New Delhi: India didn’t make the ubiquitous curry a global phenomenon. “It was the Bangladeshi community that introduced them to the world. We are just poor marketers,” said chef Manish Mehrotra at the Delhi launch of food writer Sona Bahadur’s new book, An Invitation to Feast: A Deep Dive into India’s Culinary Treasures.
The Kamaladevi Complex at the India International Centre was buzzing earlier this month as friends, family and fans gathered to raise a toast to Bahadur’s first book.
At the panel discussion, which was part of the launch event, spice was the focus of the conversation. From the Parsi dhansak masala to vatap (the wet paste anchoring Goan curries), and the eight-spice Mappila garam masala that gives Thalassery biryani its flavour—everything was on the table for discussion.
“I want to make people fall in love with India’s classic dishes quite like Julia Roberts falls in love with pizza in Eat Pray Love,” said Bahadur, who spent six years bringing the book to life, interviewing more than 120 people along the way.
And, that’s why, Mehrotra compared An Invitation to Feast with famous cookbooks like The Escoffier Cookbook and Larousse Gastronomique.
“This book will be remembered even 20-30 years later because it captures the base or the original dishes so well,” he said.
Not missing out on regional
Indian cuisine is often stereotyped and reduced to a few popular dishes like dal makhani, butter chicken, and chicken tikka masala. More often than not, regional food often gets overlooked and excluded from mainstream consumption. And sometimes, it’s the local population that ‘forgets’ its own food.
Bihari kebabs are widely popular in Dubai and in parts of Pakistan but aren’t easily available in Bihar, let alone Delhi, said Anubhav Sapra founder of Delhi Food Walks, who was part of the panel along with chef and author Sadaf Hussain, entrepreneur Hoihnu Hauzel. Nawab Kazim Ali Khan of Rampur was the chief guest at the event.
Bahadur’s book, described as “poem to Indian food” by Michelin-starred chef Vikas Khanna, aims to correct what Mehrotra and many others see as a persistent gap in documenting Indian recipes.
She makes a conscious effort to include regional dishes such as Goan fish curry and smoked pork from the Northeast. This also represents a current shift where chefs and food writers are beginning to dig deeper into the history of regional food.
Take the case of smoked meats. The way it’s prepared varies across India. In Assam, the smoked pork is cooked with wild foraged greens. It is simmered, allowing the smoke and pork fat to provide the flavour, often with added chili paste, ginger, garlic, and sometimes fermented bamboo shoots or khar (banana peel extract). Meanwhile, in Nagaland, it is cooked with axone (a traditional, naturally fermented soybean product). In Mizoram, the vawksa rep leh antam or smoked pork is popularly cooked with mustard leaves.
“Our food is simple, authentic and close to nature. We don’t use a lot of spices, our food is herb and technique forward like smoking and fermentation,” Hauzel said, who belongs to Manipur.
“A pork dish represents an entire community… it makes us feel seen.”
Bahadur has featured not one but multiple pork preparations from different regions of the Northeast including Dimapur’s smoked pork with axone, Guwahati’s Bodo dishes like Oma Narzi and Sobai, and Shillong’s smoked pork.
A former editor of BBC Good Food India, Bahadur travelled across 60 cities. From sampling Rampuri yakhni pulao at a royal family’s table to enjoying Sunday dhansak with Mumbai’s Parsi community. And her book is a reflection of this.
She ultimately pared it down to 11 ‘iconic’ recipes of India, such as biryani, dosai, vada pav, Undhiyu, chhole, shami kebabs, and rasgulla. Each is divided into a separate chapter.
Her selection, she admitted, stemmed from personal preference.
“Curation is always personal,” Bahadur said. “I have missed out on a lot of parts of India and it absolutely gutted me but I had to make some choices.”
She explained to the audience that she picked undhiyu over dhokla was purely because she found the seasonality and ritual of the winter harvest feast associated with the former more interesting.
“This doesn’t mean dhokla is any less iconic. Likewise, Goan fish curry, an everyday food eaten by all communities in Goa, seemed more representative of the state to me than the equally famous, and worthy, pork vindaloo,” Bahadur said.
What sets Bahadur’s book apart is that she delves into different interpretations and iterations of the same dish. The book doesn’t just include a biryani recipe, instead, it explores its many versions, showing how the same dish is prepared differently across regions. In the biryani chapter, there’s Lucknow’s Idrees biryani and Hyderabad’s Zaffrani Kacche Gosht ki biryani to Kolkata-style mutton biryani and ambur biryani.
“I think this cookbook marks the beginning of a shift, from simply googling ‘how to cook biryani’ to searching which regional style of biryani they want to make,” said Mehrotra.
Also read: Rasgulla, Taj Mahal, Sanskrit—What if I told you to pick one object that represents India
Whose ‘rasgulla’ is it anyway?
Bahadur talked about the war over rasgulla with West Bengal and Odisha staking their claim over the sweet treat’s origins. The chapter – ‘Rasgulla, Ball of Fame’, in her book underlines that the primary difference between Bengali and Odia Rasgulla lies in their texture and sweetness.
Bahadur introduced the reader to the Mullick family’s Jadu Babu Bazaar outlet in Kolkata’s Bhawanipur, which she describes as a “mishti equivalent of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.”
She narrated the story of how the Mullicks invented the baked rosogollas, after three failed attempts, giving Kolkata a unique iteration of the sweet which they had never seen before.
On the other hand, the Odia rasagolla, be it the Biswal’s Pahala version or the soft white ones offered at the Jagannath Temple in Puri, remains largely under the radar.
But she has more stories to tell.
“I have left out entire regions and states. To atone for these sins of omission, I hope to write a second volume to this book devoted to the foods and places I couldn’t include here and there are many,” she said.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)