Part memoir, part cookbook, Chhaunk playfully uses food to talk about economics, society and India, and makes unexpected connections between what we eat and how we live. This in turn, also becomes a basis to examine how economics influences culture and eating habits. Writer and critic Nilanjana Roy spoke to Abhijit Banerjee, Nobel Prize-winning economist, writer, and cookbook author, and Cheyenne Olivier, the illustrator and artist whose work brings a parallel narrative to their book Chhaunk. In a conversation with Scroll, Banerjee and Olivier talked about their earliest memories of food, the politics of the dining table, why everyone has a right to pleasurable food, and how its scarcity will affect each of us. Excerpts from the conversation:
The first question I wanted to ask was, you know, the title. Chhaunk, for any one of us who lives in India, is the act of basically adding spices or curry leaves or a few other things, tomatoes, etc. It’s so evocative – that word Chhaunk. It captures both the sound and the sense of cooking. And I wonder whether you could take us back to your earliest memories of watching your family cook or learning to cook yourself. You mentioned in the book that it brought you closer to your mother. But what did you find satisfying about the act of cooking?
Abhijit Banerjee (AB): My earliest memory of chhaunk is always not so much a visual memory as it’s a sound and a smell. I remember in our house in Kolkata, we had a cook, and he was a very good cook, but a conventional one. One thing you would smell often was something with a red chilli or a green chilli, and I smell that often when I’m passing houses in Kolkata. It’s a specific smell.
So it will be the sound of the chhaunk and immediately the staircase would fill up with vapours because the kitchen was downstairs. I remember noticing that there was a rhythm and there was a sound, and then there was a very strong smell that pervaded the house, and then another sound sometimes of it being poured on. I remember the sound because when it was poured, something would pop – the mustard seeds. So there was some sound of the mustard seeds popping, and then that smell came.
It’s a smash and a splatter, you know. The fennel gives it a sweetness, gives it a pungency, and then you’ve got chilli blasting your eyes out, and you’re in the back.
AB: Exactly. So that was my association with chhaunk. Phoron is the Bengali word for chhaunk.
And Cheyenne, I just wanted to thank you for your lively illustrations. You know, they feel like a companion parallel narrative. What were your earliest visual memories of food, either kitchens, markets or gardens?
Cheyenne Olivier (CO): It would not be my first memory of being in India and eating Indian food. But I remember the first trip to India. I really loved the palak paneer, and I asked Abhijit for the recipe and I tried to make the recipe for all my friends back in France. I precisely remember not getting the chhaunk and not getting the fact that you shouldn’t wait one full minute after you throw the spices. I remember not mastering that, and not understanding why it was not so fragrant. After that, it was burnt. Once I understood, then I asked again, What can I do to make it better? I remember the chhaunk as being the first breakthrough in Indian cuisine for me.
That’s wonderful because for Abhijit, it’s a kind of gateway as well. It opens up an entire world of sensory memories. And for you, it’s like an introduction to a completely different cuisine. I love Chhaunk as well as your previous book because you take us through these light meditations. You cover such a range of subjects. It’s never heavy, but it does open up a series of conversations. It often felt like being in conversation with both of you. And you say talking about food was like talking about everything else in the world, from politics to history, to economics, to culture.
So can we start with gender in the kitchen? I read somewhere that men cook a few meals a week on average, while women cook nearly all the meals. And that imbalance, as you write in a chapter called “Women and Work”, is much sharper in India. So could you introduce some of your mother’s and your own insights about women’s work in the home, how that often expands to prevent them from taking a place in the outside world, and if you feel like it, just introduce the ghonto. You know, that sublime, very everyday mélange of vegetables. It’s so humble but so comforting.
AB: My mother was an activist and an academic, and she would theorise all the time about how these gender relations pervade society, how everything in our life is driven by the odd structures we have imposed on our particular roles as gendered human beings. This was a recurrent theme of conversation. She wasn’t exactly given to being subtle. She was pretty blunt. So it was a combination of hanging sentences about “oh, men,” or “oh, Bengali men,” or “these men”. She would often emphasise how men spend very little time on housework. We give the numbers in another piece, but in India, it’s much more dire than elsewhere. Indian women have the longest housework day. But the other point she used to make is that when men cook, it’s often a little theatrical, you know, sound and fury.
“I’m going to cook”, they’ll say in Bengali and you’ll hear that sentence echoing through the house. Everybody will have to know that Uncle X is cooking his famous meat dish, and everybody will have to be excited. Then the maid would cut the onions, grate the ginger, grind the garlic, and then he would come and just move the ladle and leave. That would be his divine blessing rather than actual cooking. That was very much a part of male cooking, which was also something that didn’t happen very often.
Now, my father, I would say, made breakfast for us every day. So I was not entirely unfamiliar with the idea that men could do routine jobs. My father would make eggs, bacon, and toast for us every day. He was really a stickler for timing because his toast, which he had carefully made and buttered, could not get cold. So we would get yelled at for being late. But at least there was a role model available, which was a picky cook. Those are mypersonal gender associations – my mother yelling about gender all the time in the kitchen and elsewhere – and then the general space of male cooking in Kolkata in the 1960s.
And Cheyenne, did you grow up in a highly gendered kitchen as well? Or was it much more egalitarian?
CO: I know I’m not the one for that question because my dad raised us alone – me and my sister. He would even outdo women on housework. He was doing everything – cooking every single meal, cleaning, ironing, everything around the house. We would help too. It was very egalitarian. We did not consider this a gendered role but I guess this is very unusual. I grew up thinking differently. For a piece, we had a fierce conversation about the role of men in the kitchen. I think later when I grew up, I started noticing men sitting at the table while all the women started to sit up and clean.
I just wanted to convey in the last illustration for this piece that it’s not so much that the women will do all the tasks, but that they will have in mind the full spectrum of micro-tasks that need to be done in order for the task to be complete. That struck me much later because at one point, my cousin came to live with us and he was included in the girls’ general call, so we would do all the housework together.
That’s unusual and striking because it sheds light on what different households are like.
AB: Very unusual.
What you described with the men sitting at the table waiting to be served is very familiar to multiple households. I wanted to take it forward a bit – that food, cooking, and preparing meals together could play an active role in relieving the loneliness of old age, for example, or in breaking down cultural prejudices, encouraging more openness between people of different backgrounds. And not for the first time, you realise that economics is actually about human behaviour.
A cruel sentence, but I’ll let it go.
I’m sorry, treading dangerous ground.
AB: It’s good.
But do you think that’s actually possible? You know what you see as the helplessness of old age – the loneliness, the shame. And you have, in different ways, seen various people go through just the act of cooking together. How much would you need to change to accomplish that?
AB: Not a lot. I feel like one of the things that makes cooking relatively special among the arts is that a certain degree of success is just a matter of being. The problem with playing the sitar is that your success depends on somebody else listening, and maybe music is even more personal. Painting would be entirely outward-looking. With food, you taste it, and you eat it. You think, okay, well, that’s a nicer meal than I would have had otherwise, and that'‘s satisfying.
In that sense, it is a very accessible form of being creative in some limited way. You follow a recipe, or you do what somebody else tells you to do, you just follow it, and it's done. It tastes pretty good, and you feel a sense of accomplishment. It happens quickly – in 30 minutes, your dal is done. You add your chhaunk, you already have rice, you put it together with some achaar, and you have a nice meal. It’s very finite, and in that sense, I feel that it’s a good one for a lot of lonely people to do.
They can do things together. If two people cook, then you can have a really nice meal without a lot of effort or stress. That’s what stands out about cooking relative to other forms of creativity. It’s something that doesn’t need much planning and is very accessible, especially for people who are feeling isolated.
I really love that your recipes, by and large, have a lovely flourish to them, and there are obviously party pieces, but the way you put together your recipes is accessible. Now we’ve been talking about the happy side of food, but I want to take you into something else that you wrote. Mealtimes can be wartime. Food brings people together, but the dining table sometimes witnesses the most bitter or the most angry of exchanges in personal terms.
In India, we’ve seen the rise of vegetarian versus non-vegetarian divides. With aggressive vegetarianism, borrowed from caste suppression, now being used to enforce religious persecution, I’m sure we are not alone. But as an economist, how do you see these choices – what happens at the personal table expanding into this aggressive bid for control? It’s sometimes irrational behaviour, but it’s very powerful behaviour.
AB: I don’t think it’s irrational. I think it is a way to assert a certain authority within society. It’s to say that, you know, you guys are a little bit behind us. We are more sophisticated, or more advanced in some ways, and you should follow suit and not eat these things that somehow smell bad to us. So I do think it’s a conflict – between castes in particular, as you said, but also between religions.
It’s a very easy way to point to your own superiority. Maybe under the theory that violence is bad, it’s a way of, in a sense, being violent to people by invoking this trope of violence. You don’t have to say it, but you can imply that somehow you are more brutish than me. I think that’s why it’s very powerful. The idea that food is a domain where we can express our hierarchies is a very powerful one.
It’s funny what’s happening in India, though. You have both a version of sanskritisation – some people from middle and lower castes who couldn’t afford to be vegetarian and ate anything they could get are moving towards being vegetarian, partly under social pressure. At the same time, the number of people who eat meat but not at home is going up.
So you have these parallel moves – sending the signal of caste and purity, and then sneaking out to have tandoori chicken. I think both are happening at the same time and in that sense, it’s pretty fraught. Actually, there is a book in Marathi – translated into English – on caste cooking in Maharashtra, particularly low-caste cooking in Maharashtra, and it starts with a diatribe on this very issue.
It’s a diatribe on the oppression of vegetarians. It’s an issue that is being joined and theorised, which I think is useful. At least we should understand what exactly is at stake in this. Interestingly, Cheyenne is vegetarian, and I’m not.
CO: I have a non-Indian version of this. Part of my family was, or is, in the extreme – only organic vegan. I grew up vegetarian but in a much more subdued version of this. I remember some of them coming with loads of food when they visited, and I found that profoundly insulting.
I think I grew out of pure vegetarianism precisely because I feel bad when someone has cooked a perfectly good fish. Whenever I go to Bengal, the fish looks absolutely wonderful. I’m not vegetarian out of ideology; it’s more about taste. But I still try a little bit because I feel refusing it is extremely rude. Maybe this comes from seeing the extreme version, which feels like a negation of shared time and space. It'‘s as if we might as well eat in different rooms.
So you're saying you didn’t like it when your relatives brought their own food because they didn’t trust the food in your home?
CO: Yes, exactly. I don’t think I fully understood it then, but I remember the rest of my family feeling insulted. It wasn’t just bringing food for dietary needs – it was bringing half a store full of products that seemed purer than what we could offer. In some sense, it negated the invitation itself.
I travelled a lot, and when I was in China, I decided that a little bit of pork in my soup was perfectly okay because the grandmother who cooked it had spent the whole day preparing a wonderful meal for us. I felt that was infinitely more important than my personal taste, health, or dietary preferences.
That’s such a wonderful insight into purity, choice, and force. All these elements seem to come into controlling what’s on the plate. The more I read through the book, the more I realised that what’s on the plate is profoundly political. I was also thinking about how food gets us through a lot of human connections and relationships. It’s a comfort. It’s the thing we fall back on. And yet, there’s the scarcity side of it, and you often say food conversations have to address inequality. I loved what you said about systems of mutual aid – charity is important, but it can’t just be charity. It has to be a norm of helping friends and neighbors in need, so that the act of asking can be easy. I was very struck by that respect for the person who may be in need or may need a little bit of assistance at a certain time. From income guarantees to staving off famine to school meals, would you share some of the most effective suggestions you’ve heard of tried out, or seen in practice, to create equality on the plate?
AB: This is a vast area, but I think one of the things we often miss in conversations about hunger is the idea that people want to enjoy their food. That’s a very key piece of this conversation. It’s easy to say we shouldn't let people starve, and we should provide the basic minimum – even people with very anti-distribution views will agree with that. But that step is often qualified by focusing on nutritious food, which excludes the fun, enjoyable, or tasty aspects.
There’s a real ideological bias against allowing people to enjoy food. Social policy often treats food as purely functional, focusing on nutrition. Nutrition is important, but food is one of the few areas where people have relatively easy access to pleasure. I think pleasure should be a right for everyone. People should be able to enjoy something in their day. Why not?
People find ways to do this. They’ll add a little extra sugar in tea to make it feel like dessert. Everyone is looking for an opportunity to infuse pleasure into their eating. Social policy should recognise this instead of focusing solely on nutrition. I’m not against nutrition-first approaches, but we should also be mindful that people may sometimes prefer a little less nutrition for a little more pleasure. That’s human and even necessary – people need to feel like their life isn’t entirely dreary.
It’s so important. May I share a quick story? There was a time when I was interviewing homeless women on the streets of Delhi. They were actually very good financial managers. If you’re poor and on the streets, survival depends on agility and resource management. Every one of them, especially those with kids, would save up. They’d buy basics like dal, rice, roti, and wheat. But they’d also save so that once a month the kids could have a small treat – something like a bread pakora or, if they could manage, a pizza or a burger. It was a big deal.
AB: That’s it.
And that’s the thing that makes you go forward. It reminds you that life can be a little bit more.
AB: Exactly. And you can easily hear the counter-narrative – you know, they’re poor and wasting money on pizza. That’s why your example is so good. It shows how often people judge the poor as irrational, unreliable, or irresponsible.
Pleasure shouldn’t be doled out by class. It should be available to all. That’s just me thinking. And again, I don’t think we’re going to have time to talk about everything Chhaunk manages to pack. But I did want to ask you both about the way food travels. You’ve grown up in India, spent time in the United States, Europe, and travelled across spice-route countries and Africa. Everywhere food moves, it changes. You’ve got recipes for chhaunk, Sri Lankan pickled eggplant, and Chinese tofu. Migrant communities bring recipes and create acts of sharing and community. What has that meant for both of you – this openness to foreign tastes and the feeling that food is what you reach for when you want to assimilate in a new place?
CO: I realised this while living in the US. At some point, I cherished my lunches made with ingredients I grew up eating in France. We ate cuisines from all over – Italian, Indonesian, Indian, French. But I also realised I could only appreciate that variety if I had my everyday lunch, something familiar – mostly Mediterranean or provincial cuisine.
I’m from the Basque Country, but it’s very meat- and cold-cut-heavy. Before travelling, I always cook what’s familiar to me to feel grounded. Then, when I arrive somewhere new, I’m ready to explore. When I first came to India, I tried everything on the buffet. Gradually, I returned to familiar tastes but remained adventurous.
I remember being in Argentina once, where someone had carved a fireplace into the trunk of a tree to make an asado – this large piece of meat roasted over fire. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience I couldn’t refuse. I move between regularity in my eating habits and complete openness to new things. It’s about finding a balance between familiarity and exploration.
You know how you reach for food as something that reminds you of home, but also as something that brings you closer to others, allowing you to be curious about different cultures and explore. What surprised you the most during your travels, or what have you loved cooking the most from the cuisines you’ve experienced?
AB: I think I was most surprised by the diversity of food when we travelled through China. That was the inspiration for the piece on Chinese cuisine in the book. If you go from Shanghai to Beijing, you already see vast changes in cooking. Then, as you move further west, all the way to Tashkurgan on the Pakistan border, the diversity is staggering. China is at least as diverse as India – it’s like going from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. You see Muslims in Xinjiang, Buddhists elsewhere, and each region has distinct cuisines.
What struck me most about China, relative to India, is how few ingredients they use. No cuisine, apart from Mexican, uses as many ingredients as Indian food – cumin, nutmeg, mace, and so on. Chinese cooking focuses on a tighter set – soy, ginger, garlic, scallions, chillies – used in infinite ways. It’s simpler but incredibly rich. In contrast, Indian food often layers ingredient upon ingredient, especially in Mughlai dishes, which sometimes feel over the top.
I also admire cuisines like Japanese, which rely on just a few ingredients yet create stunning dishes. Italy does this too – fresh pasta, tomatoes, broccoli rabe, and a bit of cheese, and it’s brilliant. Bengali food sometimes mirrors this approach. We often avoid the heavy masalas of North Indian cooking, opting for lighter jhol dishes where the flavour comes from the vegetables rather than overpowering spices. I love the simplicity and how extraordinary it can be.
That’s such a lovely note to end on. But I do have time for one last question. What were the challenges and pleasures of illustrating Chhaunk? Your illustrations capture the experience of cooking, eating, and gathering so beautifully, even without colour photographs.
CO: Thank you. What I was most happy about was that someone told me the illustrations felt very Indian. That meant a lot to me because I don’t have an infinite pool of memories from India to draw from. We worked collaboratively – on the structure of the text and the illustrations at the same time. Abhijit contributed a lot of detail, and I built from that.
I often draw on my own memories, feelings, or observations. I also ask Abhijit specific questions – what a dish should look like, what ingredients to include, or what tools to show. Sometimes he’d make me read the articles he used for research, so I gathered ideas from there too. It’s playful for me. I’ve been doing this for years, so I have basic formats and ingredients in mind. I vary the settings – trains, outdoors, kitchens – to keep it exciting.
The illustrations feel so lively, like an invitation. And Abhijit, my last question – your book covers everything from deprivation to feasting, prison fare, and food shelters for dealing with climate change. What should we focus on when we talk about food and feeding people in the future?
AB: With global warming, we’re going to see huge uncertainties and disasters. We need to design redistributive systems that aren’t rooted in contempt for beneficiaries but are genuinely sympathetic. Most poor people in the world are not responsible for climate change, yet they’ll bear the brunt of it.
We need to think sympathetically and generously about creating livable conditions in increasingly dire times. That’s a recurring theme in the book – how redistributive policies and shelters can help on extra-hot days. It’s always on my mind these days. It’s not a cheerful thought, but it’s a necessary one.
Nilanjana Roy is a novelist and literary critic.
