Because food is central to the identity of every community. 

sually in hot and dry April, women from Mumbai’s East Indian community clean, sun-dry and roast a range of raw spices before pounding everything together finely and storing in air-tight containers or beer bottles to use over the year. This is called bottle masala. But the tedious process takes three to four days and — amid declining popularity among East Indian youth — its uncertain future mirrors that of the community’s traditions. Regina and Bernard Pereira are ready to fight it out, though. Their weapon: a cocktail of tradition and technology.

The East Indian couple uses Authenticook, an aggregator that lists unique dining experiences by home chefs, to attract a new generation of Indians to the community’s culture. Bernard takes guests through their village, Giriz, in the suburban Mumbai town of Vasai, narrating snippets of East Indian history before they sit down to an elaborate meal cooked by Regina. Some of her specialties are wedding rice (basmati topped with fried onions, dried fruits, peppercorns, cloves, boiled eggs and ghee), fugias (deep-fried balls of fermented flour), potato chops and sukeli (local honey-drizzled ripe bananas that are dried on the trees).

Authenticook is part of a wave of aggregators, apps, physical pop-ups and digital platforms that are connecting home chefs to audiences they could never reach before, with the aim of helping to preserve and spread India’s myriad traditional cuisines that otherwise risk fading into oblivion. Rajni Jinsi, based in the Delhi suburb of Faridabad, cooks Kashmiri Pandit food at gatherings hosted by hotels and resorts. The Vijaykars, a Mumbai family belonging to the Pathare Prabhu community, host the wildly successful Dine With Vijaykars pop-up every couple of months. Harsha Thackeray’s Masalabox connects home chefs with meal subscribers in Cochin and parts of Bangalore, promising authentic cuisines from niche communities.

Earlier, many of these cuisines were relatively unknown outside their communities; now these platforms are taking them to audiences across India.

WE ASKED OURSELVES, HOW CAN WE KEEP TRADITIONS ALIVE AND OFFER AN ALTERNATE DINING-OUT EXPERIENCE?
AMEYA DESHPANDE, CO-FOUNDER, AUTHENTICOOK
“If you think about it, India has a massive food scene, but vast in terms of establishments and limited in terms of both Indian and pseudo-international food,” says Ameya Deshpande, one of the three co-founders of Authenticook, which launched in June 2016. “So we asked ourselves, How can we keep traditions alive and offer an alternate dining-out experience?”

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.ozy.com