Eat before reading

Book review of The Indian Pantry

When reading The Indian Pantry, I remembered an important lesson I learned a few years ago: Don’t read Vir Sanghvi on an empty stomach. The book is a re-edited and rewritten collection of some of Mr Sanghvi’s best food columns, which have appeared for decades in the Sunday supplement of the Hindustan Times newspaper; some of them are familiar, presumably because I re-read them on the internet after devouring them some Sunday morning long ago. But all of them are likely to make you feel peckish. 
 
Many years ago, in the early 2000s, I tried to work out precisely