Culinary Codes for an Emergent Nation: Prescriptions from Pak Chandrika, 1926

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cuisines are never neutral, innocent concoctions, but products of dominant ideologies and power structures. This paper explores culinary codes advanced by popular Hindi cookbooks from the early twentieth century to see how they re-define the kitchen and the culinary world of urban, middle-class Hindu families. Focusing especially on Pak Chandrika, a cookbook published from Allahabad in 1926, the paper argues that these Hindi cookbooks contributed to the residual ground – especially in relation to the intimate, the everyday and the comestible – that potentially fed into the emergent nationalism in early twentieth century north India.