How to Eat with Your Hands
Roti Shoti and Other Ways to Settle In
roti shoti n.
- Bread etc.
- A meal centred on roti; ordinary food eaten routinely, comprising one or more accompaniments
- Food in general; habitual nourishment; the everyday conditions of domestic cooking
Cf. formed by rhyming reduplication, a common feature of colloquial South Asian speech, used to generalise or soften reference
Karahi chicken, channa dal, and sarson da saag. These are the sorts of meals that form the backbone of Khalil Akhtar’s day-to-day kitchen, the cuisine that he turns to when he doesn’t know what to make, when guests are coming, or when his fridge is bare. “Most of us have (or at least, had) a cuisine like this,” writes Akhtar. “Our parents or grandparents had dishes that lived in the very walls of the kitchen. One meal spoke to the next, last night’s leftovers could be coaxed into a meal for today, and the same predictable ingredients could be bent to dozens of different whims.”
How to Eat with Your Hands uses Akhtar’s relationship with Punjabi cuisine to offer a warm, open-minded examination of our intertwined relationships with food and home, in the process orienting readers toward understanding the values and knowledge available in their own kitchens.
Weaving together recipes, practical tips for organizing a kitchen, and memories of the Punjabi cuisine cooked by Akhtar’s family across generations, How to Eat with Your Hands is a rich, enlightening, and entertaining read on how to cook at home with a resourcefulness found in heritage, experience, and practice.
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This is as beautiful, lyrical, insightful, and above all else delicious a cookbook as you’ll ever find. How to Eat with Your Hands puts Akhtar among the absolute greats. — Chris Nuttall-Smith, author of Cook It Wild
In How to Eat with Your Hands, the kitchen is more than a place to prep meals — it is a sanctuary of ‘dying light’ and ‘pillowy forts,’ where a messy stovetop becomes a sign of a life well-lived. Khalil Akhtar explores ‘the inheritance’ of the kitchen through the daily rhythms of peeling potatoes, rolling rotis, and tending simmering pots. Drawing on stories of ancestral wisdom that travel across countries and time, he offers a guide — rendered in rich, evocative prose — to finding rhythm in the kitchen. — Nik Sharma, author of The Fundamentals of Flavor: 100 Recipes for the Science of Better Cooking
Whether you’re preparing thirty-plus ingredient haleem, chopping green mangoes right through their pits for achar, or mixing flour and water for humble daily rotis, Akhtar’s is the voice you want with you in the kitchen. Capable, thoughtful, passionate. This is food writing at its best. — Bonny Reichert, author of How to Share an Egg
Khalil Akhtar is a Canadian journalist, broadcaster, and cooking instructor. Akhtar was born in the United Kingdom to a Punjabi family and grew up in small-town Atlantic Canada. He has spent two decades working in radio newsrooms across the country. He is the host of CBC Radio's Information Morning in Moncton, New Brunswick, and a past co-host of CBC On the Island. He created and hosted the CBC summer radio program, The Main Ingredient, and developed a long-running syndicated food column that aired on CBC morning shows across the country. How to Eat with Your Hands is his first book.
