Did you know that in Bandra’s Chimbai village, in 1914, a group of fierce Koli women physically confronted a senior police inspector, who tried to impose a ban on drying ‘bombil’ or Bombay duck because of its strong odour? It may sound like a scene straight out of a Hindi film, but it is one of many vignettes from Mumbai’s fascinating food history that author Meher Mirza has woven into her book Sea, Salt & Spice: A History of Mumbai Through Food.
Mirza is a Mumbai-born and bred food and culture writer, who has been writing about the city and its food history for various media platforms from a post-colonial lens for over a decade. Her debut book goes back to the first century when the city was split into small islands and had trade routes to ancient Rome, West Asia and China. It is divided into four sections—pre-colonial, the Portuguese colonization, the British colonial period and post-Independence—each one studded with little gems of historical facts and trivia.
Mirza writes about the known and the popular, like what gave bombil its English name Bombay duck, without sticking to any single narrative. Or, the influence of the Portuguese colonisers on the city’s bakeries, the making of Irani cafes and how the rise of cotton mills shaped the city’s eating-out culture. In the same breath, she includes bits of history that otherwise don’t find a mention in popular media. She writes about the seemingly “caste neutral” and secular Irani cafes that kept separate tea cups for the marginalized. There are also stories of the first ice consignment from Massachusetts, USA, in 1834, which led to the city’s first ice-house a decade later, and about the Hindu biscuit factory that upheld rituals of caste purity by promoting “high-class Swadeshi biscuits prepared only by Brahmins”.
Over the four years she spent writing the book, Mirza referred to popular newspapers, including the Bombay Chronicle along with government gazettes, Marathi texts such as Bimbakhyana, and Gujarati-language guides and magazines Mumbaino Bhomiyo by Govind Narayan and Stribodh.
Some of Mirza’s favourite anecdotes come from the rationing and prohibition times, in the years following India’s independence. “For instance, eating too many samosas, or inviting two friends to a dinner party! It was also deeply enjoyable to read how the newspapers of the time lampooned the politicians and their policies, which were well-meaning, yet ludicrous,” she says.
The section on famine and food scarcity, which begins in the British colonial period during the World War I and spills over to the post-independence period, is indeed one of the most interesting parts. The recipes that resulted from rationing and the use of ingredients in place of wheat, sugar and milk—loaves prepared with tamarind flour, a cake icing made with powdered boiled sweets, a pudding made from sweetened pumpkin, rawa idli, vegan coconut milk churned into ice-cream, and bread vada (sandwich dipped in gram flour batter and deep-fried) are particularly amusing. There was even a restriction of no more than 24 people at parties, to the extent that anyone flouting the rule was reported in the newspaper, apart from an appeal to women to make Monday “no cereal day”.
Documenting a city’s history is a huge responsibility especially in today’s time when facts get convoluted easily. How did Mirza approach it? “My big worry was that I would be keen on my own particular ideological bent of mind. I have tried to be as objective as possible, insomuch as anyone can ever be objective at all. I thought multiple times about (not) sharing unsavoury facts about institutions that I hold very dear to my heart, but then I put them in anyway. Another big responsibility was to try not to be nostalgic about a city that I love dearly; that roseate lens distorts so much,” she says.
And true to her words, she stays away from the typical nostalgic tropes. However, for those who want to reminisce about old Bombay, there’s enough and more—the invention of the sizzler and the subsequent opening of the first sizzler restaurant in 1967 called Touche, the history of old Bombay favourites such as Kailash Parbat, and a hat tip to the city’s Chinese food legacy through the mention of (now shuttered) Nanking and (still standing) Ling’s Pavilion.
Flipping through the book also reinstates the fact that history repeats itself. In post-independent India, the government asked citizens to grow food in their homes to deal with food scarcity, something that came back as a trend during covid when people started maintaining kitchen gardens. Or if you thought that restaurants and food brands offering free food to protestors is a new phenomenon, you may want to read about the Irani café owner who served free tea and snacks to the revolutionaries of the 1946 Royal Indian Navy Mutiny.
Sea, Salt & Spice is visually attractive, too. The prose is punctuated with archival images, newspaper ads and recipe notes—an ad for a dance party at Monginis in aid of the blind, a fried Bombay duck recipe published in Bombay Chronicle in 1913, and a picture of one of the city’s historic markets, Null Bazaar, near Bhuleshwar.
Mirza is not the first author to write about Mumbai’s food and she won’t be the last. But her book travels across centuries to bring forth the most celebrated and mundane aspects of the city’s history—from the opening of the majestic The Taj Mahal Hotel to a water crisis that led to the first aerated water company set up by a city chemist named Henry Rogers in 1837. Who would have thought!
Shirin Mehrotra is a Delhi-based food writer and researcher.
Shirin Mehrotra is an independent writer covering food and travel.