Adaptable cooks

An item posted by Arzan Sam Wadia on http://parsikhabar.net speaks of Niloufer Ichaporia King’s book, My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking. Published by the Univeristy of California Press with a Foreword by Alice Waters, chef, restaurateur and authority on cuisines, the 355 page hard cover illustrated edition is priced at $27.50, £16.95.

A Bombay born Parsi, Ichaporia has lived in the US for 45 years, the last 25 being in the San Francisco Bay area. According to her, the word adaptability perhaps best describes the Zoroastrians’ approach to their cuisine, writes Wadia:

"The food they had prepared in Persia had been extraordinary. Persians had, as King puts it, ‘an enduring love for saffron and rice; for meat cooked with fruit and vegetables; for fruit and nuts; for eggs cooked with vegetables; for herby lentil stews; for milk, cheese, and cream; for sweetmeats and wine and the taste of sweet-and-sour.’

"In India, these people added Hindu and later Muslim influences to their cooking. With the arrival of the Portuguese came chillies, tomatoes, potatoes, cashews and other New World foods. And the Parsis embraced a number of European dishes as well.

"‘By the later part of the twentieth century,’ King writes, ‘all this adopting and adapting and enriching had led to an urban Parsi cuisine with an immense range of tastes and techniques, a real magpie cuisine. At one end of the continuum, you find a simple dish of puréed lentils with little more than salt and cumin; at the other, the potage of five different kinds of lentils, eight vegetables, and 20-something spices that is our emblematic dish, dhansak. …

"‘To this day, Parsi food is characterized by our ability to size up the offerings of another tradition and make them our own, adapting and transforming whatever we’ve taken a fancy to.’”

Niloufer Icha­poria King: food spiced with anthropology

The website of the University of California Press, which has published her work, describes her as "anthropologist, independent scholar and doyenne of Parsi cuisine (who) has made a mark in many gastronomic circles, from local markets to famous kitchens.” The immediate reason for penning the recipes which she learnt from her parents seems to have been a way of commemorating her mother’s 90th birthday. In an interview with her editor Hannah Love she says that her anthropologist background led her to place these recipes in the context of social history.

In the course of the interview we learn that the University of California Press had published her collection of Parsi ethnographic material almost 25 years ago. It is also the institution whence she and her husband, David King, who has illustrated the book, had earned their degrees. And, in the course of conversation, Ichaporia King has used the analogy of the Parsi cuisine’s wide appeal in different areas of the world to declare her conviction that the Parsi culture too is capable of incorporating change and thriving on it even though population statistics may show a down trend.

The book has received rave reviews since it was published in June 2007. "The book easily transports readers to the household of the Ichaporia family in Bombay (now Mumbai) and submerges them in the scents and tastes of Parsi food. As talented a writer as she is a cook, the author manages this with charm (enhanced by old-time family photographs) but without sentimentality. Her approach to cooking is traditional in the manner of Parsi cooking over the centuries: absorbing new ideas and influences without losing its essential Indo-Persian character. . . . Interesting, reliable and beautifully written,” notes the San Francisco Chronicle

"Melting-pot cuisine gets a star turn in Niloufer Ichaporia King’s My Bombay Kitchen,” states the Boston Globe. Anne Mendelesson in the New York Times votes it "the most delightful American cookbook in years.”