Of pish pash, pies and pao

Pronoti Datta’s food history of Mumbai, In the Beginning there was Bombay Duck, serves up stories of that city’s many communities, with a light touch and a sense of humour

- Rachel Lopez

In the Beginning there was Bombay Duck Pronoti Datta 339pp, ₹699 Speaking Tiger

I grew up in Parel, a Mumbai neigh-bourhood that, in the 1990s, was largely filled with mill workers, wholesale-cloth traders and people in low-rung, fiercely cherished corporate jobs.

Come Christmas, New Persian Bakery down the street would open up its huge, wood-fired ovens, so that local Christians could bake their cakes there for a small fee. Homi, the owner, would assess each pan before it went in.

“Mrs D'Costa!” he would scold my grandmother, “Again, your batter is so heavy. The centre won't cook”. And we'd have to split it across two pans. The bakery also extended the service for Maharashtrian chiroli-topped biscuits at Diwali and Muslim nankhatai at Eid. No one thought twice about an Iranian oven’s role in Hindu, Muslim and Christian festivities. Or that we passed Muttu’s now-viral Rajinikant-dosa stall and a dabeliwala to get to the bakery. That was just how Bombay rolled.

Flip to the back of Pronoti Datta’s book to see how this cosmopolitanism plays out in her food history of Mumbai. In her acknowledgements, Datta lists people of various faiths, multiple religions. Her eight chapters cover everything, from the fishy stench of the seven islands the Portuguese handed over to the British in 1661, to why Café Mommy Joon, a five-year old Iranian restaurant, doesn’t serve falooda.

This is the third in a series, following food-histories of Kolkata and Delhi. And it’s hard to believe that a book like this hasn't been attempted before. Mumbai, after all, is serious about its food. As is Datta. She spells the local bread as “pao”, not “pav”, acknowledging its Portuguese ancestry. She avoids the gushing tone that bloggers and content creators use when they talk about food. Instead, there is a light sense of humour. Datta describes the island of Mahim (one of the original seven) as a curved bacon rasher.