Folks far more accomplished and adept than me have written about the exemplary work of Professor Abhijeet Banerjee. I won’t make any attempts to do so. I know my limits.
In 2019 Banerjee was the co- winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics. #nuffsaid as the kids today say.
He is a fellow Presidency College, Calcutta, alumni. “Aar kono kotha hobe na,” as they say back home. #nuffsaid in Bengali. The college is now a deemed university and the city is now called Kolkata. He went to JNU for his MA and Harvard for his PHD after that. The girls of my batch (92-95, Sociology Hons) want you to know that they were fans of DB (Dipak Banerjee) who taught economics at Presidency.
What you might not know, is that Abhijit da (this is what I settled on after I asked him ‘should I call you Mr Banerjee, Abhijit or Abhijit da’) has been cooking since the age of 15. Primarily because his mother, Nirmala Banerjee (nee Patnakar), was a feminist. No, no. She was not against women cooking. She was a great cook with a wide repertoire of dishes. Her work led her to travel a lot though which meant that Abhijit da and DB were left in the hands of the family cook. “He was a good cook, but had a limited range and hence I entered the kitchen,” says Abhijit da.
“I continue cooking till date. I cook everyday. I find it a great way of unwinding and putting behind whatever happened that day.”
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| Cooking to Save Your Life. Pic: Juggernaut Book |
Abhijit da has come out with a cookbook. A natural follow up to the list of recipes that he put together for his brother in law two years back. It has been published by Chiki Sarkar’s Juggernaut India and is called ‘Cooking to Save Your Life.’
While talking to me on the subject, my mother said that this is a welcome move. That men (Bengalis in particular) did not really giving cooking the sort of respect it deserves. The fact that a Nobel laureate cooks could help change that mindset she said. A thought that had crossed my mind too and made me believe that this would perhaps make more men enter their home kitchen.
“There are many more dishes that I make. We could not fit them all in one book,” said Abhijit da ruefully.
There are various ways in which a Nobel prize winning economist can write about food. Abhijit da says that his book, Poor Economics, contains the sort of economic analysis of food that people would expect from him.
“Why a cookbook,” I asked and I must confess here that recipe books are a genre of food writing that do not excite me much. Abhijit da says that he often drools while fantasising about recipes that he encounters in cookbooks. “Ingredients talk to me.”
Demystifying cooking is a key purpose behind writing ‘Cooking to Save your life,’ says Abhijit da.
“We wanted to move away from the picture perfect world of recipe television and talk about real life cooking instead,” said Abhijit da to explain why he uses measures such as ones pinky to show how much garlic to put and ones thumb to show how much ginger to put. His associate and illustrator, Cheyenne Olivier, uses geometrical designs to show each dish. Not shots where the camera romances the food and where the ephemeral plating tells you how mundane your life till this moment was. Abhijit and Cheyenne encourage you to create your path instead and feel good about it. Diametrically different from the mukhosto bidya (learning by rote) educational philosophy of our childhood.
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| Cheyenne Olivier and Abhijit Banerjee talk to Kalyan Karmakar on #finelychoppedTV |
The book can be divided into two sections. The short section introductions, where Abhijit da gently slips in some of his socio-economic beliefs such as the need to redefine what non-vegetarian means in the Asian context and the need to look beyond basmati and seek out indigenous grains such as millets and seasonal rice; and the relevance of both in the context of sustainability.
The other, constituting the bulk of the book, are his recipes. These cover multiple genres – Bengali, Gujarati, Maharashtrian, Italian, French, Japanese etc – reflecting the distinguished and colouful path that his life has traversed. Each recipe is preceded by a tongue in cheek scenario where Abhijit da lets the aspiring novelist and humourist in him loose.
Do watch our freewheeling chat on #FinelyChoppedTV and stick on till the end to figure out why Abhijit da recommends cooking his kabuli pullao to save your life in Gabbar Singh’s den.
PS: I did not know Abhijit da before this. I confess that I was intimidated the night before the interview. I had never spoken with a Nobel prize winner in my life (though as a baby I’d possibly been with my parents to the hall where the prizes are given during a road trip in Europe). I lay in bed the night before and planned my questions. Something that I rarely do as I am a ‘by the seat of my pants’ interviewer. I eventually felt encouraged by the example of the Buddhist philosopher Dr Daisaku Ikeda, the president of the Soka Gakkai International, who has met so many thought leaders despite not having finished his formal education. We did well at the end. What do you think?
