While there are several books on regional cooking, I was quite intrigued to find a book on the food of the Kayasth community. This is perhaps the only book I know of that studies the food of a caste-group that is dispersed across India. However, as Vishal clarifies at the outset, the book with its part-memoir, part-narrative form chronicles the gastronomic history and the famed hospitality of the Kayasths in Northern India, especially those who resided in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.
The Kayasthas, a resourceful and well-educated community remained close to the portals of power during both Mughal rule and British rule in India. Through the lens of her grandmother’s impeccable table, Vishal recounts how Mughal influenced koftes and kebabs, as well as British culinary legacies such as egg curry and nargisi kofte (a local derivation of Scotch eggs) assimilated into traditional Kayastha cooking across centuries and created the unique identity that is Kayastha cuisine today. Impeccably well-researched, the book also delves into how the dispersal of Kayasthas across various regionsin post-independence India—for instance, the use of fennel seeds derived from Kashmiri Pandits, or the use of fermented lentil fritters derived from the Marwaris of Rajasthan—the book is able to grasp the nuances and complexities that have gone into the creation of a unique identity of Kayastha cuisine.
I really enjoyed the chapters in the book of the inventiveness of Kayasth home-cooks who created an array of faux-non vegetarian dishes (veg galauti kebabs made of moong dal, kele ki machchli made from plaintains, raw jackfruit tahari) since the women folk remained largely vegetarian while the men, working closely with the Mughals, and then the British had acquired a taste for non vegetarian cooking. She devotes an entire chapter too on how this gender division between Vegetarian and non-vegetarian food meant that many Kayasth men excel and take pride in their ability to dexterously handle meat dishes.
I tried Vishal’s kele ki machhli recipe—despite being a non-vegetarian myself, I was quite impressed with how close the texture and the flavors resembled actual fish curry. Besides the formal recipes at the end of each chapter, I also plan to try the home-style recipes like tamatar aloo or bhune hue aloo or cheeley ki subi that are included within the narratives of the chapters.
The book has a rich account of cooking techniques, seasonal ingredients used in Delhi-UP, as well as the subtle regional and sub-regional variation that Kayastha cooking undergoes, as Kayastha food traverses from Delhi-Agra-Lucknow to Kayastha families in Bengal. Even though the book is well-researched and detailed, especially in the subtle differences in cooking techniques and use of spices (say, between yakhni pulao and biryani or between the aloo dum of UP and that of Bengal), her easy writing style, owing perhaps to her journalistic training and her background in English literature, makes it sound more like a friend sharing her memories than of poring through a history tome.
Threaded in within the narrative of Kayastha history and culture, are also Vishal’s candid confessions of how, as a child of the 80s, she chafed against the traditions her family especially her grandmother expected her to adhere to— whether it was marrying a boy from an equally ‘cultured’ Mathur family, or to learn her grandmother’s entire repertoire of thousand songs. The book is an understated but sweet ‘coming of age’ tale where she confesses to the irony that such a ‘reluctant Kayasth’ as herself should be the one penning the culinary history of the Kayasthas. The honesty in the book, combined with the dexterity with which she grapples with the complex culinary history of the Kayasthas makes for an informative, yet entertaining read. And for the recipes alone, which Vishal inherited from her family, this book is a keepsake.
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