The sequence of fasting, sacrifice, guilt, feast, guilt and pleasure creates the capacity in our tastebuds to experience food and drink with intensity. Something in the act of fasting kickstarts the taste glands and intensifies the pleasure

Perpetrators prefer using a poisonous delicacy when they want to get away with murder. Food offers a very convenient way of avoiding detection. Despite all his precautions, rumour has it that even the Roman Emperor Augustus could not escape being slowly poisoned to death by his wife

To contemplate the art of being idle, of pottering around, drinking a tall glass of ice cold buttermilk or lemon soda, and nibbling on a cold grapefruit and hot peanut salad, seems an apt subject for the long hot summer

At birth, we all have about 10,000 taste buds scattered on the back, sides and tip of the tongue. But just like with the brain’s grey cells, we still don’t know why some use more of their taste buds than others

If north and south Indians share a similar genetic structure and perhaps a ‘common origin’ in the Harappan civilisation, then what has given birth to the different techniques of cooking?

Just as one adds a pinch of sugar or jaggery to balance the acidity of a tomato or tamarind, the sleuth’s savouring of a dish offsets and highlights the demon-like aspects of the crime

The problem we face today in India and many other parts of the world is that we straddle two conflicting ways of thinking about the relationship between health, food and taste

CELESTIAL HEROISM IS a bestseller, unless it is badly made. In it merges great survivor dramas and the romance of breaching the boundaries of human…