Sea, Salt and Spice : A History of Mumbai through Food – Meher Mirza

Description

Long before Mumbai became shorthand for ambition, overcrowded trains and monsoon excess, it was a porous island city – inhabited by fishermen and merchants, settlers and immigrants. Every empire that ruled it, every community that made it home left behind its imprint.

In Sea, Salt and Spice, noted food-and-travel writer Meher Mirza traces the history of this great metropolis through what was cooked, preserved, traded and eaten – from Koli kitchens and Peshwa courts to Portuguese enclaves and British colonial ports, all the way to the sleepless streets of present-day Mumbai. Ranging light-footedly across centuries, she excavates the hidden details of the city’s life – its home kitchens and roadside stalls, the women and marginalized communities who silently fed it – and shows how geography and climate, gender and caste, religion and commerce worked their way into everyday meals.

Richly illustrated with maps, photographs and archival material, Sea, Salt and Spice blends scholarship with storytelling, wit with insight. This is not a guide to what to eat or where to eat it, but a spirited biography of a city – one that gives Mumbai, and its food, their due.