Favorite foods online

"Every household has a favorite food story or secret, but no platform to share (it),” says Perzen Patel, a Bombay based 26-year-old marketing executive and blogger who posts regularly on www.bawibride.com To create a repository of Indian food secrets she has launched Best Kept Secrets, an online crowd-sourced project inviting people to share secrets about regional Indian cuisine. What she is looking for is recipes, ingredients, cooking tricks, the history of dishes, etymology of names, and memories and anecdotes associated with traditional Indian food, reports Hindustan Times (HT) in its issue of January 14, 2014.
Patel’s blog, now about eight months old, is filled with recipes for Parsi food and related trivia. For instance, she explains how dhansak got its name. "Dal was used as currency in old Gujarat. So a dish that should have logically been dalsak came to be known as ‘dhan’sak.”

Bawi bride Perzen Patel

The report mentioned that she had invited those interested to email her at perzen@bawibride.com by January 15 with a photograph of themselves and the dish, its recipe and the story behind it. She was to shortlist 25 entries and then upload them on her blog, inviting votes by readers. A week later the 10 entries on her blog with the most votes would be compiled into a free e-book by the end of the month. If the response is good, Patel will initiate similar online projects to crowd-source food secrets on specific themes, such as festivals like Diwali or ingredients like mangoes.