Articles and Papers

In the not-so-distant past, eating out in India usually meant tandoori chicken, butter chicken, South Indian idli or dosas, or Indian-Chinese. Rarely did people make these dishes at home, at least not the spice- and gravy-heavy versions that were standard restaurant...

The US consulate general in Calcutta and Tasting India Symposium hosted the inaugural "India's Global Footprint: New Discoveries" at the American Center last month. The opening address was delivered by Krish Das, deputy director, American Center in Calcutta. The...

Colleen Taylor Sen met her husband Ashish at a college dance. It was the early 1960s, when she still went by Colleen Taylor. She was born and raised in Toronto, the child of two white parents with ancestral roots in England. She had never eaten Indian food before...

Madhur Jaffrey started collecting books by happenstance. "I started looking around for old books without any thought in my head that I would use them one day," she explains. "I like to pick up things that are beautiful." Before books, it was shawls and Indian...

Darkness conquers light. Good overcomes evil. And somewhere in between these important battles, sweets and savouries emerge the ultimate winner. The darkest night at the end of a month — and millions of lamps and candles at their brightest best. And a little away from...

While some people dispute that there was ever a wave of migration of Indo-Aryans, the second millennium BCE did see the appearance of a new people, who introduced new flavors into the cuisine. Theirs was a semi-nomadic society consisting of small kinship groups who...

The quintessential feature of Indian food is, of course, the extensive use of spices.  The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has registered 109 spices, of which 52 are supervised by the Spice Board of India.  Spices indigenous to India are ginger,...

It’s a truism that India is the most diverse country in the world - ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and gastronomically. A debate about what constitutes India’s national dish - khichdi once proposed - may never be answered. Still, if we look into history, we...

On her first trip to Mumbai, we take author and food historian Colleen Taylor Sen on a pav bhaji jaunt to some of the city’s most iconic eateries  Colleen Taylor Sen’s tryst with Indian food goes back nearly four decades, when she met her husband Ashish Sen at...