Kashmiri Cuisine: Through the Ages Hardcover – 3 March 2020

Paper and Recipes are best

Useless recipes

After flipping through the pages of this book, when I think of Kashmir—I don’t think of the coverage of Kashmir through the articles fed to us by the media and the journalists. I do not think of the way Kashmir has been turned into an epicentre of cultural rifts, of habitational and religious frictions. When I read this book, I inhale the flavourful aroma of the Kashmiri delicacies—it’s ingredients, its recipes, the food and the drinks.Kashmiri cuisine is rich and savoury, and it incorporates the delicate flavours of its sensual ingredients. It is also very traditional, with the essence of the dishes coming down generations. As I flipped through the various categories of recipes laid down in the book, I could see how essentially simple the preparations were. Most of the recipes are layered with a very specific platter of spices—of the aromatic, fragrant spices which lift up the rawness of the tastes. Strangely enough, the author has probably tried to make the dishes accessible to the general population, and so while preserving its authenticity; she has also kept intact the simplicity of the dishes. Combined with the spices are a single central ingredient to the dish—sometimes meat, sometimes fish, and even at times juicy vegetables. Even with a limited number of the central ingredients, the items seem to shine with the delicate proportions of spices and condiments, and the sequence at which they are added to the platter. The recipes essentially can be put to the dining table by a preparation not heavily tedious, but nevertheless very intelligent.Courtesy of the colourful pictures that adorn each recipe, my mouth watered as I feasted my eyes upon them. I saw juicy preparations of lamb, of freshwater fishes and chicken. Recipes like the Rogan josh, the korma and the white yoghurt gravies stole my eye as I delved deep. This brings me to another speciality of the book, which surely can prove its worth. In alignment with popular belief that Kashmiri cuisines is laden with only non-vegetarian recipes that are rich and heavy with spice—author Sarla Razdan gives to us an assortment of vegetarian options. Be it French beans, pumpkins, radishes or the typical Kashmiri ingredients like lotus stems and Kholrabi, these dishes can definitely stimulate all our taste buds. For all the fitness freaks, there is also a section that deals with several low calorie recipes!‘Kashmiri Cuisine through the ages’ gave me a fresh new look to Kashmir’s traditions, and a chance to bring a small part of their large platter into my own humble home. Cultural research is definitely a need of the hour, as it has always been. There is no alternative to simultaneously exploring different streaks of culture individually, and also simultaneously placing them on a common platform for better impersonation and reflections. And the food of a particular region speaks much. It speaks of tradition, of heritage, of ethnicity, of experimentalism and of inclusiveness. At a time when Kashmiri has been decorated and torn by newspaper reports and media figures, an exploration of its cuisine is a subtle attempt to make us recall how alive Kashmir is, how splendid and how diverse.