#TIL that the Dum Pukht slow cooking technique of making Biriyani was pioneered by the cooks in the Awadhi royal kitchen to solve the problem of serving fresh hot food over an entire day to the poor without needing to keep re-cooking fresh batches all the time.

It’s quite brilliant if you think about it. There is a cultural preference for fresh cooked food in this part of the world, and it requires a dish whose flavour can improve over time and be slow cooked while being sealed to reduce moisture loss.

And this way, the first part of the process, the par-cooking of rice and meat, happen in a central kitchen and the dum-cooking part, which requires very little infrastructure, can happen in the field where people are being fed.

The economics of food is inseparable from its cultural and historical aspects. Wondering if someone with a strong background in economics has written a book about how economics shaped our eating habits.

Something along the lines of Lizzie Collingham’s “The Taste of War: WW2 and the battle for food” and “The Hungry Empire”, but focusing on the last 100 years

Also recommend @ShobaNarayan’s “Food and Faith”, that explores the role of temples and the tradition of prasad(am) in our food culture.

One of the questions asked in the @IWTKQuiz food quiz I hosted was centred around the idea that Lord Krishna ate 8 items a day, and since he lifted Govardhan hill for 7 days, the Puri temple serves a 8x7 item meal (Chhappan Bhog)