Review: From the King's Table to Street Food by Pushpesh Pant

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

Whenever I've heard Pushpesh Pant speak about food, whether in a three-hour Aaj Tak radio episode or from beneath the shade of a tree in Sunder Nursery, I always picture him with a mouthful of gulab jamun, mid-sentence. It's as if he's chewing on metaphor and syrup at the same time, swaad lagaake. This is not a complaint. It's a particular talent of talking as though the act of remembering is indistinguishable from the act of tasting. Every corner in this book is filtered through desire, rumour, and what the body once wanted at 4 PM in 1972. Fasting and feasting in Delhi's Jama Masjid market (Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times)
Pant's great trick is that he does not try to prove a thesis (which he admits early on), he makes the reader feel the absences around which his city has always existed. You can feel the smoke of a missing kabab stall, the sweetness of a jalebi you can no longer find, the way someone once said, 'Yeh asli nihari hai' — and how no one says that anymore.
406pp, ₹699; Speaking Tiger
This is not history as chronology. It's history as residue.
Pant resists the academic impulse to flatten food into a stable 'object of study.' Instead, he treats it like an unreliable narrator which is part witness, part fabulist. He walks the reader through Mughal durbars, refugee kitchens post-Partition, and 1980s buffets in government guest houses with the same tone: curious, never conclusive. It's a tone I find strangely ethical. He does not lie. He simply doesn't pretend to know more than he does.
'Who's to say what is authentic anymore?' is the book's real question. And when the book refuses to solidify meaning makes Pant's writing feel ungovernable by typical non-fiction standards. A lesser writer might have lined up recipes, wrapped them in context, and added footnotes like garnish. Pant gives you traces. He gives you longing. And then he tells you that history, especially food history, is made of exactly that.
This is where the book's revisionist quality emerges, not in the overwriting of old narratives, but in the refusal to grant them authority in the first place. From the King's Table to Street Food doesn't 'correct' history. It walks past it. Pant's loyalties are not with the court, the archive, or the textbook. They're with the forgotten halwai. The refugee daughter-in-law who invented a new biryani out of what she had. The rumour that this particular nihari joint used to serve the emperor's cook. All unverifiable. All valid.
What's interesting is how political that stance is. Pant doesn't need to say, 'Food is political.' He shows you a city rearranged by displacement, war, plague, economic migration, caste. And he shows it through a single sentence: 'We must also remember that many of the so-called traditions of Delhi's food are hardly older than 175 years.' That's a statement which dismantles the fantasy of some eternal, static culinary identity. It tells you that Delhi, like its food, has been in motion forever.
Even the Mughal nostalgia is handled with a wink. Pant clearly respects the imperial kitchens, but he's far more interested in what came after the empire broke. He's interested in the mutability of taste, in the way food adapts to new economies, new arrivals, new needs. In that sense, he's doing something quite radical: shifting the centre of Delhi's food story away from empire and toward entropy.
The real protagonist of this book is change.
You can see this in how Pant writes about sweets. Ghantewala's sohan halwa is more than just dessert, it's a ghost. It's a way to think about what happens when legacy stops being edible. Pant's nostalgia is forensic. Memory, in this book, is always being poked, disbelieved, laughed at. 'Memory tends to play strange tricks as you grow old and revisit old haunts, remembering them very differently,' he writes. That's the closest thing to a thesis this book can be. That is to say food is a memory device, and memory is unreliable on purpose.
Here's what that does, formally. It frees Pant from the burden of being correct. He doesn't need to prove which dish came first, who made it, or where the cardamom was sourced. He needs only to make you believe that someone once cared enough to make it in the first place. And that someone else remembered it differently. The city's foodscape, then, becomes a series of layered misrememberings. It's history told in gossip, grief, appetite, and spice.
There's also something about the way Pant treats 'Delhi' as a signifier. The term 'authentic' loses all structural integrity. There is no stable origin. Only imitation, translation, and habit. He quotes generously, from cooks, vendors, family members, friends. 'Who's to say the street food we eat today isn't more honest than what the royals dined on?' he asks. The question is rhetorical, but the provocation is real. What if the greasy paratha on your plate tonight has more to say about Delhi than the feasts of Shah Jahan ever could?
Let's pause there. That sentence 'more honest' is doing heavy lifting. What does honesty mean in the context of food? Purity? Origins? Intention? The paratha you eat today in Moolchand isn't less authentic than the one your grandfather ate, it's just a different version of the same desire. Which is perhaps the book's deepest claim: that taste is a theory of history. And when taste changes, so does everything else.
To speak of food, Pant reminds us, is also to speak of gaps — of what is no longer eaten, or no longer made the same way. One of the more haunting threads in From the King's Table to Street Food is his unspoken obsession with disappearance. Foodways are how a people remember themselves, and when they vanish, so does a particular version of history. Pant never mourns these losses directly. But he circles them. He writes around vanished eateries the way one speaks about old friends no longer seen. No judgment. Just absence, noted.
We get a map with missing neighbourhoods, a route that doubles back on itself. We also get an ethnography of hunger. What people in Delhi craved at different moments in time. What they missed. What they insisted on reinventing.
This insistence is key. Delhi's foodscape, as Pant sees it, is not a static inheritance. It's a constant improvisation. He gives the example of how Mughlai cuisine was repurposed by post-Partition Punjabi refugees. What was once slow, courtly, ceremonial became fast, fiery, and practical. Nihari, korma, and qorma changed hands. Changed oils. Changed meanings. The migrants who arrived from Rawalpindi and Lahore had different needs, different tongues. They didn't preserve Mughal recipes, they mutated them. This is culinary history as lived resistance in the kitchen.
We then collectively arrive at a conclusion: food as adaptation. Not nostalgia. Not restoration. Not even survival exactly but a kind of semi-conscious synthesis. His prose mirrors this ethic. It lifts phrases from old Urdu poets. It riffs on colonial gazetteers. It quotes hawkers. It also speculates.
This can make for an uneven reading experience. There are moments where the digressions pile up. A description of a long-lost kachori leads to a historical aside, which leads to a personal memory, which leads to a speculation about Persian influences and you feel the chapter is more compost than essay. But even this, I'd argue, is the form doing its work. Pant is essentially letting things rot. Break down. Ferment. That's what food does when left alone, and that's what language does when released from a thesis.
Still, the absence of critical friction can feel like a missed opportunity. For all its richness, the book rarely addresses power directly. Caste is mentioned only glancingly. Class appears more often, but often as background. And while Pant is certainly aware of these forces, his inclination is to observe, not intervene. This reluctance feels generational, maybe even aesthetic. It seems his eye is trained on continuity, not rupture. But sometimes, I wished he'd push harder and ask who gets to narrate this city's food stories, and who disappears between bites.
There is also an irony in the book – Pant is both an insider and an outsider to his own material. He is a trained academic, but he distrusts academia. He is a Delhiwallah, but one who arrived in the city as a student from the hills. His nostalgia is earned, not inherited. And that makes him unique to write this kind of book.
Author Pushpesh Pant (Courtesy the publisher)
What stays on the tongue long after the meal is over. What stories repeat themselves in different accents. What dishes resurface years later under new names. This, I think, is the radical heart of the book. It's not about preserving Delhi's culinary past. It's about showing how the past lives on in distortion, in mishearing, in new combinations.
So what does that make this book? A field guide to edible memory? Perhaps. By the end, you do not know more about Delhi's food history. But you know how it might have felt to eat your way through it. You know how the city might have smelled on a humid day in the 1960s. You know why someone once said the chaat at Bengali Market was 'what love tastes like when it breaks your heart.' You know that history, too, can be eaten and that its aftertaste is often more vivid than the event itself.
And maybe that's enough. Or maybe it's everything.
Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.