My Bombay Kitchen

Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking

Niloufer Ichaporia King

Born in Bombay, anthropologist, independent scholar, and doyenne of Parsi cuisine Niloufer Ichaporia King spent many years compiling the recipes of her childhood. Since moving to the United States in 1971, she has made a mark in many gastronomic circles, from local markets to famous kitchens. Recently King was interviewed by her editor, Hannah Love.

This is your first cookbook, and yet you have been cooking for groups, sharing your recipes, and conducting research for years. What inspired you to write My Bombay Kitchen?

When my mother turned 90 in 2000, the daughter in me wanted to mark the occasion by writing up the recipes for the many Parsi dishes I had cooked under my parents’ joint supervision. Since Parsi recipes would mean nothing out of context, the anthropologist part of me wanted to fix them in time and place. The cook in me wanted to show how very easy, unintimidating, and delicious Parsi food can be—how there’s something for nearly every taste and level of cooking ability.

Cookbooks aren’t often paired with university presses. Why did you choose to publish with University of California Press?

A university press is more likely to see the value of food presented in some sort of personal and cultural context rather than as a sequence of micro-managed shopping lists. Having admired several books that have preceded this one in UC Press’s forward-thinking food and culture program, I’m happy to be counted amongst them. And I’m especially pleased to continue my ties with the University of California, which sponsored my collection of Parsi ethnographic material almost twenty-five years ago, and which awarded degrees to both me and my husband, David King, the illustrator of the book.

Which aspect of the book do you hope will most greatly influence a reader’s understanding of the Parsi people?

The idea of enthusiastic adaptation to whatever life and markets present. I also hope that the introduction—with its long jumps through history and the personal narrative that follows—might stimulate a reader’s curiosity about this singular community of mine, and that the recipes themselves will reflect the many layered influences on our culture. Most of all, I hope the book will communicate the long-held Parsi love for sharing the pleasures of the table without fuss or anxiety.

Do you have a favorite childhood memory associated with one of the recipes in My Bombay Kitchen?

Making puris for my mother to fry, rolling them out using a little board and pin made especially for me by a friend of my parents’.

Can you point to any ways that your experience with “California cuisine” has influenced your style of traditional Parsi cooking?

In some of its aspects, California cuisine is what we were doing all along—buying local, seasonal, fresh food not for ideological reasons but because when I was growing up in India, that’s pretty much what you had to do. Coming to California in 1971 was like entering Rosetti’s goblin market—such a tremendous, alluring banquet of possibilities couldn’t help but influence my Parsi cooking. And it continues to do so with the increasing availability of inspiring ingredients.

The Parsi population is rapidly declining worldwide, making My Bombay Kitchen not only a cookbook but also a cultural document. As an anthropologist, what do you hope the book’s impact will be?

I want to show that cultural change and geographical dispersal do not necessarily mean a loss of identity or authenticity, but rather a rearticulation in a different context. The most tenacious aspects of culture are often those that can incorporate change, like Parsi food over the centuries in India and now in the New World.