A bhaji made with 

moong and dill, to be had along with jowar bhakri

A lot of people would think I wrote ‘Anna he Apoorna Brahma’, because of the beef
ban. That is not true. I started researching for, and writing, the book over three years
ago mainly because I wanted to let the world — and my children — know what my
people, the Mangs of Marathwada, ate. And, beef formed just a part of our diet. Also,
when I looked around, I saw books and blogs on every kind of food imaginable:
south Indian, Bengali, Syrian Christian, Parsi, Punjabi and so on, but there was very
little about Dalit food, and that is when I decided to give it a go.

The title of my book is a play on a saying found in Hindu scriptures, about ‘anna’ or
food being ‘Brahman’, the supreme reality or ‘Poorna Brahma’. The saying refers to
the four satvik flavours that are supposed to be found on every plate, or that ought
to be a part of a complete meal. In the case of Dalits, though, our plate has always
been incomplete — and hence, ‘Anna he Apoorna Brahma’. Forget four flavours,
sometimes there was only the flavour of salt in our food. Thus, the story of Dalit food
has for long been defined by a lack of it, or at least, lacking in flavours determined by
Hindu scriptures. The recipes and stories in my book are mostly about food found in
Marathwada, and are not representative of Dalit food in Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu,
or, say, Bihar. This is the food my parents ate and their parents ate, and I, too,
sometimes eat. It is an acquired taste, especially one that has been acquired due to
centuries of discrimination.

Roasting onions for a fiery masala called yesur

If you were to ever dip into the book and pay close attention to the recipes — you’d
realise that most of them do not need oil. Why is that? Because, Dalits could not
afford oil, and that is why we have dishes such as the steamed mutke, which is made
out of jowar, garlic and coriander. Instead of oil we used beef fat. Then, there is the
famous Maharashtrian dish, the rich puran poli, but the Mangs used to substitute
ghee with butter milk for obvious reasons. Reading about some of the other dishes
in the book would amuse someone with a sense of irony. For instance, we have been
having a sort of blood pudding for ages. Lakuti is essentially cow/buffalo/bullock
blood that is generally infused with a fiery masala called yesur and then boiled. We
have also been practising ‘nose to tail eating’ for years. In fact, fashi, a dish made out
of the epiglottis of a cow/bullock has long been a delicacy among Dalits in
Marathwada. I believe foraging is the new trend in the West, and there are
restaurants that take great pride in having foraged food as part of their menu. But
again, centuries of deprivation made expert foragers out of us — wild leafy
vegetables, bee larvae and pumpkin leaves were for a long time a part of our diet.