Feasts and Fasts

Since in India, more than in any other part of the world, food has been invested with meaning as a marker of identity. The corollary of “You are what you eat” is “You eat what you are”

Buddhists, Jains, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and those adhering to other religions have their own food prescriptions and proscriptions. Feasts to celebrate festivals and

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Recipes, the elementary forms of the culinary life, are missing in the great tradition of Hinduism.

While there is an immense amount written about eating and feeding, precious little is said about cooking in Hindu legal medical or philosophical texts... Food is principally either a moral or medical matter in traditional Hindu thought

• Arjun Appadurai,

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Most of those old ladies never really thought in terms of recipes. They tended to think about cooking in terms of broader ratios of ingredients, acids, herbs, dry spices, legumes, rice and so on, and had developed heuristics on the function those ingredients played (sources of sourness, sources of strong aroma etc), and mental algorithms on how to... See more