What Bengal eats today ...

It is a bad idea to accept money from a publisher after promising him a manuscript based on the food of your country, then short-change him by spending two or three days in each state, sometimes eating no more than a meal or two. It is an even worse idea to travel around the country guided solely by where your friends from the same community are. It is the worst idea of all to let all this show in your book. If you did indeed eat a single meal in Gujarat, and tried unsuccessfully to meet someone from the 16-strong Jewish community (yet did not have the option of staying one extra day to re-try your luck), please don't tell us about it. We just might conclude that you are slap-dash and that your book doesn't contain meat. Even worse, we will be forced to conclude that none of your remarks is based on fact.

If Chitrita Banerji was a gastronomic light-weight, I could have chucked the book aside lightly, but the pity of it is that she is emphatically not. Her Life and Food in Bengal is an insight into the culture of her home state and she is at her best when she is writing about what she knows well. The Hour of the Goddess, slim as it is, can be considered a masterpiece that touches lightly on lesser known aspects of Bengali cuisine. By comparison, one of the problems with Eating India is that of patchiness: the first chapter, on Bengal as it happens, is the best in the book. The worst comes second: the one on Goa, where she stays with Bengali friends and makes dozens of references to "Goanese" cuisine. Her overriding concern in Goa "" as indeed in almost all the places she visits "" is to find a common thread between food in Bengal and food elsewhere.

Thus, she looks out for mishti in Goa, because of a single sentence in a book in some library that says that Indians were tied to the Portuguese "with tender ties of love". Banerji takes this to mean that the Portuguese taught Bengalis how to work with chhenna so she begins looking for chenna in Goa. I am not making this up. It's there on page 43.

I have no idea what Chitrita Banerji's antecedents are, apart from what I have read about her in Life and Food in Bengal, but the rapid pace at which she advances through the country searching for comparisons with her home state reeks of a certain kind of amateurishness. When journalists are sent on assignment to a new town, they famously attempt to cover as much ground as possible by interrogating their cab driver on the way from the airport. Taxi driver journalism, as it is sneeringly referred to, is a country cousin of the mistake that Banerji makes throughout her book. It is the reason why she cannot stay another day in Cochin, even after she discovers that the minuscule Jewish community will not talk to her on Saturday, because of their strict observance of the Sabbath.

She has been told that Gujarati food is very sweet, and so asks one individual from Ahmedabad about it. When he replies that the cuisine of his forefathers is not sweet, she puts down the answer in the book somewhat naively. Of course she has no more association with Gujarati food than a single meal, and so cannot draw on her own experience. It is her rather maddening naivete that leads her to become dismayed that the rest of the country do not eat their meals course-wise, but simply pile up everything on their plates. Bengalis, needless to say, are civilised enough to eat their meal course by course.

The icing on the cake has got to be the half-baked chapter on Kashmiri food. After informing us breezily that Kashmiris eat their meals on a lotus leaf (now where could she have heard that remarkable fact?) she goes on to enumerate the dishes she once ate in a Kolkata restaurant while a Kashmiri food festival was going on, and concludes that it is a fine cuisine, because like her own fare, Kashmiri cookery too calls for the use of mustard oil.

---

EATING INDIA
EXPLORING A NATION'S CUISINE

Chitrita Banerji
Penguin
Rs 350; 329 pages