Layers of Bengal During the Indo-Islamic Culinary Traditions: Evolution, Culture and Science MUGHLAI PARATHA: 2

A Note on This Book This is a work of narrative history. It tells a true story - the story of how a fried, egg-filled, gloriously messy square of dough came to sit at the centre of one of the world's great riverine civilisations - and it tells that story in the manner of the storyteller rather than the cataloguer. Where the record is firm, this book stands on it. Where the record dissolves into legend, as it so often does around a dish that was born in kitchens rather than in courts, this book says so plainly, and then, because legends are themselves a kind of historical fact, it tells the legend anyway, and asks what people wanted to be true and why. Every restaurant founding date, every dynasty, every figure of weight and measure in these pages rests on the published record: on the work of food historians and social historians, on contemporary journalism, on the establishments' own accounts of themselves, and on the chronicles of Bengal that survive from the sultanate, the Mughal subah, and the long afternoon of the Nawabs. Prices change, memories soften, and the men who first folded the dough left no patents. The reader should treat the dates of small eating-houses as the eating-houses themselves treat them: as cherished, well-worn, and held lightly. Where two stories compete, both are given. Where a beloved story is almost certainly untrue, it is honoured and then gently dismantled, which is the only respectful thing to do with a good story. "To eat is to appropriate by destruction; it is at the same time to be filled up with a certain being." - a thought borrowed from the philosophers, and offered to the cooks "Fish and rice make a Bengali." - a proverb, which this book intends to complicate

Pagina's: 191, Paperback, Independently published