Category Archives: Chillies and Porridge

Vogue, December 11, 2015 Mita Kapur’s ‘Chillies and Porridge: Writing Food’ paints a delectable tale with a beautiful collection of essays on food “For the uninitiated, porridge is a dish of ground, crushed or chopped cereal, boiled in milk or water, usually served hot. Admittedly, not quite the stuff fine-dining dreams are made of. Porridge is as unexotic as, well, porridge. Yet as trends come and go, this humble one-bowl meal trudges on, quietly filling bellies around the world first […]

Deccan Herald, December 10, 2015 What alarms me is that a lot of home cooking in terms of traditional Indian food is getting lost. I don’t see kadi chawal being made in houses so often,” exclaims Mita Kapur. “I feel that food unites and levels us whether socially or culturally, especially in a diverse country like ours where we have such inherent rich food traditions. Most of our food traditions are very scientific. There are multiple layers to the food […]

Mid-day, December 10, 2015 http://www.mid-day.com/articles/mumbai-diary-thursday-dossier/16759159

Outlook, December 7, 2015 You’ve heard of gastro or kitchen porn, haven’t you? At its purest, it was first noticed in the film When Harry Met Sally, as Meg Ryan sits opposite Billy Crystal in an American delicatessen and starts faking it. Her gasps and groans are so authentic that the lady across the aisle says, “I’ll have what she’s having.” As editor of a marvellous compendium of anecdotes revolving around food, Mita Kapur knows a thing or two about […]

Food Chants, December 3, 2015 Food memoirs and history of food are slowly becoming my favourite topics when it comes to food writing/reading. The food gets so much more character when it becomes a part of someone’s memory. There’s also this joy of reading about how the eating habits of people evolved, how they learnt about new flavours and how did they create something new out of all that knowledge. Harper Collin’s latest title Chilies and Porridge, compiled and edited […]

Rediff.com, December 3, 2015 We all have an inspiration when it comes to food, don’t we? For some it’s their mother, aunt or father… for others, it is a famous food writer. Fashion designer Wendell Rodricks is no different; he learnt to love food from his late aunt, an exceptional cook who loved to innovate. ‘Her favourite word was ‘blend’… followed by ‘with imagination’. Long before I applied those words of wisdom to clothes, I learnt the basics from humble […]

Rajasthan Post, November 26, 2015 Mita Kapur, the founder and CEO of Siyahi, India’s leading literary consultancy, is just out with her second book Chillies and Porridge: Writing Food. Her first book, The F-Word, is also a food book, memoir and travelogue. Mita says the experience of food can mean many things to many people. Whether it’s carrying a chilli around to dinner parties in the UK or finding out what it really means to be a vegetarian in a […]

The Good Book Corner, November 25, 2015 Chillies and Porridge- Writing Food  came to me just at the time when I was starting my regimented diet – post a big fat Punjabi wedding and the festive gluttony of Diwali. Edited by Mita Kapur, founder and CEO of Siyahi, it features essays by some well known writers. Chillies and Porridge celebrates food- food as humble as the ordinary porridge and as crackling as the foreign chilli, which we Indians can’t live without now. […]

Woodpie Blog, November 20, 2015 Mayur and I grew up, and to this day live, in a small place called Uday Park in Delhi which was a small colony where plots of land were given to the families who had lost a member to the war of 1971. The resulting demographic therefore was a lot of working ladies who were the heads of the family and a lot of kids without fathers who had only each other to really learn […]

Mint Lounge, November 16, 2015 Why the staples of a large section of India are shrouded in deliberate invisibility—an exclusive excerpt from a new anthology on food writing At Brigade Ground, the buses had started to come in from mid-morning; by afternoon, there was a thick, orderly mass of people from Bengal’s districts and villages, streaming in for one of the many rallies held by Mamata Banerjee, the West Bengal chief minister. Political rallies and bandhs had punctuated the daily […]