READING LIST
9 APRIL 2026
A selection of stories that helps understand the connections between people, places, and ingredients while also asking what weight an ingredient carries, its significance across landscapes, and how we relate to it.
July: Fruits and Vegetables
A staple in tropical India, plantain has a place in daily meals as both a vegetable and fruit.
When Techi Nimi remembers her years spent at boarding schools, it is laced with memories of hunger. She longed for Arunachalee food—with “heaps of bamboo shoot”—which was never served.
Farmer and seed-saver Sunil Bhoye shares how seeds can be preserved by storing them in earthen pots and bamboo stems, and what it means to pass his knowledge of wild foods on to his daughter through the Wild Food Festival.
The Thal Sunday Market is indispensable to Neil Khopkar’s family-run eatery in the coastal town of Alibag in Maharashtra. Leaning into local flavours and ingredients, it is here that they buy hirva vanga, samudra methi, and sakla, among a bunch of other produce.
This recipe for Bhaat Nu Osaman is from Silent Cuisines: The Unsung & Disappearing Foodways of Gujarat’s Adivasis by Sheetal Bhatt, a cookbook documenting culinary traditions of tribes from the foothills of the Aravalli mountains of Gujarat, across six northeastern districts of the state.
Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal shares the process of mapping chutneys across India for her recent book—how they are born out of geography and practicality as much as flavour, and why despite their ubiquity, chutneys are often sidelined in culinary conversations. She also shares two chutney recipes from the book: Tangthur and Chaapda Chutney.
Located in the dry scrublands of Niravi Pudhupatti in Tamil Nadu is Ishka Farms—India’s only caper farm—cultivating a crop that isn’t native to the country. They retail their produce as brined capers, caper salt, sliced caperberries, in addition to innovative, organic caper-infused condiments such as sauces, spreads, and seasonings.
Even as small-scale producers struggle to harvest honey amidst climatic stressors and environmental degradation, India’s honey production continues to grow significantly, largely through a policy push that encourages the use of the European Bee, while sidelining native bees and their habitats.
For Vijeta Kumar, there is a version of her mother she will never know—the one who ate fish, pinched crabs, and loved seafood before a temple vow took it all away. This evocative personal essay is Vijeta’s ode to fish, one that involves exploding tiffins, the art of intimacy, and the politics of caste.
At a Local Food Club meetup in Mumbai in 2025, Sumana recounts her love story that’s straight out of a Bollywood script—bridged by eggs, tested by family drama.
For the Mahar and Mang communities in Maharashtra, meat was never easily available. When one came upon some, it would be made to last long enough, every bit of offal and fat put to use.