be the next strong weapon of diplomacy”.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail