Cookbooks in Contemporary India
Cookbooks in Contemporary India
Cookbooks in Contemporary India
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How to Make a National Cuisine:
Cookbooks in Contemporary India
ARJUN APPADURAI
University of Pennsylvania
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4 ARJUN APPADURAI
The evolution of a high cuisine, to use Goody's term, does not follow
exactly the same form or sequence in each of these locales. But with th
possible exceptions of China and Italy, there is in every case a powerfu
tendency to emphasize and reproduce the difference between "high" and
"low" cuisines, between court food and peasant food, between the diet of
urban centers and that of rural peripheries. Imperial cuisines always drew
upon regional, provincial, and folk materials and recipes. Preindustrial elites
often displayed their political power, their commercial reach, and their cos-
mopolitan tastes by drawing in ingredients, techniques, and even cooks from
far and wide. Yet these high cuisines, with their emphasis on spectacle,
disguise, and display, always seek to distance themselves from their local
sources. The regional idiom is here decisively subordinated to a central,
culturally superior, idiom. French haute cuisine is exemplary of this type of
high cuisine. In the cases of China and Italy, by contrast, regional cuisines are
the hautes cuisines, and no imperial or metropolitan culinary idiom really
appears to have achieved hegemony, even today. In the Chinese case, to the
degree that a civilizational standard has emerged, it appears to be the colorless
common denominator of the complex regional variants. In Italy, at least unti
very recently, it appears to be impossible to speak of a high, transregional
cuisine.
1 The single most important comparative treatment of cuisine from a sociological point of
view is found in Goody (1982). In addition to that study, which has provided a good deal of the
comparative perspective in this essay, I have also consulted the following sources for my under-
standing of non-Indian culinary traditions: Ahsan (1979); Austin (1888); Chang (1977); Cosman
(1976); Forster and Ranum (1979); Furnivall (1868); Revel (1979); Roden (1972); Rodinson
(1950); Root (1977); Vehling (1977). Goody (1982) contains an excellent and extensive
bibliography.
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA 5
2 Goody's discussion of the Indian material (Goody 1982:114-26) takes issue at several points
with the approach and arguments of R. S. Khare (1976a, 1976b). On the question of whether a
pan-Indian high cuisine existed in premoder India, Goody appears to have confused the question
of regional and courtly high cuisines with the matter of a national cuisine. For the latter, there is
little evidence until the second half of this century. I am also inclined to support Khare's view that
the cultural significance of cooking within the Hindu system remains incidental. More exactly, it
might be said that Brahmanical normative thought gives short shrift to cooking, but royal
practices as well as the divine cuisines of the great temples show highly differentiated, though
regional, styles of cooking. On sacred cuisine in premodern South India, see Breckenridge
(1986). Even here, collections of recipes are hard to find, though lists of ingredients, dishes, and
meals frequently appear.
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6 ARJUN APPADURAI
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA 7
In turn, the exchange of recipes, oral in origin but aided and intensified by
the new cookbooks, clearly reflects and reifies an emerging culinary cosmo-
politanism in the cities and towns of India, which is reflected in other con
sumption media as well. The trend setters as well as followers in this process
are women who often-times work in multiethnic job settings (as their hus-
bands do), whose children are acquiring broader tastes in school lunchrooms
and street-vendors' stalls, and whose husbands feel the pressure to entertain
colleagues and contacts at home. In all these contexts, what are created,
exchanged, and refined are culinary stereotypes of the Other, stereotypes tha
are then partly standardized in the new cookbooks.
The predicament of these middle-class women is quite complex, however,
for the homogenization of a certain middle-class life style calls for diversifica
tion of consumption patterns in many domains, including clothing, interio
decoration, and cuisine. In the domain of food, the push to diversify the
housewife's culinary skills comes from a variety of sources: the push of guest
who want to taste your regional specialties (as they have constructed them in
the course of their own interactions, travels, and readings of cookbooks), th
push of children who are tired of "the same old thing," and the push o
ambitious husbands to display the metropolitan culinary ranges of their wives
At the same time that she is dealing with these pressures to diversify her skills
and add to her inventory of ethnic food specialties, the typical middle-clas
housewife also has another clientele, composed of her husband (in another,
more primordial guise), her more traditional in-laws and other relatives, and
important country cousins who crave food in the specialized mode of the
region, caste, and community from which they originally come. This clientele
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8 ARJUN APPADURAI
is either simply conservative in its tastes or, worse still, has acq
fangled urban notions of authenticity regarding their own natal c
middle-class housewives are thus on a perpetual seesaw that alter
tween the honing of indigenous culinary skills (and if they have
there are books to which they can turn) and the exploration of n
regions. It is the tacit function of the new cookbooks to make t
seem a pleasant adventure rather than a tiring grind.
What is tiring is not only the acquisition, refinement, and displ
stantly new culinary wares, but other, less subtle pressures. In t
class world I am describing, the budget is a central instrument, for
money as well as time. Many of the new cookbooks emphasize th
specifically designed to resolve shortages of time and money in
tings. They therefore frequently offer menus, shortcuts, and hint
get more out of less. Some of them explicitly recognize the dual p
working women to earn part of the family's livelihood and simult
cater to the culinary sophistication of their families and friends. Wh
ticity, attractiveness, and nutritional value remain the dominant v
new cookbooks, efficiency, economy, and utility are becoming i
respectable themes.
One very striking example of how this new metropolitan pragm
to erode traditional concepts can be seen in the role of leftover fo
new cookbooks. Leftovers are an extremely sensitive category in
Hindu thought (Khare 1976b; Marriott 1968; Appadurai 1981) and
certain circumstances they are seen as positively transvalued, mos
eating of leftovers or wastes carries the risk of moral degradation
contamination, and loss of status. Their treatment and the etiquet
rounds them stand very near the moral center of Hindu social thou
new cookbooks, which are in other respects hardly iconoclastic,
suggest ways to use leftovers and wastes intelligently and creati
the traditional prohibitions concerned food contaminated by hum
rather than by the cooking or serving process, all waste products
bear some of the aura of risk associated with leftovers in the narrow sense.
Several books contain chapters on the treatment of leftovers. There is even
one cookbook, Tasty Dishes from Waste Items (Reejhsinghani 1973a), that is
built entirely around this principle. Its author goes so far as to say in her
introduction that she is "taking these discarded articles of food out of the
wastebin and [making] interesting and delightfully different dishes from
them." As caste differences come increasingly to be perceived as differences
between ethnic entities (Dumont 1970), so food differences come to be seen
as consumption issues divorced from the realm of taboo and prohibition. Of
course, as food emerges from its traditional moral and social matrix, it be-
comes embedded in a different system of etiquette-that of the drawing
room, the corporate gathering, the club event, and the restaurant.
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA 9
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10 ARJUN APPADURAI
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA II
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12 ARJUN APPADURAI
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA 13
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14 ARJUN APPADURAI
tongue and could not read Tamil. These examples suggest that the ve
cookbooks and the English-language cookbooks are not wholly
genres.3
Though the colonial version of Indian cuisine is the most significant precur-
sor of the emergent national cuisine of the last two decades, it was not
confined to the homes of the colonial elite and it did not end with colonialism.
Some of its content, and a good deal of its ethos, provided the basis of the
culinary manuals and procedures of the Indian army, which even today repre-
sents a rather specialized subcontinental culinary standard. And with broader
reach, there are certain clubs, restaurants, and hotels that carry on the colonial
culinary tradition. The other enclave in which some of the Anglo-Indian ethos
of this colonial cuisine is preserved is the Parsi community (Mehta 1979).
Though the colonial version of Indian cuisine is the most significant precur-
sor of the emergent national cuisine of the last two decades, it was not
confined to the homes of the colonial elite and it did not end with colonialism.
Some of its content, and a good deal of its ethos, provided the basis of the
culinary manuals and procedures of the Indian army, which even today repre-
sents a rather specialized subcontinental culinary standard. And with broader
reach, there are certain clubs, restaurants, and hotels that carry on the colonial
culinary tradition. The other enclave in which some of the Anglo-Indian ethos
of this colonial cuisine is preserved is the Parsi community (Mehta 1979).
In the national cuisine that has emerged in the last two decades, Mughlai
cuisine (to a considerable extent) and colonial cuisine (to a lesser extent) have
been incorporated into a broader conception of Indian food. The shape of this
new national repertoire can be seen in the recent proliferation of cookbooks,
whose structure and rhetoric are the topic of the next two sections.
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA 15
5 For a sociobiological treatment of ethnic cuisine in contemporary Western contexts, see van
den Berghe (1984).
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I6 ARJUN APPADURAI
Few states in India have such a variety of savory dishes as Gujarat, or a tradition of
making and storing snacks. And in a Gujarati home, sweets and snacks are always
waiting to be offered to a welcome guest. The use of condiments (vaghar) is a practice
peculiar to the region. There is a widespread use in Gujarat of mustard seed, fenu-
greek, thymol, asafoetida and other additives that both make the food tastier and help
digestion.
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA 17
Books like the one by Shanta Ranga Rao remind us that Indian regional or
ethnic cookbooks in English are the self-conscious flip side of books that are
engaged in constructing a national cuisine. In this, they differ markedly from
vernacular cookbooks, which take their regional context and audience largely
for granted.
The new cookbooks are not simple or mechanical replicas of existing oral
repertoires. The transition to print in this particular social and cultural context
results in a good deal of editing. Most of the ethnic or regional books are
selective in specific ways. When written by insiders, they represent fairly
complex compromises between the urge to be authentic and thus to include
difficult (and perhaps, to the outsider, disgusting) items and the urge to
disseminate and popularize the most easily understood and appreciated items,
and to promote those already popular, from one's special repertoire. Outsiders
who write these books, on the other hand, end up including the easy-to-grasp
and more portable examples from alien ethnic or regional cuisines, partly
because their own tastes for the exotic are first nurtured in restaurants or other
public eating contexts, where the subtleties of that cuisine (which are often
domestic) have already been pared down. In both cases, one of the results of
the exchange of culinary images is the elimination of the most exotic, pecu-
liar, distinctive, or domestic nuances in a particular specialized cuisine. In
national or "Indian" cookbooks, of course, the selective process is much
more obtrusive, and whole regional idioms are represented by a few "charac-
teristic" dishes, which frequently are not, from the insider's perspective, the
best candidates for this role.
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I8 ARJUN APPADURAI
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA I9
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20 ARJUN APPADURAI
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA 21
There is one final sign that the idea of national Indian cuisine is now taken
for granted-though its structure and logic are by no means standardized-
and that is the proliferation of cookbooks that subsume and absorb "Indian"
recipes into other, more transcendent, categories. Examples abound. Than-
gam Philip's Modern Cookery (1965), produced with an eye to nutritional
benefits, restaurant cooking, and extremely Europeanized urban audiences,
makes Indian recipes "modem" by looking at them from the perspective of
the nutritionist, the food technologist, and the caterer. Madhur Jaffrey's bril-
liant Vegetarian Cooking (1981), like several others, juxtaposes Indian vege-
tarian recipes with those from the Middle and Far East, thus appealing main-
ly, in this case, to a particular audience in the United States. Others stick to
Indian vegetarian recipes. The third volume of Harvey Day's multivolume
Curries of India runs the reverse operation and includes dishes from Indo-
nesia, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Malaya, and Thailand under the label curry, il-
lustrating a kind of gastronomic imperialism under the colonial trope of curry.
There are also books like the recent Appetizingly Yours (Currim and Rahim-
toola 1978) that are clearly directed to wealthy urban audiences in India,
where Indian and Western snacks are promiscuously combined, with the
Indian side of the book drawing on a transregional inventory. Thus not only is
a national cuisine being constructed from regional or local traditions, but
access to this national repertoire permits it to be subordinated to the purposes
of other, more general classifications.
The idea of an "Indian" cuisine has emerged because of, rather than
despite, the increasing articulation of regional and ethnic cuisines. As in other
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22 ARJUN APPADURAI
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
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NATIONAL CUISINE: COOKBOOKS IN INDIA 23
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24 ARJUN APPADURAI
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