Eating India - Exploring a Nation's Cuisine

Author: Chitrita BanerjiPublisher: PenguinYear: 2007Language: EnglishPages: 330ISBN/UPC (if available): 0-14-306309-X DescriptionIn Eating India, award-winning food writer Chitrita Banerji takes us on an extraordinary journey through a national cuisine formed by generations of arrivals, assimilations and conquests. Traveling across the length and breadth of the country—from Bengal to Goa and Karnataka, via the Grand Trunk Road, then northwards to Amritsar, Lucknow and Varanasi, on to Bombay and Kerala—Banerji discovers a civilization with an insatiable curiosity, one that consumes the old and the new with eager voracity.Weaving together myths and folklore associated with food, the people and their culture, the author narrates captivating accounts of life in the subcontinent: the legend behind the weeklong harvest festival of Onam; the strictly observed rules of kosher in the Jewish households of Cochin; the best Benarasi thandai that has a dollop of bhang in it; and the food and cultur