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I am going to let you in on a guilty secret. Even if you dub me a philistine after that. Or a pretender.

I rarely read cookbooks.

I respect the work which goes into them. The yeoman service done in documenting traditions and cultures through them. And in inspiring and enabling the new generation to cook.

It’s just that I don’t cook from recipes. Nor, unlike Nobel Laureate and cookbook author Abhijit Banerjee, does ‘reading recipes make me drool.’ Recipes speak to me as much as algebraic formulae did in school. Read on, if you haven’t decided to unfollow me already. 

To me a book is something you should be able to curl up in bed with. A Bengali’s boy’s first crush. ‘Don’t lie down and read, your eyes will get spoilt,’ my mum would fret. All the fish eyes in the mached

mudo diye dals she fed me helped. I needed reading glasses only in my mid 40s but that’s the law of nature.

You could say that a food writer should read recipes books. Perhaps you are right, but if I was to do what I SHOULD, I’d have stayed back in market research. 

Yesterday, I needed a book to curl up with and I picked up Anahita Dhondy’s ‘The Parsi Kitchen.’ I thought I’d flip through it to get a sense of the book since she’d been kind enough of to send it and then I’d get back to ‘Lincoln Highway’ by Amor Towles which I am reading right now. 

I didn’t stop till I finished it. The Parsi Kitchen has recipes no doubt, but it is not a recipe book with a few perfunctory stories thrown in. It is a lot more.

The Parsi Kitchen is Anahita Dhondy’s expression of joy and gratitude for being a Parsi and being able to fulfil her dream of being a chef. She had never thought that the two would intersect, but she explains how they eventually did.

The book is full of anecdotes and facts about Parsis. Their food, culture, people and history and many of their quirky individuals. 

No, it’s not the Encyclopaedia Behramaeca (just a prose thing in case you thought I am obsessed with Busybee, which I am).

Anahita is quick to acknowledge that she never thought she’d be a Parsi chef, scholar or historian, while growing up. That her life has been a journey of learning and that she has tried to share whatever she has learnt so far. She is  cognisant of the fact that she’s a Delhi Bawi and lives far away from the promised land of boomla… Bombay. That she had her first boi (mullet in English, parshe in Bengali), three years after she was with SodaBottleOpenerWala when she went on a very personal journey of discovery to Gujarat. That she believes in the spirit of laissez faire in the kitchen and that it is up to you to decide on how tight you want your akoori to be. And whether to pair it with Parsi choi or the pan Indian phateli coffee.

I’d compare the book with a warm Parsi granny’s hug, but that would do disservice to the fact that the book is well researched. That it taught me, someone who prides himself as one who knows a fair bit about the Parsis and not just because I am married to one or because one of my two best friends today is one, a fair bit about the Parsis. That the quality of production and styling of the book sets a benchmark for cookbooks coming out of India. The closest comparison I could think of to Anahita’s simple yet evocative and informative narrative style would be Chitrita Banerji whom I hold in very high regard and who is one of my role models.

And most of all, the voice of the author of The Parsi Kitchen is that of a friend which, full disclosure, Anahita is in my case. 

 

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