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The twin impact of the pandemic and heightened awareness of climate change in the past couple of years has led to several new and renewed food trends. It remains to be seen how many of these will become enduring trends, and how many are just fads that will wither away. Here are a few trends […]
In this column, I often fulminate against recipes. I believe that recipes have as much of a charm as a doctor’s prescription, minus the bad handwriting. Recipes instruct you to add one teaspoon of this, and two cups of that, and fry this for five minutes, and voila you have an exact replica of what […]
In this column, I have often talked about how food travels and transforms. How cultures clash and then meld, and new cuisines emerge through the assimilation of the ingredients and cooking techniques of different cultures. The best cuisines of the world are those that have arisen out of this merging and blending. This fact was […]
I write here about food. My other interest is education. I am a professor when I am not cooking. Wearing my professor hat, I often ponder over what is wrong with our education system, and how we can reinvent the world of education. My cooking hat and my professor hat often collide. I then start […]
Food is politics. Throughout human history, food has been used as a means to signal power and position in society. Food has been caught up in the identity of caste, class, religion, ethnicity, and nationality. Sections of society always use food to differentiate themselves from other sections of society. The rich eat some food, the […]
Food does not flourish in a vacuum. It is an integral part of culture and identity. And when food travels, the context, and the culture around it, needs to travel too. Otherwise, food becomes just an isolated transplant from one place to another, without the stories and rituals that surround it in its country of […]
An aphorism by the 19th Century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin has entered popular culture, ‘Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es’; that is,‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are’. In English, we often tone down the exuberance and floweriness of the French language; […]
If you are this far into my series of columns, you know that I savour every bite of my food. I pick apart the colours, textures, tastes, smells, and sounds in every bite, and mindfully immerse myself in the party in my mouth. But the Western style of serving food makes it difficult to enjoy […]
The words ‘eating alone’ conjure up images of a loner, an anti-social soul, a sad person. Do not judge. Yes, sometimes the solo eater might be all of these, and I know some such sad loners (see, I am judging now). But there is a time for social eating, and there is a time for […]
I hereby launch a petition. Ban the word ‘foodie’. This neologism did not exist until the early 1980s. It first appears in restaurant reviews by Gael Greene, the food critic at New York Magazine. And even after its unfortunate invention, it made only small ripples for a couple of decades, when someone wanted to talk […]
Define cooking. You start with some base ingredients – say, vegetables, dal, rice, meat. Into these base ingredients go some additives – say, oil, salt, spices, condiments. The defining transformation happens when heat is applied to the ingredients and the additives. So, cooking is a simple combination of three factors: the base ingredient, the additives, and […]
Some people say food is life. Well, I say, food is more important than life. Food transcends life. With something so important, no wonder people get inordinately passionate, viscerally emotional, and violently possessive about their food. What really is their food? This brings me to the authenticity wars. I know at least two nations who would rather […]
While we think we just engage the sense of taste when eating, we often engage all five senses. We eat with our brains. This concept has a fancy name: Multisensory Perception of Flavour. What happens on the tastebuds is only a small part of this multisensory experience we call taste. We feed the mind and not […]
People often say, cooking is an art, not a science; cook from the heart, not the head. Having proclaimed that, the said people promptly open a recipe book, or watch a recipe video, and slavishly start following instructions – add one teaspoon of this, 20 grams of that, one cup of the other. Why do […]
