Cooking, it is clear, is one of most popular Covid-19-quarantine activities. Since the lockdown, Facebook and Instagram have been buzzing w...
Cooking, it is clear, is one of most popular Covid-19-quarantine activities. Since the lockdown, Facebook and Instagram have been buzzing with images of culinary pursuits. Traffic to cooking websites has soared. Not just amateur cooks but celebrity chefs are also “inviting” fans into their home-kitchens through recipe livestreams. Food and lifestyle platforms have responded with promotions: How to cook at home during coronavirus, Our best recipes and tips for quarantine cooking, or as in the case of this publication, A top Indian chef’s guide to stocking your kitchen during coronavirus lockdown.
Even before the coronavirus-driven spurt in culinary content, the internet had transformed the ways in which we thought about food. Yet, printed cookbooks have survived, and in fact thrive in the digital age. This, as The New Yorker’s food correspondent Helen Rosner says, is because cookbooks reinvented themselves. “What once were primarily vehicles for recipes became anything but: the recipes still mattered, but now they existed in service of something more – a mood, a place, a technique, a voice.”
When it comes to Indian food, even a small sample of books that have made it to international bestseller lists over the past two decades showcase the subcontinent’s culinary riches: Niloufer Ichaporia King’s My Bombay Kitchen is at once a...
