Soni Wadhwa at the Asian Review of Books:
Breakfast, the first meal of the day, in India carries two competing traditions. On one hand, ritual references to food offered to the gods each morning suggest the meal has always held a place of its own. On the other hand, for the labouring classes, breakfast was rarely more than the previous night’s leftovers, hurriedly eaten before a day of fieldwork. In India (as elsewhere), it is really only in the wake of industrialisation—compounded by the upheavals of colonisation and migration—that breakfast crystallised into a fixed, valorised meal time for India’s urban citizens. In First Bite: Breakfast Stories from Urban India, Priyadarshini Chatterjee traces this crystallisation across ten Indian cities, combining first-hand sampling of their breakfast offerings with a reading of existing food-history scholarship.
Her method is two-fold: she eats her way through each city’s morning fare and reads against the grain of historical texts to contextualise what she tastes.
More here.
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