Cookbooks, which usually belong to the humble literature of complex

civilizations, tell unusual cultural tales. They combine the sturdy pragmatic
virtues of all manuals with the vicarious pleasures of the literature of the
senses. They reflect shifts in the boundaries of edibility, the proprieties of the
culinary process, the logic of meals, the exigencies of the household budget, the
vagaries of the market, and the structure of domestic ideologies.

Cookbooks are resemblance of culture in various ways such as

● Shifts in the forms edibility a particular society is adapted to.
● Process of food making/culinary process
● The logic behind the meal intake
● Financial circumstances of household budget.
● The principles of household.
The cookbooks can be seen in the way that society has the literacy power, the speciality
of a particular regime.
Beside seeing it only through the cultural and cosmological lenses it also has a class
and hierarchy thing.

The last two decades have witnessed in India an extremely significant increase in the
number of printed cookbooks pertaining to Indian food written in English and directed at
an Anglophone readership. This type of the cookbook raises a variety of interesting issues
that are involved in and discusses the issue of the process of national cuisine constructed
under the contemporary circumstances.

Language and literacy, cities and ethnicity, women and domesticity, all are examples of
issues that lie behind these cookbooks. In examining these issues in the Indian case, we
can begin to sharpen our comparative instincts about how cuisines are constructed and
about what cookbooks imply and create.

The author says there is a need to introduce a comparative problem regarding

culinary traditions. Cookbooks appear in literate civilizations where the
display of class hierarchies is essential to their maintenance, and where
cooking is seen as a communicable variety of expert knowledge.
However , cookbooks trace their existence way back in pre industrial world, and seems
to have come from royal or aristocratic milieus, because these were the ones that could
afford complex cuisines and had access to the special resources required for the
production and consumption of written texts.
The evolution of a high cuisine, to use Goody's term, does not follow exactly the same
form or sequence in each of these locales. But with the possible exceptions of China
and Italy, there is in every case a powerful tendency to emphasize and reproduce the
difference between "high" and "low" cuisines, between court food and peasant food,
between the diet of urban centers and that of rural peripheries.

Preindustrial elites often displayed their political power, their commercial

reach, and their cosmopolitan tastes by drawing in ingredients, techniques, and
even cooks from far and wide.

Yet these high cuisines, with their emphasis on spectacle, disguise, and display,
always seek to distance themselves from their local sources. The regional idiom
is here decisively subordinated to a central, culturally superior, idiom. French
haute cuisine is exemplary of this type of high cuisine. In the cases of China
and Italy, by contrast, regional cuisines are the hautes cuisines, and no imperial
or metropolitan culinary idiom really appears to have achieved hegemony, even
today. In the Chinese case, to the degree that a civilizational standard has
emerged, it appears to be the colorless common denominator of the complex
regional variants. In Italy, at least until very recently, it appears to be
impossible to speak of a high, transregional cuisine

In India, we see another sort of pattern, one that is, in some respects, unique. In this
pattern the construction of a national cuisine is essentially a postindustrial, postcolonial
process. But the traditional Indian picture has some parallels with those of the other
major culinary regions of the world.. Cooking in India is deeply embedded in moral and
medical beliefs and prescriptions.

As in the Chinese and Italian cases, the premodern culinary traditions are largely
regional and ethnic. As in Ottoman Istanbul in the seventeenth century, court cuisines
drew on foods and recipes from great distances . But in contrast to all these preindustrial
cases, in India before this century, the emergence of a gustatory approach to food (that
is, one that is independent of its moral and medical implications), the related
textualization of the culinary realm, and the production of cookbooks seem to have been
poorly developed . In the Indian case, the cuisine that is emerging today is a national
cuisine in which regional cuisines play an important role, and the national cuisine does
not seek to hide its regional or ethnic roots. Like their counterparts in England and
France in the early eighteenth century, the new Indian cookbooks are fueled by the
spread of print media and the cultural rise of the new middle classes. As in all the other
cases, but notably later, food may finally be said to be emerging as a partly autonomous
enterprise, freed of its moral and medical constraints. The Indian pattern may well
provide an early model of what might be expected to occur with increasing frequency
and intensity in other societies having complex regional cuisines and recently acquired
nationhood, and in which a postindustrial and postcolonial middle class is constructing a
particular sort of polyglot culture. This pattern might well be found, with the appropriate
cultural inflections, in places like Mexico, Nigeria, and Indonesia.

THE SOCIAL WORLD OF THE NEW INDIAN CUISINE

The audience as well as the authors of the English-language cookbooks produced in

India in the last two decades are middle-class urban women. But the middle class in
India is large and highly differentiated.

Cookbooks allow women from one group to explore the tastes of another, just as
cookbooks allow women from one group to be represented to another. The authors thank
women they have known in various metropolitan contexts for sharing recipes and skills.
In some cases, it is possible to discern a progression from orally exchanged recipes to
full-fledged ethnic or "Indian" cookbooks. The terseness of many of the recipes in the
new cookbooks may testify to the fact that they are intended only as references and aids
in a largely oral form of urban interaction.

In turn, the exchange of recipes, oral in origin but aided and intensified by the new
cookbooks, clearly reflects and reifies an emerging culinary cosmopolitanism in the
cities and towns of India, which is reflected in other consumption media as well.

In the domain of food, the push to diversify the housewife's culinary skills comes from a
variety of sources: the push of guests who want to taste your regional specialties

The history of food consumption outside the domestic framework has yet to be written
for India, but there is little doubt that traditional nondomestic commensality was
confined to religious and royal milieus, where traditional social or religious boundaries
could be maintained even in public eating places. To some extent, public eating places in
modern India still seek to maintain boundaries among castes, regions, and food
preferences. But restaurants, both humble and pretentious, have increasingly become
arenas for the transcendence of ethnic difference and for the exploration of the culinary
Other. Restaurant eating has become a growing part of public life in Indian cities, as
wealthy families begin to socialize in restaurants and as working men and women find it
easier to go out for their main meals than to bring food to work with them. These
restaurants tend to parallel, in their offerings, the dialectic of regional and national logic
to be noted in the new cookbooks. These twin developments sustain each other. The
efflorescence of increasingly supralocal and transethnic culinary arenas explains why the
pace of change in traditional commensal boundaries (so critical to the caste system) is so
much greater than in the realm of marriage, a matter on which there has recently been a
lively exchange

CULINARY TEXTS AND STANDARDS IN INDIAN HISTORY

Food in India is closely tied to the moral and social status of individuals and groups.
Food taboos and prescriptions divide men from women, gods from humans, upper from
lower castes, one sect from another. Eating together, whether as a family, a caste, or a
village, is a carefully conducted exercise in the reproduction of intimacy. Exclusion of
persons from eating events is a symbolically intense social signal of rank, of distance, or
of enmity. Food is believed to cement the relationship between men and gods, as well as
between men themselves. Food is never medically or morally neutral

Whatever the perception of the purely gustatory aspect of particular foods, the issue of
their implications for the health, the purity, and the moral and mental balance of the
consumer are never far out of sight. Feasting is the great mark of social solidarity, as
fasting is the mark of asceticism or piety. Each of these patterns is to be seen in other
societies, but the case could be made that the convergence of the moral, social, medical,
and soteriological implications of food consumption is nowhere greater than in
traditional Hindu India. While gastronomic issues play a critical role in the Hindu texts,
culinary issues do not. That is, while there is an immense amount written about eating
and about feeding, precious little is said about cooking in Hindu legal, medical, or
philosophical texts.Recipes, the elementary forms of the culinary life, are missing in the
great tradition of Hinduism. Yet it is clear that cooking is a highly developed art in
Hindu India.

Food becomes relevant to this concern as a matter of managing the moral risks of human
interactions, or as a matter of sustaining the appetites of the gods (who in turn bestow
grace and protection), or as a matter of cultivating those bodily or mental states that are
conducive to superior gnosis.

There are two specific cultural factors that have made it difficult for a pre modern Hindu
high cuisine to emerge. The first is that there was a deep assumption in Hindu thought
that local variation in custom must be respected by those in power, and that royal duty
consists in protecting such variation unless it violates social and cosmic law
(dharma).Hindu culinary traditions stayed oral in their mode of transmission, domestic
in their locus, and regional in their scope.

With the arrival of Mughals in India in the first half of the sixteenth century, the
textualization of culinary practice took a significant step forward. The famous Mughal
administrative manual, the Ain-1-Akbari, contains a recipe section, though the text as a
whole is devoted to various aspects of statecraft. Mughlai cuisine is a royal cuisine that
emerged from the interaction of the Turko-Afghan culinary traditions of the Mughal
rulers with the peasant foods of the North Indian plains. Though some versions of
Mughlai food are available throughout contemporary India, it cannot be considered an
Indian cuisine if by that designation we mean a cuisine that draws on a wide set of
regional traditions. It is the limiting case of a tradition that is "high" without being a
civilizational standard.The textualization of culinary traditions was intensified by the
arrival of the printing press.

Though the colonial version of Indian cuisine is the most significant precursor of the
emergent national cuisine of the last two decades, it was not confined to the homes of
the colonial elite and it did not end with colonialism.

In the national cuisine that has emerged in the last two decades, Mughlai cuisine (to a
considerable extent) and colonial cuisine (to a lesser extent) have been incorporated into
a broader conception of Indian food. The shape of this new national repertoire can be
seen in the recent proliferation of cookbooks

PROLIFERATION OF GENRES AND THE CULINARY OTHER The most striking

characteristic of English-language books on Indian cooking is the rapid specialization
that has occurred within this young field. There are already cookbooks directed toward
special audiences, such as The Working Woman's Cookbook (Patil 1979) and Cooking
for the Single Person (Reejhsinghani 1977). There are also entire cookbooks devoted to
specific food categories, such as chutneys and pickles (Jagtiani 1973), snacks (Currim
and Rahimtoola 1978), vegetable dishes (Lai 1970) etc

What we see in these many ethnic and regional cookbooks is the growth of an anthology
of naturally generated images of the ethnic Other, a kind of "ethno-ethnicity," rooted in
the details of regional recipes, but creating a set of generalized gastroethnic images of
Bengalis, Tamils, and so forth.

Books like the one by Shanta Ranga Rao remind us that Indian regional or ethnic
cookbooks in English are the self-conscious flip side of books that are engaged in
constructing a national cuisine. In this, they differ markedly from vernacular cookbooks,
which take their regional context and audience largely for granted.

THE INGREDIENTS OF A NATIONAL CUISINE

In the contemporary Indian situation, and to some degree genetically, cookbooks appear
to belong to the literature of exile, of nostalgia and loss. These books are often written
by authors who now live outside India, or at least away from the subregion about which
they are writing.

There is also the widespread assumption, referred to earlier, in cookbooks and

restaurants both in India and abroad, that conflates Mughlai food with Indian food.
Another strategy for constructing a national cuisine is inductive rather than nominal: The
author assembles a set of recipes in a more or less subjective manner and then, in the
introduction to the book, gropes for some theme that might unify them

The appearance of structural devices for organizing a national cuisine is accompanied by

the development of a sometimes fairly explicit nationalist and integrationist ideology.
Thus, for example, a newspaper review of Indian Recipes (Lai 1980) says: "Hindi may
or may not help in unifying the country; while it is trying hard, there may be no harm in
letting an Uttar Pradesh snack win over a Tamil Nadu heart."

There is one final sign that the idea of national Indian cuisine is now taken for granted—
though its structure and logic are by no means standardized— and that is the
proliferation of cookbooks that subsume and absorb "Indian" recipes into other, more
transcendent, categories. The idea of an "Indian" cuisine has emerged because of, rather
than despite, the increasing articulation of regional and ethnic cuisines.

CONCLUSION

The emergence of a national cuisine in contemporary India suggests a processual model

that needs to be tested comparatively in other postcolonial situations in the
contemporary world. The critical features of this model are the twin processes of
regional and ethnic specialization, on the one hand, and the development of overarching,
crosscutting national cuisines, on the other. These processes are likely to be reflected
and reproduced in cookbooks designed by and for the urban middle classes, and
particularly their female members, as part of the larger process of the construction of
complex public cultures involving media, travel, and entertainment. Of equal
comparative interest are the historical and cultural contexts against which the new
national cuisines are appearing, contexts that are likely to vary considerably. In the
Indian case, a national cuisine has developed recently in spite of a relative historical
disinterest in gastronomic issues in classical (Hindu) traditions, so that both the
textualization of the culinary realm and the creation of a civilizational culinary standard
are recent processes. The final question that deserves further comparative investigation
is whether the long term historical and cultural idiosyncrasies of each case make the
culinary dynamics of contemporary societies different, in spite of certain broad
processual similarities. To answer these questions, we need to view cookbooks in the
contemporary world as revealing artifacts of culture in the making