The Parsi Household Manuals

The Parsis are the Zoroastrian community who travelled out of Persia and settled on the Gujarat coast in the west of India. Their cooking was carried in the household and passed from woman to woman long before it was printed, and the manuals of the Parsi homes of Gujarat and Bombay are the written form of a kitchen formed by that settlement.

A household manual stands apart from a court text such as the Manasollasa or the Ain-i-Akbari. It does not describe a ruler's table; it fixes the working repertoire of one family and one community, in the quantities and sequences a cook actually uses. The Parsi manuals belong to this kind, and they are valued as a record of how a community of newcomers arranged its cooking from what the new coast supplied. Monisha Bharadwaj, in The Indian Cookery Course, gives the account of this arrangement as it was told to her by a friend of Parsi family. The Parsis were not vegetarians, yet the Gujarat coast offered them little meat, and chickens there were kept for the household kitchen alone. Eggs were abundant, and the cooks paired them with vegetables, producing a wide range of dishes that were new to them. This is the reason given for the Parsi habit of setting eggs over a vegetable base, and it makes the repertoire read as a cooking of resourcefulness rather than plenty. Bharadwaj's example is a dish of eggs on tomatoes. Eight ripe red tomatoes are scored with a cross at one end and, in the first stage, go into an oven heated to 200°C (392°F). They are then cooked down with diced onion, ginger-garlic paste, turmeric, a little medium-hot red chilli powder and chopped fresh coriander. A spoonful of malt vinegar and a teaspoon of caster sugar bring the sourness and sweetness for which Parsi cooking is known, and four eggs are set in the sauce to finish. It serves four, takes about forty-five minutes of cooking, and is eaten with rotis or boiled rice. The manuals therefore matter to a reader of this book as evidence of a regional cooking learned by adaptation. They place the keeping of a cuisine in the household, not the court or the restaurant, and a measure and sequence taken from them is what one family trusted, passed on within the kitchens of its women.

The Parsi table turns on a balance of sweet and sour. In Bharadwaj's tomato and egg dish, malt vinegar and a spoonful of sugar are set against turmeric, ginger-garlic paste and chilli. It is eaten with rotis or boiled rice, and the eggs, set just firm in the tomato, are the centre of a family meal rather than a feast.