In India, caste system ensures you are what you eat

When Charles de Gaulle grumbled about the difficulty of governing a nation with 246 different cheeses, someone should have put him on a flight to India, to experience some real complexity - the kind where the entire culinary cosmos, not just one lump of dairy, changes every few train stations.

There is no such thing as Indian cuisine. Every region has its own distinct traditions. Brahmins in the south and some other regions will not tolerate onions or garlic in their dishes. For a north Indian, making a good gravy-based dish without onions and garlic is as impossible as trying to reconstitute an egg yolk once it has been broken.

Much of this regional cuisine has featured in cookbooks. The culinary traditions of the royal families have also been chronicled, with one writer, Salma Husain, even using museum archives to recreate dishes served to the magnificent Mughals.

But a new kind of Indian cookbook is becoming the flavour du jour; those that document the food eaten by particular castes or communities.

Recipes based on caste may strike a foreigner as strange, possibly regressive, but strict social stratification remains a reality in India, along with precise and unbending rules that have evolved over the millennia concerning the food that can be eaten by various groups.

Like the caste system itself, the food rules constitute an immense and informal codification whose only raison d'etre appears to be the classification of Indians into "higher" and "lower" categories, with infinite gradations up and down the food chain.

Recipes for the dishes eaten by a specific caste used to be transmitted seamlessly, due to several generations living together in extended families. Today, as young Indians leave home to study or for work, this oral tradition is weakening.