Sea, Salt and Spice: A History of Mumbai Through Food

Imported from India, Sea, Salt and Spice reveals the complex origins and worldwide influence of Mumbai, which for hundreds of years has been an important crossroads offering access to India and sending its goods, most notably spices and other foods, to far-off lands.

Food and travel writer Meher Mirza, born and bred in Mumbai, assumes a certain familiarity with Indian culture, taking for granted recognition of Emperor Ashoka and geographical relationships. But she writes with density of detail that allows a rapid parade of figures, ranging from Ramses II, and the first queen to have coins minted in her name to Portuguese colonialists and the British who followed them.

The lives of everyday people are often represented less dramatically, but Mirza is careful to contrast them, pointing out, for instance, that the rise of restaurants in the city was initially disorienting for people who rarely ate away from except for weddings and religious festivals.  But the city's many communities worked and ate alongside each other, even if patronizing separate businesses in the same building.

Well illustrated with period drawings and photographs and rounded out with sample recipes, quotations from poetry, saga, and newspapers, Sea, Salt and Spice makes it clear that Mumbai's history is rich enough that a single book could not fully do it justice, even as it whets the appetite to learn more.

Hardcover. Color and black-and-white photographs.