Copeland Marks’s The Varied Kitchens of India, first published by M. Evans and Company in 1986, carries a subtitle that reveals its unusual comparative ambition: Cuisines of the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta, Bengalis, Jews of Calcutta, Kashmiris, Parsis, and Tibetans of Darjeeling. Rather than treating “Indian food” as a single national cuisine, Marks organized the book around six genuinely distinct culinary traditions coexisting within India, each shaped by a different community’s history, migration, and religious practice, with the Baghdadi Jewish cuisine of Calcutta taking its place alongside Anglo-Indian, Bengali, Kashmiri, Parsi, and Tibetan Darjeeling cooking as one of six case studies in India’s culinary diversity.
A Traveling Cookbook Author’s Method
Copeland Harris Marks, born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1921, brought an unusual biography to his career as a cookbook author. After earning an agriculture degree from the University of Vermont, he served in the Burma campaign during the Second World War, then spent eight years in the United States Foreign Service before opening an import-export business that took him to live for extended periods in Mexico, Guatemala, India, and South Africa. This itinerant career, combining agricultural training, wartime service in Asia, and diplomatic and commercial work across several continents, gave Marks direct, extended residence in the regions whose cuisines he later documented, rather than the shorter research trips more typical of food writers surveying unfamiliar culinary traditions. Over his career he wrote sixteen cookbooks, including The Indonesian Kitchen (1981), False Tongues and Sunday Bread: A Guatemalan and Mayan Cookbook (1985), and The Great Book of Couscous (1994), establishing a consistent method of embedding himself within a specific regional or communal culinary tradition and then documenting it in detail for an English-language audience.
The Varied Kitchens of India applied this method to India, but with a twist distinctive among Marks’s body of work: rather than covering a single national or regional cuisine, the book deliberately fragmented “Indian food” into six specific, minority or regionally distinct culinary traditions, each associated with a particular community whose cooking had developed somewhat apart from the mainstream Hindu vegetarian and Mughlai traditions most commonly associated with Indian food in the American popular imagination of the 1980s.
Calcutta’s Jewish Cuisine in Context
Placing the Jews of Calcutta alongside Anglo-Indians, Bengalis, Kashmiris, Parsis, and Tibetan Darjeeling communities reflected a considered curatorial logic: each of these six groups represented a culinary tradition shaped by a distinct migration history and religious or ethnic identity operating within, but not fully absorbed into, the broader currents of Bengali and North Indian cooking. Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community, having arrived from Iraq and Aleppo beginning in the late eighteenth century, developed a cuisine that combined Iraqi Jewish culinary tradition, kosher dietary requirements, and ingredients and techniques absorbed from Bengali and broader Indian cooking over nearly two centuries of residence in the city, producing dishes that were recognizably Sephardic and Middle Eastern in structure while incorporating distinctly Bengali ingredients and flavors unavailable in the communities’ Iraqi countries of origin.
This kind of hybrid cuisine, neither fully Iraqi nor fully Bengali but a genuine synthesis of both traditions, exemplified exactly the phenomenon Marks’s book set out to document across all six of its featured communities: minority culinary traditions that had evolved through genuine cultural exchange with their surrounding Indian environment while retaining distinct religious, ethnic, or regional markers of origin. For Calcutta’s Jews specifically, food functioned as one of the primary ways communal identity and kosher observance persisted across generations, even as many other markers of distinct communal life gradually receded through assimilation and, eventually, mass emigration to Israel, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere.
Documenting Communities in Simultaneous Decline
By the mid-1980s, when Marks was researching and writing the book, several of his six featured communities faced comparable demographic pressures: Calcutta’s Anglo-Indian and Jewish populations had both shrunk substantially through emigration following Indian independence, while the city’s Parsi community, though more stable, remained a small minority increasingly concentrated in Bombay rather than Calcutta. Marks’s decision to document all of these traditions together, rather than focusing on a single community, captured a broader pattern of minority culinary heritage across urban India facing similar pressures of demographic decline and cultural dilution, even as each community’s specific culinary tradition remained, at the time of the book’s writing, still actively practiced by remaining community members willing to share recipes and cooking knowledge with an outside researcher.
A Comparative Approach Still Valuable Today
Nearly four decades after its original publication, The Varied Kitchens of India remains a valuable resource precisely because of its comparative structure, allowing readers to see Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish cuisine not in isolation but alongside the other minority culinary traditions with which it coexisted and, in various ways, exchanged ingredients and techniques over nearly two centuries of shared urban life. For researchers and home cooks interested specifically in Indian Jewish cuisine, Marks’s book complements more focused works such as his own later volume on Sephardic cooking, offering instead a wider lens that situates Calcutta’s Jewish culinary tradition within the fuller context of the city’s, and the country’s, remarkable diversity of minority foodways.
What a Community Cookbook Preserves
Cookbooks documenting minority or endangered culinary traditions serve a preservation function that extends well beyond the kitchen. Recipes carry embedded within them information about trade networks, ingredient availability, religious dietary law, and the specific adaptations a transplanted community made to unfamiliar local ingredients, all of which can otherwise be difficult to reconstruct once a community has dispersed and its distinctive cooking practices are no longer passed down through daily household routine. For Calcutta’s Jewish community specifically, whose numbers had already declined substantially by the time Marks conducted his research, a documented recipe collection captured techniques and dishes that depended on direct transmission from cooks who had learned them from earlier generations, a chain of transmission that grows more fragile with each decade of continued emigration and demographic decline.
Marks’s own extended residence in India, part of the broader itinerant life that took him to live for periods in several different countries, gave him the kind of sustained, embedded access to community kitchens that a shorter research visit could not have provided. This method, consistent across his sixteen cookbooks documenting cuisines from Indonesia to Guatemala to India, positioned him as a documentarian of minority and regional culinary traditions more broadly, rather than a specialist in any single cuisine, and The Varied Kitchens of India represents one of the more ambitious applications of that method, requiring him to gain access to and document not one but six distinct culinary traditions within a single country.
A Distinct Angle from Marks’s Later Work
It is worth distinguishing The Varied Kitchens of India from Marks’s later book focused specifically and exclusively on Sephardic cooking, which included Indian Jewish recipes within a broader survey of Sephardic culinary tradition worldwide. Where that later book approached Indian Jewish cuisine as one instance of a global Sephardic culinary heritage stretching from Spain through the Ottoman Empire to India, The Varied Kitchens of India took the opposite analytical approach, treating Calcutta’s Jewish cuisine as one thread within a specifically Indian tapestry of minority culinary traditions, comparing it directly to Anglo-Indian, Bengali, Kashmiri, Parsi, and Tibetan Darjeeling cooking rather than to Sephardic cuisine elsewhere in the world. Together, the two books offer complementary vantage points on the same underlying subject, one placing Calcutta’s Jewish food within a global Sephardic context, the other placing it within a specifically Indian context of minority culinary coexistence, both approaches equally valid and equally valuable for understanding how a small, transplanted Jewish community sustained a distinctive culinary identity across nearly two centuries of life in Bengal.
For readers seeking to understand Indian Jewish cuisine specifically, both books belong on the same shelf, each illuminating a different facet of how Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community cooked, ate, and preserved its identity through food across nearly two hundred years of life far from Baghdad.