A hearty meal with a chronicler of Indian culinary history

Before I met Colleen Taylor Sen in Chicago in May, she shared with me several lunch options, but I knew I had to have a sub-continental meal with her, for she is without doubt the most diligent chronicler of the culinary history of our part of the world than anyone else before and after the late KT Achaya.

On Colleen's suggestion, we had lunch at Mishthan, a Bangladeshi restaurant on Devon Avenue (Chicago's Little India), which seemed far more appetising than the competition.

We were joined by her husband, Ashish Sen, an acclaimed authority on transportation statistics and an influential Democrat who has served the Clinton administration and is now the vice-chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority.

As we chatted over a hearty meal consisting of Mughlai paranthas, mutton rizala, mishti doi and payesh (kheer), prepared by a cook who had left Dhaka a year and half ago, and served by a painfully slow waiter who did not leave any of us in doubt that he was fresh off the boat, I could not but admire Colleen's keen understanding of our food culture and how lightly she carries her knowledge.

Only she could have written a book as conversationally written and loaded with delicious facts as Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India (Speaking Tiger; Rs 699) - the depth of her scholarship reveals her abiding interest in the subject, which dates back to her first visit to India in 1972, and her prose is easier to digest than that of Achaya, the Mysore-based food scientist who wrote the benchmark-setting volume, A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food.

Colleen, interestingly, is neither a historian (her PhD from Columbia University is in Slavic languages), nor a food writer by training.

It was marriage that brought her in touch with Indian food and she developed a lifelong interest in the subject, writing copiously for newspapers and journals across North America, and contributing year after year to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

I discovered Colleen courtesy of uncle Google while researching the history of the Bengali sandesh, which in turn drew me to an early article by her on the Portuguese influences on Bengali cuisine, and eventually to her slim but information-rich book, Curry: A Global History (Reaktion; 2010). It was with great anticipation therefore that I picked up Feasts and Fasts and I wasn't disappointed.

Feasts and Fasts benefits from Colleen's ability to collate information from a multitude of sources, from Manu and Charaka to the Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar, Hsuan Tsang, to Anglo-Indian cookbook writers and modern scholars, and present it in the most readable manner, breaking up her narrative to accommodate sidebars and recipes.

The picture she draws is of a society that, contrary to the vision of those who view the past from the blinkers of contemporary politics, ate heartily (and a lot of what our ancestors ate was non-vegetarian) and drank merrily.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)