Do we, by partaking of a prescribed set of dishes during a festival, connect with our cultural past? Can one say that the purpose of associating the notion of a favourite food with a god was to make the deity more approachable

In the third of the Cormoran Strike whodunits, JK Rowling has four pyschopaths as potential suspects

It helps if you can come across as creative, dogged, willing to take risks, and more importantly, may also fail. When you fail, you get face-time on TV because the sudden death or black apron episode will feature only you and a few others

Let’s assume that skill in the kitchen is gender-neutral. If so, why is a man more likely than a woman to be taken seriously as a chef? It is perception that creates the illusion of a distinction between men and women in the kitchen

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