With women’s education in India taking off only in the 1860s, it isn’t surprising that cookbooks were authored by men until then, in tones ranging from disciplinary to mansplaining. When women began to write these themselves, they did so on their own terms.
At the turn of the 20th century, two women’s periodicals in Bengal found themselves embroiled in a heated dispute over a recipe for guava jelly. A recipe in Antahpur suggested peeling, boiling, and straining guavas to get rid of the seeds, and then mixing the liquid and the pulp with sugar before leaving it to cool at room temperature.
Soon after this recipe was published, a rejoinder followed in the rival magazine Punya, whose editor Prajñasundari Devi dismissed Antahpur’s recipe as inauthentic. For authentic guava jelly, she wrote, the liquid should first be separated from the pulp, and then the liquid alone should be stirred with sugar, boiled some more, mixed with lime juice and colour, and cooled. By including the pulp, Antahpur’s recipe would deprive the final product of the distinctive transparency of packaged jelly, Prajñasundari argued.
Today, this debate—elaborated by Ishita Banerjee-Dube in her book Cooking Cultures: Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling—over a recipe for jelly may elicit little more than mild amusement. But in early 1900s’ India, it was remarkable for more reasons than one. The exchange between the two periodicals not only reflected the culinary prowess of their editors but also found them writing quite authoritatively about concepts like authenticity and aesthetics. It was particularly significant, given that the editors involved were women, and women, at the time, had been writing recipes and cookbooks for less than two decades.
Early cookbooks: A veritable man’s world
While the domestic kitchen has historically been synonymous with women, cookbooks and recipe writing were a different matter altogether. For much of history, it was the domain of men. Pakadarpanam, arguably India’s oldest treatise on cookery, is a compilation of King Nala’s cooking philosophies, in which he holds forth on topics ranging from seasonally appropriate foods to the qualities of an ideal cook.
Some recipes are simple, such as ghee rice and tamarind rice, while some are more complex, such as pulaos made with chicken or quail, and payasam made with garlic and wheat. The 15th-century Ni’ matnama, written by the Sultan of Malwa, dedicates several pages to fillings for samosas—milk solids mixed with dough; minced meat cooked with onions, spices, and dried fruits; and wheat paste fried in ghee and infused with spices and herbs—alongside recipes for shorba and rabri.
Then there are the Mughal-era texts such as Ain-i-Akbari, in which Akbar’s grand vizier Abul Fazl compiled recipes for biryani, khichdi, and kebabs. Two of India’s earliest printed cookbooks, Pak Rajeshwar (1831) and Byanjan Ratnakar (1858), were written under the patronage of the King of Burdwan. Drawing inspiration from Mughal cuisine, their recipes featured rich, elaborate meat-based dishes, especially mutton and fowl.
These books were not only written by men but also likely addressed to them. With extravagant recipes, advice on aesthetic presentation, and detailed serving etiquettes, they could have been meant for the use of cooks and servers in royal kitchens and elite households, who were all men. Equally, as Farah Yameen speculates, they were probably “meant for the compiler’s use alone or to be shared with friendly visitors over a royal meal,” visitors who were possibly also men.
These elaborate recipes were not meant for regular household use and thus fell outside the purview of women. Besides, as sociologist Utsa Ray observes, “[t]hough even in pre-colonial India women were largely responsible for cooking, this act was never defined within the specific parameters of gender roles.” Medieval texts such as the Mangalkavyas, a group of narrative poetry about Bengal’s social and folk histories written between the 15th and 18th centuries, praise the food cooked by contemporary women but do not portray them as belonging only in the domestic space, or cooking as a solely feminine task.
Ray cites a 1915 essay titled Sekal aar Ekal (Those Days and These Days) whose author emphasises “that in ‘those days’, all men knew how to cook”. Though the period being referred to as “those days” remains vague, she concludes that in a bygone era, “the skill for cooking was not restricted to women”. In the second half of the 19th century, several upper- and middle-class households in Bengal hired male cooks, many of whom had migrated to cities from villages. Women, if employed, worked primarily as kitchen aides. In her memoir, Saradasundari Devi, mother of Brahmo reformist Keshab Chandra Sen, recalls sending their male cook to a sweetmaker to learn and then teach her how certain sweets were made. Going by these instances, the domestic kitchen, up until this point, was not—and nor was it imagined to be—an exclusively feminine space.
In Bengal alone, over 40 manuals were published between the 1860s and 1900s, instructing housewives how to store spices, rice, lentils, potatoes, and pickles; how to make good food without spending too much; and how to cook relatively exotic dishes such as pulao, korma, chops, cutlets, and soups as well as traditional sweets for festivals.
This began to change in the second half of the 19th century with the publication of a series of books that are best described as “domestic manuals”. Also written by men—particularly English-educated, upper- and middle-class men—these were addressed exclusively, and rather pointedly, at women. Their stated motive was to “educate” women on nutrition, cooking, hygiene, and household management, writes Judith Walsh in Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice. In Bengal alone, over 40 manuals were published between the 1860s and 1900s, instructing housewives how to store spices, rice, lentils, potatoes, and pickles; how to make good food without spending too much; and how to cook relatively exotic dishes such as pulao, korma, chops, cutlets, and soups as well as traditional sweets for festivals.
Domestic Manuals: Written by Men, for Women
This sudden urge among middle- and upper-class men to mansplain the correct way to store potatoes and spices and generally interfere in the working of the kitchen, which they had traditionally left to women’s devices, with or without the support of hired male cooks, was likely a fallout of British colonialism, both Walsh and Ray suggest. Amid the reality of colonial rule and British stereotypes that portrayed them as weak and effeminate, middle-class Indian men experienced a loss of power in the public sphere. To compensate for this loss, they sought to turn the private domestic sphere into an autonomous space free from the coloniser’s, or, for that matter, any kind of public encroachment, and subject only to their own authority and instruction. In particular, they focused on food, cuisine, and the kitchen.
At the same time, their English education and professional lives as lower-grade clerks in the British administration exposed Indian middle-class men to British values of efficiency, order, and frugality, which they sought to introduce in the running of their own households. In Bengal, the seat of British imperial power at the time, the middle class tried to create a refined and modern cuisine by appropriating foreign ingredients and cooking styles from colonial kitchens. These ideas were popularised through male-authored domestic manuals, which also placed the burden of executing them squarely on the shoulders of women.
In the process, these texts established the idea that cooking was a gendered act and explicitly named it as the responsibility and even duty of women. They advanced the narrative that culinary skills were central to a woman’s identity and glorified her cooking as an expression of love and affection, notes Banerjee-Dube. These trends were evident in the widely popular Bengali manual Strir Sahit Kathopakathan (Conversations with Wife) published between 1883 and 1908. In it, the fictitious husband reasoned with his wife, “A person marries so that his wife will look after his household duties; but if the wife never learns how to do housework, what’s the good?”
Extending this argument, the Bengali journal Bamabodhini Patrika, in an 1887 edition, described the ideal housewife as “one who toiled ceaselessly from morning till night, delighting in such labour”. In the same vein, the author of Paribarik Prabandha (Treatise on the Family) argued that “the goddess of the home was entrusted with the serious task of preparing and producing delicious, hearty food to ensure the continued good health of the family”.
These authors were primarily calling upon upper- and middle-class women to participate in the exercise of turning the household kitchen into a culinary utopia. The narrative they spun also sought to edge out the hired male cook from the domestic sphere, casting the housewife’s labour of love on a higher pedestal than the transactional work of paid cooks. Odia cooks in Bengali households, for example, were the targets of considerable anger and disgust.
Dinesh Chandra Sen remarked in a 1917 book Grihasree (State of the Household) that “the tendency of these cooks to pour excessive salt into food made the food thoroughly unpalatable”, insisting that the women of the house should be the ones to cook. “When grihini [housewife] herself takes charge of the kitchen, she resembles none other than the goddess Annapurna (anna meaning rice). She is affection personified, which makes the food she prepares, taste like nectar,” he writes. A 1987 book by Bengali Muslim author Lutfur Rahman sees a woman warning her sister-in-law against leaving domestic duties to the male khansama or to female aides. “If the responsibility of cooking is given to them, you will be eating unhealthy food. […] One should only consume food cooked by educated, intelligent women,” goes the advice.
The endeavour to instruct women on cooking and housework was made possible by the reformist push for women’s education in India, which started roughly in the 1860s. “Reformers of the period […] all agreed on one point: women needed a distinctive kind of grooming. And hence, ‘domestic-science’ that included hygiene and cooking featured in the curricula for girls’ schools all over India,” writes Banerjee-Dube. Needless to say, only upper- and middle-class women received the benefits of such education.
“Will the woman who has obtained the B.A. degree cook or scour plates,” asked the worried author of an 1890 article.
Many domestic manuals emphasised that women’s culinary education would equip them to grasp the finer points of a refined cuisine and matters of hygiene and nutrition—qualities that could then be deployed in the service of her family. At the same time, women’s education triggered anxieties of a “potential mass defection of educated women from domestic life,” points out Walsh. “Will the woman who has obtained the B.A. degree cook or scour plates,” asked the worried author of an 1890 article. This panic was simultaneously reflected in manuals and cookbooks of the time.
In Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra, and Dravida Hindu Pakasastra (1891), TK Ramachandra Rau laments the neglect of cooking as a subject of instruction in girls’ schools. Echoing these concerns, the Bengali journal Pak Pranali, which first appeared in 1883, sought to teach culinary skills to young housewives and encouraged them to save money by trying out the recipes published in it at home. Later, the journal’s editor Bipradas Mukhopadhyay compiled these recipes into a book with the same name. Here, he took on a more disciplinary tone, blaming women for the lack of care with which they carried out the “exquisite task of cooking” and warning that they would bring about the ruin of the family and society by treating it as a chore.
Amid the barrage of instructions and handwringing over the potential “dangers” of women’s education, the one skill that they unequivocally acquired was to read and write. Before long, educated upper- and middle-class women put this skill to good use by taking on the role of educator and writing their own cookbooks.
Women-authored cookbooks: Subverting traditions inside and outside recipes
The first book of recipes that marked women’s coming of age as culinary educators was Pak Prabandha in 1879, written by an anonymous Bengali woman. “The advertisement of the book described it as a book of ‘well-tried recipes for the preparation of rare and delicate Mahomedan, Hindu and other dishes’,” writes Banerjee-Dube. Noting that “Mahomedan dishes appear first” in the book, she speculates that its author may have been a Bengali Muslim woman. It set itself apart from early Bengali cookbooks like Pak Rajeshwar and Byanjan Ratnakar, which, while heavily influenced by Mughal cuisine, omitted onion and garlic even in meat recipes, reflecting the caste-based dietary restrictions of oppressor-caste Hindus, who were likely their intended audience.
In contrast, the author of Pak Prabandha does not shy away from the use of onion and garlic, reflecting “a change in diet patterns among the middle class in colonial Bengal,” explains Utsa Ray. Four years later, Parvatibai wrote the first Marathi non-vegetarian cookbook Mamsapakanishpatti Athava Maams Matsyadik Prakar Tayar Karane (How to Cook Non-vegetarian Dishes).
In late 19th-century colonial India, where an emerging Hindu nationalist movement had led to a renewed focus on vegetarianism and reinforced taboos against meat-eating—especially in Maharashtra where Brahminical and patriarchal orthodoxies were well-entrenched—Parvatibai’s “non-vegetarian cookbook […] was no mean feat”, writes Chinmay Damle. Recipes for mutton curry, fried liver, prawns curry, fried crabs, and egg saguti appeared in the book alongside Mughal cuisine-inspired seekh kebab, bakarkhani, shami kebab, and keema. Most of these dishes were typical of upper-class non-Brahmin households in Maharashtra at the time, points out Damle. However, chicken, for which Parvatibai included only two recipes, was considered “Muslim food” and remained taboo for many Hindu households till the late 20th century, he adds.
The desire to experiment with different cuisines and cooking styles is also evident in Meherbai Jamsetjee Wahadia’s Vividha Vaani, which has the distinction of being the first Gujarati cookbook by a woman. Feted as a cult Parsi cookbook for almost half a century since its publication in 1894, Vividha Vaani contains not only Parsi recipes such as akuri, aleti paleti, and patiyo but also European cakes, jams, tarts, creams, essences, and dumplings as well as Bohri and Goan fare. With entries listed alphabetically rather than by genre, one “could be looking at custard recipes one moment, only to encounter a variety of cutlets on the next page,” writes Murali Ranganathan.
With entries listed alphabetically rather than by genre, one “could be looking at custard recipes one moment, only to encounter a variety of cutlets on the next page,” writes Murali Ranganathan.
In the same decade, Prajñasundari Devi, who belonged to Bengal’s famed Tagore family, was not only reproducing British recipes but also putting her own spin on some of them. Her recipe for custard sauce used white onions and ghee in addition to standard ingredients like milk, eggs, and sugar while her plum pudding replaced the beef suet used in traditional English recipes with lard.
These recipes were compiled and published over three volumes, each titled Amish o Niramish Ahar (Non-vegetarian and Vegetarian Food), between 1900 and 1907, and remain the most frequently referenced books on Bengali cuisine to this day. In these volumes, recipes for tipsy cake and arrowroot pudding jostle for space alongside those for quintessential Bengali vegetables like raw jackfruit and banana flower, and heirloom recipes from the Tagore family, including apple pulao, komola phulkopi (cauliflower with oranges), mangsho (mutton) malai curry, and roshuner payesh (garlic kheer).
To be sure, some of these early women authors reiterated the ideas of frugality, order, and nutrition emphasised by their male predecessors. Just as Bipradas Mukhopadhyay taught the ideal housewife to be frugal by making sweets at home instead of depending on shops, Prajñasundari cautioned readers against discarding potato peels and pointed gourd seeds, offering recipes for both.
Like male reformists of her time, feminist writer and educationist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain championed the cause of women’s culinary education. The tone of her 1904 essay Sugrihini (Mistress of the House) shares some similarities with the male authors of domestic manuals as she chides the imagined housewife for leaving the kitchen in disarray: “Cobwebs decorate the storeroom frequently. Spices like coriander and fennel are mixed together. It takes an hour to figure out where one has stored sugar.” At the same time, she broadens the scope of women’s education, urging them to learn about medicine and chemistry along with cookery. “What are the qualities of specific food, how long does it take to cook different ingredients, who needs to eat what, all these subjects encompass the knowledge that the mistress of the house must acquire,” she writes.
At other times, women challenged their erstwhile male instructors in the public domain to establish themselves as superior culinary educators. In Amish o Niramish Ahar, Prajñasundari mounts a scathing critique of the lack of precision and discipline in prevalent Bengali food habits. “The muddle of fish and milk-based dessert in our feasts results in a hodge-podge that is as contrary to the rules of scriptures as it is harmful for health. My prime objective is to save Bengali food from this disorderliness and confer on it order and discipline,” she asserts. Her reference to the “muddle of fish and milk-based desserts” was likely a dig at Bipradas’ Pak Pranali, which prescribed this mix as a sample menu for feasts, Banerjee-Dube Ray ventures. Instead, Prajñasundari’s own recipe books start with rice-based dishes, methodically introducing other dishes in the order in which they would be eaten in a Bengali multicourse meal, even designing a menu for sample feasts.
Women authors also debated and competed with each other to claim better knowledge of and command over the art of cooking. This is the backdrop against which the debate on guava jelly on the pages of Antahpur and Punya becomes significant. In their counter-response to Prajñasundari’s rejoinder, Antahpur’s editors criticised Punya for depending primarily on male contributors and claimed greater credibility for themselves for being run entirely by “women — accomplished housewives and seasoned cooks—who had created, prepared and tried the dishes prior to publication”.
If cookbooks written by men defined women’s role as synonymous with the home and the kitchen, by the early 20th centuries, women redefined this role in their own terms. In producing new recipes and publishing cookbooks, they crossed the boundaries of home and placed themselves firmly in the public/professional sphere. Their writings also reflected an academic interest in food, cookery, and the history of gastronomy. While their arguments sometimes mirrored male discourses, at other times, they went beyond instructions to keep a well-maintained household or the elements and processes of a recipe.
Taking on new themes: Regional cuisines, meat-eating, and local versus foreign foods
Prajñasundari’s penchant for improvisation was carried forward by Kiranlekha Ray, who also puts a spotlight on the regional nuances of Bengali cuisine. In Barendra-Randhan, she points out that the vegetable dish shukto may taste very different in Barendrabhumi (as northern Bengal was known at the time) because of the use of fenugreek, radhuni, and onion seeds instead of the five-spice mix panchphoron used elsewhere in Bengal.
Rather than replicate the region’s traditional dishes, Kiranlekha Ray often reinterprets these recipes by incorporating foreign ingredients. She also complicates the concepts of traditional and foreign as they apply to food. In Jalkhabar (Snacks), published in 1924, she classifies jams, jellies, and pastries as foreign recipes but also introduces foreign ingredients in recipes categorised as traditional or authentic to northern Bengal. For instance, her recipes for yoghurt and sandesh use vanilla and strawberry essences, which hardly qualified as traditional ingredients at the time.
Many non-vegetarian recipes in Barendra-Randhan use beef, moving away from the consensus on meat-eating in 19th- and 20th-century cookbooks. While Hindu caste norms had historically deemed beef impure, in colonial India, it also became associated with the excesses of the British coloniser. Moreover, foreshadowing the cow politics of contemporary India, the Hindu nationalist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century fostered cow protection societies and leveraged beef-eating to incite anti-Muslim hate and violence. In keeping with these religious and caste-based diktats, cookbook authors typically replaced the beef in European cuisine-influenced recipes with chicken or lamb. In Barendra-Randhan, Kiranlekha Ray goes against this entrenched consensus.
Many non-vegetarian recipes in Barendra-Randhan use beef, moving away from the consensus on meat-eating in 19th- and 20th-century cookbooks.
The theme of traditional and foreign foods runs throughout Binapani Mitra’s 1941 Cheleder Tiffin (Tiffin for Boys) as well. But unlike Kiranlekha Ray’s enthusiastic embrace of foreign ingredients, Binapani’s book advocates the health benefits of traditional local foods, such as a mix of puffed rice, jaggery, and grated coconut, over biscuits and cakes that she categorises as foreign. In the 1955 Randhansanket (About Cooking), Binapani concerns herself with the authenticity of curry, urging readers to eschew the use of curry powder that had been popularised by Anglo-Indian cuisine. Even when she works with foreign foods, the ingredients are suitably indigenised. Her famed khirer toffee for instance, reinterprets the British-style sweet by using kheer (thickened milk).
Women’s cookbooks: From labour of love to an economic enterprise
If male-authored cookbooks had devalued the labour of cooking under the guise of love, women authors emphasised its economic value and the potential for financial benefits. Binapani Mitra, for instance, is as concerned about the marketability and profitability of her books as furthering discussions about good food. In Randhansanket, she admits to including meat-based dishes due to apprehensions that a book about only vegetarian fare may not find enough takers. Randhansanket also uses illustrations for its complex and unfamiliar recipes, such as puffs and Dhakai jilipi, to appeal to the novice cook.
In the latter half of the 20th century, cookbooks made space for women’s professional and public lives more explicitly. As upper- and middle-class women began to enter the formal workforce in the 1970s and ‘80s, a 1979 cookbook by the popular Bengali author Lila Majumdar, simply called Rannar Boi (Cookbook), offered ways to reduce cooking times. Similarly, a number of books by Bela Dey normalised the use of store-bought spices and time-saving cooking methods.
To be sure, the ability to write cookbooks and reap the financial benefits of doing so remained the purview of certain categories of women. The early cookbooks penned by Prajñasundari and her contemporaries as well as later-day outputs such Kamalabai Ogale’s Ruchira, Tarla Dalal’s The Pleasures Of Vegetarian Cooking, or S Meenakshi Ammal’s iconic Samaithu Paar are proof that it was mostly oppressor-caste and upper- and middle-class women who took over the role of culinary educators. Unsurprisingly, these books exclusively featured oppressor-caste cuisines, reflecting the food practices of their authors.
It is also not a coincidence that the 19th-century male-authored domestic manuals and cookbooks implicitly addressed only oppressor-caste and upper- and middle-class women. With poor and oppressed-caste women historically engaged in paid labour outside the home, it is only the identities of more privileged women that were tied to the domestic sphere. The same texts also glorified the middle-class housewife’s (unpaid) culinary labour of love while disparaging the paid labour of working-class men who had begun to take up employment in kitchens of urban elite households. As mentioned earlier, over time, this led to the displacement of hired male cooks, who were often poor migrants from rural areas, in urban kitchens.
Unsurprisingly, these books exclusively featured oppressor-caste cuisines, reflecting the food practices of their authors.
The coming of age of women as culinary educators is mired in a number of such exclusions and erasures. While their books reflect women’s growing sense of agency, they also show us that only certain women could subvert a male-dominated narrative and reconfigure the identities and roles ascribed to them. Their published recipes were a rejection of the domestic constraints that men sought to impose on women, but also left open the question of whose cuisines are memorialised in text.
Sohel Sarkar is a Bangalore-based independent journalist, writer and editor covering food, sustainability, gender and culture. Her work has appeared in Feminist Food Journal, Rewilding Magazine, Whetstone Magazine, Sourced Journeys and Eaten Magazine, among others. You can find her on Instagram @sarkar.sohel10.
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