मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Monday, May 12, 2008

Does 133 Years Old Tradition of Recipe Books in Marathi Encourage Cooking?

For Lalit ललित April 2008, Sharad Gogte शरद गोगटे has written a delightful essay on a long history of cookery books in Marathi.

I am fond of food. More accurately talking about food as my metabolism- after years of abuse- gradually falls apart!

In English, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has done some of the best writing on the history of food.

“…We think thin and we get fat…Mealtimes are our oldest rituals. The companionable effects of eating together help to make us human. The little links which bind households together are forged at the table. The stability of our homes probably depends more on regular mealtimes than on sexual fidelity or filial piety. Now it is in danger. Food is being desocialised. The demise of mealtimes means unstructured days and undisciplined appetites.

The loneliness of the fast-food eater is uncivilising…

…The raw food movement is not a healthy alternative..The raw movement is not a solution, but part of the threat, dividing families by taste and diet…

…So the family mealtime looks irretrievably dead. The future, however, usually turns out to be surprisingly like the past. We are in a blip, not a trend. Cooking will revive, because it is inseparable from humanity: a future without it is impossible. Communal feeding is essential to social life: we shall come to value it more highly in awareness of the present threat. There is bound to be a reaction in favour of traditional eating habits, as nostalgia turns into fashion and evidence builds up of the deleterious effects of snacking…

…We seem incapable of socialising without food. Among people who like to enjoy other's company, every meal is a love feast. We eat to commune with our gods. The discreetly lit table is our favourite romantic rendezvous. At state banquets, diplomatic alliances are forged. Deals are done at business lunches. Family reunions still take place at mealtimes. Home is a place which smells of cooking. If we want relationships that work, we shall get back to eating together. Along the way, we shall conquer obesity: if we stop grazing, we shall stop gorging. “ (September 14, 2002 The Guardian)

I have enjoyed Jaywant Dalwi’s जयवंत दळवी writing on food in Marathi more than pornography.

First Marathi book on the subject of cooking was published in 1875: soopshastra सूपशास्त्र by Ramchandra Sakharam Gupte रामचंद्र सखाराम गुप्ते publisher Raoji Shridhar Gondhalekar रावजी श्रीधर गोंधळेकर price Rs. 1/25. Over next fifty years six more editions of the book came out. Price remained unchanged.

(सूप “soop” is a Sanskrit word meaning a kind of curry or an accompaniment in an Indian meal.)

The book has 107 recipes. For our kitchen quite a few of them-like कोरफङीचा मुरंबा (jam of aloe vera)- are now extinct.

During the period 1888-1890, a ‘recipedia’ titled “soopshastra” सूपशास्त्र by Ramkrushna Salunkerao रामकृष्ण साळुंकेराव, 4 volumes, 06 books, 2500 pages was published. It had recipes from many parts of India and the world. (2500 pages must be a kind of world record that still stands!)

As this long history suggests, do middle class Maharashtrians enjoy cooking?

I cannot resist temptation to paraphrase The Economist:...As porn is to sex, so the recipe books are to cooking. The more people read, the less they do it.


"soopshastra" सूपशास्त्र by Ramchandra Sakharam Gupte रामचंद्र सखाराम गुप्ते

They could be talking about कोरफङीचा मुरंबा (jam of aloe vera) as well:


Artist: Peter C Vey The New Yorker 30 November 1998
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