Kalpish Ratna-Frontline

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The chilli’s malice is ubiquitous.

Chilli: The red devil

Chillies came to India with Vasco da Gama in the late 15th century, and utterly destroyed its cuisine.

Carl Linnaeus, in a 1775 painting by Alexander Roslin. Linnaeus’ system could absorb the global scatter of plants. Explorers brought back forests entire, and here at last was a method to catalogue them. Once named, plants from anywhere became Europeanised as the rightful botany of Empire.

Linnaeus’ taxonomy and the roots of scientific bias

His plant classification system, based on sexual characteristics, reinforced binary gender concepts and facilitated colonial botanical appropriation.

Enter the dragon: A bitter gourd fashioned into a crocodile.

Bitter gourd: croc in the kitchen

All my life, I have avoided the bitter gourd like poison until that fateful rainy day, when I cooked a delicious karela navratan.

Indian cuisine celebrates the okra like no other.

Okra: What’s in its ick?

On a planet as diabetic as ours has become, the okra’s medicinal properties might well spell salvation for us

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now, for this is the story of onion.

Vishnu protects the onion

The onion whets the appetite, warms the heart, heals the sick, and transforms the clumsiest cook into chef supreme.

“Oranges in Tissue Paper” by William Joseph McCloskey, c. 1890.

Holmes solves a mystery for the marmalade millionaire

“The orange sings of the farmers of Vidarbha: the peel of their zest, the pith of their patience, the juice of their exuberant spirit of freedom!”

The cabbage has endured five centuries of culinary cruelty on the subcontinent.

Cabbage, the gourmet’s delight

The reviled cabbage can sparkle with wit, melt with tenderness, comfort with generosity—all depending on the cook’s attitude

Illustration by Siddharth Sengupta.

Words on a plate

The menu boasts no dish names but will serve up similes and metaphors, oxymorons and syllogism, with metonymy that might pass for irony.

A bean is a seed, an egg on pause.

The bean that carries a whiff of rain

A common kitchen ingredient, the black-eyed bean has a glorious lineage and, when boiled, a shockingly intense umami flavour

Perhaps Hokusai’s “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” conceived octobaby?

A fearless exploration of the black hole of the mind

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities is filled with unpredictable, open-ended, and edgy sci-fi stories.

Waldemar Haffkine inoculates a child against cholera in Calcutta, in 1894.

A coming plague: Review of ‘Foreign Bodies’ by Simon Schama

Any narrative history of pandemics and vaccines must be told from ground zero. Sadly, Schama’s book is far removed from that reality.

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