By Terry Barringer
From the title and publisher’s blurb I was expecting something like A History of the World in 100 Dishes, preferably with recipes. This book is both more and less than that, part travelogue, part food writing with numerous anecdotes and interesting byways. (It is worth exploring the endnotes for these. Footnote 7 on pp. 294-5, for example is particularly informative on the history and taste of and attitudes to eating dogs.) These ‘tummy chronicles’ (p. xiv) abound in descriptions of food ranging from the mouth-watering to the stomach churning.
The author is Swedish by birth, Indian by adoption and he wrote up his journals during and just after the pandemic, a ‘panegyric to Indian hospitality, to eating and travelling and to enjoying food’ (p. xxiv).
The writing is, as a whole, too slangy for my taste but is relieved by occasional witticisms and some nice turns of phrase – for example ‘Mopping it [bheja fry, seasoned brain] with a soft naan, I relish every morsel like a zombie tasting IQ for the first time’. (p. 120). Some terms such as ‘GI tags’ sent me to the internet for an explanation. A glossary would have helped.
The first chapter is a paean to the author’s adopted home and setting for his detective fiction. Bengaluru (Bangalore) – bookshops, cinema, beer, eating offal (not for the faint hearted), goldfields. Chapter 2 is a voyage around the writer R.K. Narayan – his books and their adaptations for cinema and television, his haunts and his food preferences. Chapter 3 is a gastronomic tour of Kerala (seafood and spices) with cultural references including Somerset Maugham, the Duke of Wellington, Herman Hesse and heavy metal.
And so the journey round India proceeds: Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Hyderabad, Goa, Maharashtra (with a digression on Gandhi and his ideas on nutrition and diet), Rajasthan (plus palace hotels and cave art), Delhi, Chandigarh, Bihar, Bengal, Kolkata, Bhutan….
There is virtually nothing on politics, not much on religion, a bit of history and a lot of literature (from both Indian and European writers).
Terry Barringer is the Assistant Editor and Books Editor of the Round Table Journal. The great Indian food trip: around a subcontinent à la carte by Zac O’Yeah, London, Hurst, 2024.
[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.]
