Vivek Singh: Indian Festival Feasts

The founder of London's Cinnamon Club and Cinnamon Kitchen talks about an average year of feasting with family

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Indian Festival Feasts is my sixth cookbook – I've already done a number of restaurants and didn't think I had another one left in me. But every time I talked about a dish, or a memory that it triggered, I found that it was related to a celebration. I realised that no matter what the origin of the festival or what the occasion of the celebration was, invariably the expression of it ended up as food. Writing about festivals was also particularly enjoyable in the sense that they were part of my childhood, but involve dishes and menus that aren't necessarily the kind of food I cook in my restaurants all the time.

It was a tough ask trying to narrow down the list of festivals to the 13 I included. I followed the calendar for 12, and then included a Bengali wedding as the final chapter, which was incredibly important to me as it's no less a celebration than any other festival. Growing up in a small town in Bengal in the 1970s, it struck me even then how multicultural it was. Festivals such as Makar Sankranti Pongal, Diwali and Holi have a special meaning to me as we celebrated them as a family. I went to a Christian Brothers school in Asansol, where the community was made up of lots of Christians and Anglo-Indians, so Christmas was also a big festival for us, not least because we got long holidays. It's these kind of memories that stick with you.

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