Abstract
Abstract This article deliberates on the entanglements between politics and the history of food, health, and gender in Hindu middle-class households of early twentieth-century North India, through the genre of printed cookbooks in Hindi. While cookbooks became important nodes through which to construct an ideal Hindu housewife and kitchen, they were also a place where educated, middle-class women’s voices came to be heard, recorded, and published. The article shows how and why cookbooks are an important source for writing gendered social histories of the Hindu middle classes in modern India. Simultaneously, reflecting on the larger politics of food, the article focuses on the social identities embedded in these culinary texts, and the multiple meanings they embodied, as they strengthened gender, caste, and religious boundaries, constructed a past golden culinary age, upheld ayurvedic knowledge, bemoaned the present state of culinary sciences, used food to overcome the malaise of the middle classes, fashioned an ideal Hindu upper-caste palate as synonymous with a vegetarian diet, and imagined a healthy family and a strong Hindu nation through culinary idioms.
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