Lessons in flavour and frugality from home cooks in Dharavi, 'Asia's largest slum'

As a teenager living in England in the 1970s, most of my friends in the London satellite town of Slough (home of the fictitious Wernham Hogg Paper Company in hit television show The Office) were from working-class families. Their diet was limited and poor: processed white bread, chip butties (sandwiches filled with fries), potato chips, processed cheese slices, sausages and tinned food. An aubergine, for example, was unheard of and even if one had been presented, its purpleness would have been something to be feared.

I had assumed that the working classes elsewhere in Europe ate just as badly until I travelled to Strasbourg, in France, to stay with a friend's parents. Brigitte's father was a retired miner and her mother a housewife. I expected indifferent food.

Instead, the ratatouille was a profusion of bright flavours, the baguettes were bought fresh every day, snacks were not cheese and onion crisps but artichokes on toast and, most staggeringly of all, they often had a crispy endive salad before the dessert or cheese to cleanse the palate - a phrase rarely heard over the rustling of a TV dinner being opened in Slough homes. The meals of this French working-class family were nutritious, balanced and refined.

Diet, I realised, should not be universally linked to class. Nor, as I have discovered in India over the past few years, should it be linked unquestioningly to economic status.

Poor Indians obviously have few resources and have to keep things simple. Dire poverty can mean a sad meal of a chapati (unleavened bread) with a raw onion and a green chilli. Droughts in areas such as Bundelkhand, in central India, are forcing some farmers to have just chapati and salt for dinner. But away from the extremes, Indians with little money can prepare meals that are as satisfying as they are simple, especially so in Dharavi, in Mumbai, described as "the biggest slum in Asia", or "an informal settlement", as the politically correct prefer to call it.

The Indecisive Chicken is a collection of recipes from eight women who live in Dharavi and came together for cooking workshops presided over by Prajna Desai, an art historian who writes about contemporary art. Desai wanted to collect their recipes, along with information and anecdotes about their lives, and publish them - something the women themselves found bewildering.