The flavors of sacred India
- Pankaj Sharma

The food, in Hinduism, has its own qualities - balance and purity (quality sattva); energy, strength, passion and desire (rajas qualities) or inaction and heaviness (quality tamas) - which influence not only the body but also the spirit. In this sense, it has a powerful impact on health.
In India, feeding is also a ritualized social act and a tool for expressing feelings. Joy, love, secular or religious holidays, birth, death: everything is manifested through food.

For Pankaj Sharma, as for every Indian, to cook is to maintain this sacred, intimate and social connection to food. By bringing together in this book 60 traditional Indian vegetarian recipes, she shares with us her attachment to her culture and her beliefs, while demonstrating that Indian cuisine can be accessible to all and adapted to our lives and our Western palates. .

The recipes, classified according to the different elements that constitute a meal - the classic starter / main course / dessert, but also the dairy products with paneer and ghee, the drinks, the breads, the chutneys and the pickles - are enamelled of personal stories of Pankaj, evoking the links between food and the divine, or the traditional rituals that are dear to him.

Pankaj Sharma was born in Jaipur, the state capital of Rajasthan. When she settles in France, she is confronted with eating habits very different from hers, and discovers that being a vegetarian, unlike India, is belonging to a minority. Anxious to assert and share the richness of this family and cultural heritage, she created, in 2007, an Indian vegetarian cooking blog that soon became a great success.

Hardcover - 19.5cm x 17cm - Illustrations
189 pages
Author: Pankaj Sharma
Editions Almora