: From food and family to domesticity: What sattvik cookbooks from the Hindi heartland tell us #IndiaNEWS Cookbooks today reveal a sense of nostalgia and a desire to preserve a past getting all-the-more

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From food and family to domesticity: What sattvik cookbooks from the Hindi heartland tell us #IndiaNEWS
Cookbooks today reveal a sense of nostalgia and a desire to preserve a past getting all-the-more distant moment by pandemic moment. Curiously, very similar – or at least comparable – anxieties and desires propelled the rush of cookbooks in the early 20th century. Hindi cookbooks from this period allow us to talk about a neglected cooking tradition that was the mainstay of upper-caste Hindu vegetarian cookery half a century ago.Cookbooks also allow us to converse with the voices traditionally not heard. For example, a mid-20th century cookbook written by Vrindeshvari Devi, entitled Saras Bhojan Kaise Banayen, or How to Cook Tasteful Food, leads us into the intricacies of sattvik cooking: a form of kosher vegetarian cooking style that abjures onion, garlic and tomato, and similar “foreign� ingredients. Drawing on some of the classical Hindu Ayurvedic and scriptural texts, this culinary philosophy understands food as made up of three intrinsic characteristics or gunas: virtuous/cool (såttvika), passionate/fiery (råjas) and dark or decadent (tåmas).A relationship is thus posited between the character of the food ingested and the character and wellbeing of the person ingesting it in this life and the next. The recipes detailed in Devi’s cookbook are not listed in contemporary commercial menus, but it is obvious...Read more

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