A bouquet of diverse books to gift this festive season.
This guide will help you choose a book for a loved one—whether they are avid readers or simply enjoy cooking and food lore. But gifting books can often be tricky. To know whether the book you’re choosing is the right pick for someone, read through an excerpt and have a taste of the book yourself!
1. For those with a green thumb
The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook is a distillation of Arina Suchde’s journey of zero-waste cooking. Featuring 75 recipes and smart, practical hacks, the book guides readers to cook imaginatively. Think pomegranate skin teas, stem stir-fries, and clever peel-infused cocktails—recipes that surprise in their thrift as much as in their flavour.
Read this short excerpt from, where Arina makes a case for everyday food scraps as the beginnings of a meal, not its discard. Bruised tomatoes, cauliflower stems, orange peels—what we dismiss, Arina wants you to begin redeeming.
2. For those mad about mangoes
Stories of growers, geopolitics, and even fruit flies, Sopan Joshi’s Mangifera Indica: A Biography of the Mango, describes multiple aspects of India’s most beloved fruit.
Read this excerpt from the section titled ‘The Fruit of the Senses,’ where Sopan travels to Thalupulapalli village in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh, to meet T. Chandrasekhar Reddy, a farmer conserving traditional varieties of mangoes like Totapuri, Thorapadu, Neelum Benishan, and Himayat.
Learn more here.
3. For those who enjoy preserving food and memories alike
In Spiced, Smoked, Pickled, Preserved, the author Indranee Ghosh brings together charming vignettes from her youth in the densely forested Khasi Hills and then in Bengal’s plains. There is a delectable selection of family recipes passed down over three generations to weave an engaging narrative.
Read this excerpt from the opening chapter ‘A Doctor-Preacher in the Hills’. Indranee writes about her grandfather’s culinary adventures in Cherrapunji, where he had moved to work as a preacher for the Brahmo Samaj.
Learn more here.
4. For those who struggle with dense books but want to read more about socio-politics
Based on author Anumeha Yadav’s investigative series on the central government’s rice fortification scheme—and its fallout on Jharkhand’s farmer communities—Our Rice Tastes of Spring highlights why the locals’ right to control their own food systems matters.
Read an interview with Anumeha to know more about the process of putting the book together, and how her work as a journalist informed the story.
Learn more here.
5. For the history and food connoisseurs
In Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia, historians, literary scholars, plant scientists, heritage practitioners, writers, and chefs come together to document precious stories, histories, and recipes from South Asia, proving just how profoundly Muslim kitchens have reshaped alimentary practices. The anthology emerged from a research and public engagement project, and includes perspectives on heritage rice varieties, Kashmir’s saada saag, and the rich foodscape of Manipur’s Pangal community, among others.
Too often, the meat in the qormas is overpowered by the masalas, writes historian Rana Safvi in her essay, ‘Memories of Awadhi Qorma’, part of the anthology. Read her essay to learn how a qorma should ideally be cooked.
Learn more here.
6. For those seeking a powerful perspective on feminism and flavour
Feminist anthropologist Dolly Kikon and peace researcher Joel Rodrigues present a diverse set of stories and essays accompanied by recipes in Food Journeys: Stories from the Heart (Zubaan, 2023). They bring together poets, activists, writers, and researchers who explore how food and eating allow us to find joy and strength while navigating the history of militarisation in Northeast India.
In this excerpt from the book, Techi Nimi recollects her years spent at boarding schools, laced with memories of hunger. She often longed for Arunachalee food—with “heaps of bamboo shoot”—which was never served.
Learn more here.
7. For the forever nostalgic
A crowd-sourced initiative by Nivaala and The Alipore Post, Memories on a Plate seeks to build a bigger kitchen—one with room for memory, identity, grief, and a spectrum of emotions that deepen our relationships with food.
Read these excerpts from four contributors—Sneha Suresh, Shubhshree Mathur, Oorja Makkad, and Imdad Barbhuyan—as they navigate their own relationships with food.
Learn more here.
8. For those hoarding travelogues and cultural ethnographies
Over many centuries, the Indian Jewish community have abided by their dietary laws yet integrated Indian habits with their customs, creating unique ceremonies, rituals, and recipes that have been passed down over generations. In Bene Appetit, Esther David, a Bene Israeli Jew herself, records traditions and closely guarded recipes from Jewish communities from across India.
Read an excerpt from Esther’s chapter on her visit to Andhra Pradesh, to learn more about the cuisine of Bene Ephraim Jews who live there, including the kitchens she was welcomed into and the dishes shared at a Shabbat dinner.
Learn more here.
9. For those fishing for lived experiences behind our food
Seasoned by the Sea—or Neidhal Kaimanam in Tamil—is more than just a cookbook. Documenting India’s Coromandel coast, it dives into the ebbs and flows that define coastal food across the region: from the lives of the inhabitants to the cooking methods they employ, and the labour and ecology that ties the recipes together.
Read the following excerpt from the section titled ‘From the sea to the self: Amma’s journeys with seafood’, written by Bhagath Singh A. and translated from the Tamil by Niranjana R. Here, the author writes about his late mother and the fallout of industrial transformation in their coastal hometown of Ennore.
Learn more here.
10. For those interested in indigenous forest produce, and the traditional knowledge surrounding it
A labour of love, the Wild Food Zine by The Locavore captures the efforts to document and preserve knowledge of the wild foods found and harvested in Palghar, Maharashtra, during the monsoon. It features 24 wild ingredients with information about their seasonality, how to identify them, and how they are traditionally cooked, along with recipes to try out. The zine was also translated into Marathi.
Learn more here.
11. For those who enjoy culinary and environmental documentaries
The Koli community is at the frontline of the food systems in Mumbai. The original Indigenous fisherfolk of this coastline face numerous challenges posed by rapid urbanisation and the ongoing climate crisis, often resulting in not only their displacement, but also a loss of livelihood and heritage. Despite these pressures, the Kolis have managed to stay afloat. This book by The Locavore is an attempt to shed light on how the community resists and persists, and what the journey tastes like.
Part cookbook, part visual archive, and part record of a coastline in transition, it is an invitation to look more closely at the fish on our plates, and at the people and places behind them. Across its pages are photo essays and interviews from Mumbai’s Koliwadas, profiles of 15 locally significant seafood species, 20 home-tested recipes, and a practical guide to buying seafood, together with maps and research on the city’s ever-changing coastline. It is a culmination of a six-month-long storytelling and public engagement project that spotlights Mumbai’s Kolis and their evolving relationship with the sea.
Learn more here.
Learn more about the LFC theme for October and November, ‘Food as Gift’ here.
