Best authentic Indian recipes
I can now confidently confirm that palak (spinach)/saag (leafy greens) paneer (cottage cheese) is the most popular Indian dish abroad, because I haven’t met a single non-desi in the last five years who hasn’t asked me if I have an authentic recipe for it, unless they were vegan, or lactose intolerant, or just blissfully unaware of the…
Lentils are an elemental part of all Indian meals. They are usually served as a side dish, often accompanied by another side of vegetables, but they can also be the star of any meal. They are the most versatile of all produce and are also inexpensive, healthy, quick and easy to cook. Â Once you know…
The title of this post is not as oxymoronic as you might think.  The city of Chandannagar, located 19miles north of Kolkata, was once a French colony that facilitated Bengal’s connection with France in the 17th century. Vestiges of this colonial past are still visible along the banks of Hoogly. The most ubiquitous of these are…
First, my apologies for this long absence from my blog. Much of my time and energy over the last two months was spent on travel to and in India. My initial plan was to visit the popular food joints in the different cities that I was visiting (primarily Calcutta), and to recreate the recipes at…
How to make chicken kathi roll? I left my hometown, Calcutta, exactly seven years ago. Since then, Calcutta has become something of a vacation home for me, where I get to go only once every year to enjoy my mom’s home-cooked food, the company of my beautiful family and friends, chicken Kathi rolls, and the…
An archival research for a paper that I am currently working on at my university library yielded me, to my pleasant surprise, with five volumes of the Punya (1897-1906), a periodical, women’s magazine, that began as an in-house publication of the Tagore family of Jorasanko. Besides publishing works on fiction, poetry, essays, advertisements etc., it also contained numerous…