Telling your personal narrative through food is a common cookbook trope. Taking an anthropological wander through a peoples’ — or country’s — food culture is another prevailing cookbook methodology.
Less ubiquitous is an author who merges the two, swiveling a mirror to look at both themself and their ancestral background. Niloufer Ichaporia King’s 2007 masterpiece, “My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking,” might be the exemplar of this double-vision.
Parsis and global cooking
Across the book’s 300-plus pages, King tells the story of the Parsis, a group of Persians who practiced Zoroastrianism thousands of years ago and were persecuted after the Arab-Islamic conquest of Persia. As the persecuted often do, the Parsis fled. Many landed on the western coast of what is now India.
This meant, for King’s family, establishing themselves in Bombay, merging their Persian cooking with Indian influences. The resulting cooking featured an “immense range of tastes and techniques,” King writes in “My Bombay Kitchen,” a real “magpie cuisine.”
King moved from Bombay to Baltimore in 1962, then to Berkeley, California, acquiring all the more culinary influences as she worked on a doctorate of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. In time, she connected with the food-world rabble rousers at the formative Chez Panisse restaurant, eventually spearheading an annual Persian New Year (Nowruz) dinner there for more than a decade. I attended a few times, and King’s bright way with the flavors of India and Persia all showcased with California’s faultless ingredients exploded how I thought about cooking and eating.
Innovation in the kitchen
“My Bombay Kitchen” compiles recipes that flaunt that same fresh, innovative cooking style. King’s Parsiburgers are a breezy take on kebabs, with your choice of ground meat seasoned with chopped yellow or green onions, ginger, fresh green chiles and cilantro and mint. You shape them into patties, sizzle them in a skillet and serve them however you like. This is how King cooks: the spirit of Persia and the Indian subcontinent on the wings of California’s freewheeling individuality.
Parsis are mad for potatoes: “If I had to draw a Parsis food pyramid, it would rise out of a plinth of potato chips,” King writes. There are recipes for both fried angel-hair potatoes and potato wafers, aka potato chips, plus hash with curry leaves and turmeric.
I made King’s kicky, sharp tomato chutney every year for a number of years, canning it for gifts to others and my future self. It is fresh, plucky with loads of cane vinegar, chile powder, cloves, cinnamon and matchsticks of fresh ginger. Recipes that become ritual are a surefire tell of an indispensable cookbook.
A personal, scholarly wander through a singular cuisine
