Mrs LC's Table Stories about Kayasth Food and Culture

It is telling that these tasteful tales begin with things Mrs LC wont eat. She cooked them, but would not eat them, a vegetarian who refuses even certain vegetables and legumes due to tastebuds and traditions.

Mrs LC is the authors grandmotherand Vishals love and awe breathe life into these stories, even as she claims gourmet status for a fussy eater. Perhaps the lens of childhood viewing senior adulthood is responsible. Indeed, there is a huge lacuna around how Mrs LCs table manages to be laden without much experience or involvement on her part.

One might consider it a misnomerit was never Mrs LCs table but the furniture, like her name, rightfully her husbands even. Or find it plain confuzzlinglike a recipe for charnamrit from a supposedly emancipated woman speaking to a supposedly emancipated reader

It is an absorbing picture of the Kayasth community, sure, painted by a reluctant subscriber to that caste identity. It defines itself much by exclusionand an odd ownership of that which is also disowned, disavowed, distinct, like Mrs LC lauding meat dishes shes never tasted. It celebrates skills learnt, not personally acquired yet identified withlike cooking keema kofte perfectly as an upper-caste Hindu vegetarian matriarch with good hands. Vishal claims for Kayasths an instinctive flair for cooking yet the facts point to indoctrination and copycattery. She does acknowledge the cultures Ganga-Jamuni contradictionssyncretic, superior, sometimes stifling. This results in colourful cobbling, like kele ki machchli, fish made from raw banana.

It is a brave journey to claim ones caste identity while acknowledging its problematic nature. Yet the depths of the authors privilege are not fully plumbed. The tales are well told, pretty stories like those pretty plates of Mrs LCs table. Read it for a modern Indian womans struggle to reconcile the dark side of cultural identity with the bond to gatekeeping family figures. Read it for the food history. But beyond that is a bitter pill of inter-community tensions elided, foibles papered over with nostalgia, tied up in parochial straitlaces.