This paper considers the methodological challenges of writing histories of cooks and kitchens out of an archival context where both early texts that dwell on rituals, dietetics, or gourmandry and the printed sources that offer recipes seldom reveal the working lives and local structures that underlay their subject. The paper explores how one might creatively read such disparate texts and expand the meanings of kitchens and archives in order to locate South Asian foodways in terms of local and global histories of casted and classed labour and migrations, cultural circulation, colonial urban, commercial, and oceanic expansion, gendered innovation and interlocution.
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