Sea, Salt And Spice: A History of Mumbai through Food
Meher Mirza serves up something rather special here: a cultural history of Mumbai that refuses to treat food as mere sustenance. Instead, she positions cooking and eating as the very lens through which we might understand this sprawling, contradictory metropolis. Before the city became synonymous with hustle and chaos, it was something altogether different. An island where fishers, traders, and newcomers arrived with their own culinary traditions, reshaping what landed on tables across neighbourhoods and generations. What makes this investigation genuinely absorbing is Mirza's insistence on following the threads of everyday meals backwards through time. She examines how the Koli community fed themselves, what appeared in Peshwa kitchens, which dishes persisted through Portuguese rule, and how colonial commerce altered the rhythms of local eating. Geography matters here. So do caste, gender, faith and the relentless march of commerce. Each influenced which spices were ground, which fish were caught, which recipes survived. The book itself is handsome: dotted with maps, photographs and fragments from archives that anchor the narrative in something tangible. What Mirza has avoided is writing a restaurant guide or a collection of recipes. Instead, she's given us something rarer: a genuine biography of a city, told through the intimate language of food. It's scholarship that doesn't feel like work, storytelling that carries genuine weight.
- Author: Meher Mirza
- Publisher: HarperCollins India
- Genre: Travel Writing & Guides
- ISBN: 978-9369895236
- Pages: 320 pages