Seventeen Tomatoes

Seventeen Tomatoes is a series of linked stories which revolve around two Sikh boys coming of age in an Indian army camp in Kashmir. Each story takes a minor character from the previous tale and builds a new tale, weaving a collective portrait of the border community. In addition to the boys, Adi (a student of gardens) and Arjun (a budding chemist), we meet a boatman's daughter, a captured Pakistani officer, a celebrity cricket umpire and Parachute Aunty. From modern missiles to cricket matches, from religious miracles to the sumptuous gardens of Shalimar and Nishat, Singh treats beauty and politics and religion in a gentle and humane manner. "His scientific knowledge and diction is unusual in a storyteller--like technology and poetry smashing into each other. It's an exciting collision." --Quill & Quire "The robust, haunting stories of Jaspreet Singh recite an extraordinary human drama. They create a portrait of Kashmir and India that is at once convoluted, comical, raw and savage, steeped in myth yet paradoxically tempered by science. As the old and the new clash, the stories examine the edges of human experience and their wayward effects upon the heart." --Trevor Ferguson "Funny, tragic, elegantly told, these Tales from Kashmir should be read everywhere." --Kristen den Hartog "With just the right mix of suspense and lyricism, and an exacting eye for mot juste, Jaspreet Singh weaves a tapestry out of the fabulous and the real." --Taras Grescoe Born in 1969, Jaspreet Singh grew up in India and Kashmir. In 1990 he moved to Montreal, where he received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from McGill University. In March 2002, Quill and Quire identified him as one of the five new talents to watch. His stories have appeared in the Fiddlehead and Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope and he is currently at work on a novel, The Book of Hanging Gardens.

In Tomatoes, Miriam Rubin gives this staple of southern gardens the passionate portrait it deserves, exploring the tomato's rich history in southern culture and inspiring home cooks to fully enjoy these summer fruits in all their glorious variety. Rubin, a prominent food writer and tomato connoisseur, provides fifty vibrant recipes as well as wisdom about how to choose tomatoes and which tomato is right for which dish. Tomatoes includes recipes that celebrate the down-home, inventive, and contemporary, such as Stand-over-the-Sink Tomato Sandwiches, Spiced Green Tomato Crumb Cake, Green Tomato and Pork Tenderloin Biscuit Pie, and Tomato and Golden Raisin Chutney. Rubin also offers useful cooking tips, lively lessons on history, cultivation, and preserving, and variations for year-round enjoyment of the tomato.

Home cooks and gourmets, chefs and restaurateurs, epicures, and simple food lovers of all stripes will delight in this smorgasbord of the history and culture of food and drink. Professor of Culinary History Andrew Smith and nearly 200 authors bring together in 770 entries the scholarship on wide-ranging topics from airline and funeral food to fad diets and fast food; drinks like lemonade, Kool-Aid, and Tang; foodstuffs like Jell-O, Twinkies, and Spam; and Dagwood, hoagie, and Sloppy Joe sandwiches.

Alabama’s history and culture revealed through fourteen iconic foods, dishes, and beverages The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods explores well-known Alabama food traditions to reveal salient histories of the state in a new way. In this book that is part history, part travelogue, and part cookbook, Emily Blejwas pays homage to fourteen emblematic foods, dishes, and beverages, one per chapter, as a lens for exploring the diverse cultures and traditions of the state. Throughout Alabama’s history, food traditions have been fundamental to its customs, cultures, regions, social and political movements, and events. Each featured food is deeply rooted in Alabama identity and has a story with both local and national resonance. Blejwas focuses on lesser-known food stories from around the state, illuminating the lives of a diverse populace: Poarch Creeks, Creoles of color, wild turkey hunters, civil rights activists, Alabama club women, frontier squatters, Mardi Gras revelers, sharecroppers, and Vietnamese American shrimpers, among others. A number of Alabama figures noted for their special contributions to the state’s foodways, such as George Washington Carver and Georgia Gilmore, are profiled as well. Alabama’s rich food history also unfolds through accounts of community events and a food-based economy. Highlights include Sumter County barbecue clubs, Mobile’s banana docks, Appalachian Decoration Days, cane syrup making, peanut boils, and eggnog parties. Drawing on historical research and interviews with home cooks, chefs, and community members cooking at local gatherings and for holidays, Blejwas details the myths, legends, and truths underlying Alabama’s beloved foodways. With nearly fifty color illustrations and fifteen recipes, The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods will allow all Alabamians to more fully understand their shared cultural heritage.

The tomato. As savory as any vegetable, as sweet as its fellow fruits, the seeded succulent inspires a cult–like devotion from food lovers on all continents. The people of Ohio love the tomato so much they made tomato juice the official state beverage. An annual food festival in Spain draws thousands of participants in a 100–ton tomato fight. The inimitable, versatile tomato has conquered the cuisines of Spain and Italy, and in America, it is our most popular garden vegetable. Journalist Arthur Allen understands the spell of the tomato and is your guide in telling its dramatic story. He begins by describing in mouthwatering detail the wonder of a truly delicious tomato, then introduces the man who prospected for wild tomato genes in South America and made them available to tomato breeders. He tells the baleful story of enslaved Mexican Indians in the Florida tomato fields, the conquest of the canning tomato by the Chinese Army, and the struggle of Italian tomato producers to maintain a way of life. Allen combines reportage, archival research, and innumerable anecdotes in a lively narrative that, through the lens of today's global market, tells a story that will resonate from greenhouse to dinner table.

India is passing through the night. Night, just like rain, hides the ugliness of a place so well. We are running behind the backs of houses. Thousands of tiny lights have been turned on inside them. Towns pass by, and villages. I remember my first journey to Kashmir on this train. It was a very hot day, and despite that, passengers were drinking tea, garam chai, and the whole compartment smelled of a wedding. Girls in beautiful saris and salwar-kameezes sat not far from me; some of them spoke hardly any English. Their skins had the shine of ripe fruits. How shy I was then. – from Chef by Jaspreet Singh The year is 2006, and Kirpal Singh is returning to Kashmir fourteen years after abruptly quitting his military post as a chef to Kashmir’s Governor, an army general. He has been summoned back to cook for the wedding of the General’s daughter Rubiya, who is scandalously engaged to a Muslim man. As his train speeds past the ever-changing Indian landscape, Chef Kirpal contemplates the twists and turns of his life. In his brain, a recently diagnosed tumor grows. Kirpal made this journey for the first time many years ago, as a naïve nineteen-year-old craving a glimpse of Kashmir’s Siachen Glacier, where his war hero father had perished in a plane crash. Joining the military despite his mother’s protests, the inexperienced Kirpal apprenticed to Chef Kishen in the General’s kitchen. A muscled former infantryman whose beefy exterior masked the passionate soul of a culinary poet, Kishen had known Kirpal’s father, as had the glamorous wife of a local colonel. The boy hungrily devoured their stories of his father’s bravery. The young Kirpal’s confidence grew as the kind Kishen taught him to tease the taste of pent-up desire from fruits and spices, and advised him on the seduction of women. Then a careless remark caused Kishen to be abruptly demoted, dispatched to an icy post atop Siachen Glacier. Kirpal was suddenly alone in the kitchen, promoted to chef. After a particularly violent period of war, hearing that Kishen was in the local hospital, young Kirpal stole Kishen’s confiscated journal from the General’s study. Searching through the pages to understand more about his mentor, Kirpal began to consider the world anew. A trusted member of the General’s household, his faith in the rightness of India’s position faltered as he witnessed some grim secrets. Later, when accompanying the General on a brief mission to the glacier, Kirpal once again encountered Kishen and became a covert, yet unwilling, accomplice in his former mentor’s final act of rebellion. Kirpal was also disillusioned in his youth by an encounter with a beautiful Muslim woman, Irem, imprisoned at the local hospital as a suspected terrorist. Helped by the nurse, a smitten Kirpal had cooked for Irem, under the pretence of conducting interrogation for the General. After she was abruptly taken away for further interrogation, Kirpal was prevented from seeing her again until years later, in terrible circumstances. Today, speeding back to the Kashmir that he both loves and dreads, Kirpal’s slowing brain is choked in sad memories. Yet he still finds room for hope. “For a long time now I have stayed away from certain people,” he thinks. What will his actions be, when he encounters them again? Set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of army-occupied Kashmir, Jaspreet Singh’s brilliant first novel, Chef, is a lushly poetic and immensely compassionate portrayal of an unforgettable flawed hero, at the time of his life’s reckoning.

Diasporic writing simultaneously asserts a sense of belonging and expresses a sense of being 'ethnic' in a society of immigration. The essays in this volume explore how contemporary diasporic writers in English use their works to mediate this dissonance and seek to work through the ethical, political, and personal affiliations of diasporic identities and subjectivities. The essays call for a remapping of post-colonial literatures and a reevaluation of the Anglophone literary canon by including post-colonial diasporic literary discourses. Demonstrating that an intercultural dialogue and constant cultural brokering are a must in our post-colonial world, this volume is a valuable contribution to the ongoing discourse on post-colonial diasporic literatures and identities.

In the history of food, the tomato is a relative newcomer outside its ancestral home in Mesoamerica. And yet, as we devour pizza by the slice, dip French fries in ketchup, delight in a beautiful Bolognese sauce, or savor tomato curries, it would now be impossible to imagine the food cultures of many nations without the tomato. The journey taken by the tomato from its ancestral home in the southern Americas to Europe and back is a riveting story full of culinary discovery, innovation, drama, and dispute. Today, the tomato is at the forefront of scientific advances in cultivation and the study of taste, as well as a popular subject of heritage conservation (heirloom tomato salad, anyone?). But the tomato has also faced challenges every step of the way into our gardens and kitchens—including that eternal question: is it a fruit or a vegetable? In this book, Clarissa Hyman charts the eventful history of this ubiquitous everyday edible that is so often taken for granted. Hyman discusses tomato soup and ketchup, heritage tomatoes, tomato varieties, breeding and genetics, nutrition, tomatoes in Italy, tomatoes in art, and tomatoes for the future. Featuring delicious modern and historical recipes, such as the infamous “man-winning tomato salad” once featured in Good Housekeeping, this is a juicy and informative history of one of our most beloved foods.