This cookbook is unlike any other from India. Pass the honeycomb, please!

KHAMGAON, India – Pork rinds. Dried squirrel. Spicy fish eggs. Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada is part anthology, part cookbook and part rebuke to readers, who may presume Indian food is largely vegetarian.

It tells of the culinary traditions of two groups of Dalits, known as Mang and Mahar. Dalits, broadly, occupy the lowest rungs of South Asia's ancient caste system and were once known as untouchables. They also form a sizable minority: around a fifth to a quarter of India's estimated 1.4 billion people.

Yet this is a rare book, perhaps the first published in English about Dalit culinary traditions by a person of Dalit caste.

There's a simple reason for that, says author Shahu Patole, a 62-year-old retired civil servant and a Dalit. "To upper-caste Hindus," Patole says, "we were not even humans. We were slaves." Dalit food, Patole says, was not considered worthy of being documented.

We spoke to Patole in his childhood home, in the hinterlands of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, on the fringes of Khamgaon village — because Dalits were once forced to build their homes away from upper-caste Hindus so they didn't pollute their spaces.

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The first recipe: Blood

The book is not for the fainthearted.

The first recipe is simply titled, Blood. The method: boil blood – of any animal – until it's the color of dark chocolate and has the consistency of firm tofu. "Hot rakti tastes delicious when eaten immediately after cooking," Patole advises.

The next recipe advises readers to mash the cooked blood by hand to give it the texture of firm tofu, add spice and onions fried in animal fat. Garnish with coriander.

"How many people think about Indian food when they think about mashed blood?" asks Krishnendu Ray, professor of food studies at New York University. In a review, he described Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada "as arguably the most important cookbook to come out of South Asia."

The book, he says, "undermines this peculiar one dimensional understanding of Indian food [being] rich in spices, low in meat."

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Ray says, "we know very little about Dalit cooking" because the idea of what Indians eat largely comes from upper-caste Hindus, including Brahmins, who sit at the apex of South Asia's caste hierarchy. Traditionally, they're largely vegetarian.

Ray says upper-caste Hindus dominate publishing houses that commission cookbooks and media houses that create cooking shows. In that context, Ray says the book is "dynamite that explodes the idea of Indian food from the bottom up."

Much has changed for Dalits since India won its independence more than seven decades ago. India's constitution was penned by a Dalit intellectual, known as Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar CQ. He helped enshrine quotas for Dalits in government jobs, education and legislature, although critics argue those quotas are not fairly or fully allotted. Ambedkar was also from Maharashtra, where there's a long tradition of Dalit activism. It's no coincidence that Patole's book also comes from this place, says Farha Ternikar, professor of sociology at Lemoyne College in Syracuse, N.Y. "It's a result of the activism over the last few decades around trying to increase Dalit visibility, but also, Dalit culture."

Yet the Dalit community in India is among India's most marginalized and has long faced severe discrimination. They dominate industries involved in waste collection, disposing of corpses and carcasses. Even in his own village, Patole says, other residents still refuse to eat food prepared by Dalits.

Cooking like his grandmother

Food he warmly recalls his grandmother making for him, like a meat and offal stew he prepares for us on a steamy June day.

Patole heads to a market town to buy leafy greens, then trudges down a muddy road lined with butcher shops, each a hole-in-the-wall, run by Muslim men – the Indian minority dominates the butchery trade.

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Patole has a favorite: a seemingly-indistinguishable closet-sized nook filled out by an enormous buffalo carcass hooked from a roof rafter, its skin hanging on a wall hook. A plastic partition offers little resistance to the buzzing flies. Patole requests rib cuts, liver, still hanging in the carcass and intestines.

The butcher hacks off the cuts, dices them on a block and pops them into a black plastic bag that hides the meat. Patole says that's partly so shoppers can conceal their caste identity – typically only lower-caste Hindus eat red meat. It is also good manners, because the sight of cut-up flesh can offend vegetarian Hindus.

It also sidesteps the danger posed by Hindu extremists.

Over the past decade, they've beaten and lynched Muslims and Dalits they suspect of carrying cow flesh – beef – an animal sacred to many Hindus. But Muslims, and Dalits, traditionally, have eaten beef.

"These shops were called 'beef hotels,'" he says, because they only sold one thing. The butcher nervously assures us he's only selling buffalo meat. Patole sighs. Buffalo doesn't taste as good as beef, he says.

Back in Patole's kitchen, he heats up a pot. He adds oil, apologizing that he couldn't source rendered animal fat, which his community traditionally used for cooking.

Patole throws in salt, turmeric, garlic and ginger. He says Dalits were traditionally too poor to use these spices. Now he buys them pre-mashed in a packet.

Patole's mother, Gunabai Patole, swishes the meat and organ cuts in water, washing off dust and grime.

The meat cuts sizzle as Patole browns them off. He speeds up the cooking time by transferring the mix into a pressure cooker. Within minutes, he presents us with a rich brown stew. Patole mops it up with a traditional flatbread made of millets that his mother freshly prepared on a griddle.

Why he wrote the book

Patole says his book was published nine years ago in his native language, Marathi, through friends he made in the publishing industry. "Few took note of it," he says of local Indian media. Then the global publishing house HarperCollins issued an English translation this summer. Still, Patole says, no other Indian publisher has approached him to make a version in any other local language, like Hindi.

But he says, his book isn't intended to educate upper-caste folk. It's to help fellow Dalits shake off "a sense of shame that they are eating something wrong."

Partly, he says, that's because the dominant Indian culture values vegetarianism as pure — and eating meat as lowly — a bias he angrily tackles in his book.

"Vegetarian groups consider themselves superior even today," he writes. He asks: How many vegetarians "sweat in the fields?" Indian vegetarians, he says, come from castes that do not do manual labor.

Patole's words can feel shocking to those in the West, where the conversation about eating meat revolves around ethics: the cruelty of animal slaughter and the environmental cost of raising animals for meat. In India, there is a different conversation, which revolves around status, caste and meat.

It's something Yashica Dutt, the author of Coming Out As Dalit, has thought about deeply. "You grow up eating a certain kind of animal, a certain type of meat or just meat in general, and you are associated with being lower caste or being impure."

Growing up, Dutt's family pretended they were upper-caste. Her mother didn't want Dutt to be raised with the stigma of being known as a Dalit of the Bhangi sub-caste, whose people were long compelled to remove excrement from latrine pits.

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She says other Dalit sub-castes were expected to dispose animal carcasses, because corpses are seen as impure. Living in poverty, the same Dalits often stripped down and ate those deceased animals for sustenance. That stigma lingers, but more than that, Dutt says "because our entire being is considered impure – the food we eat is also considered impure."

So for many Dalits, their food evokes mixed feelings: comfort, but also shame. "Joy cannot be separated from the oppression that we experience," Dutt says. "It's always going to be congealed together."

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Back in Patole's kitchen, he says he wants his book to raise questions for fellow Dalits: "Why were you forced to eat this sort of food in the first place?" he says, like dead animals, offal, mashed blood. But he also hopes they'll see their food traditions as a product of tenacity, survival. "You're alive today because your ancestors ate it then," he says of other Dalits. "Otherwise you'd not be here."

Patole says he's pleased to have written the book if only as a "middle finger" to upper-caste Hindus who find him, his caste and his food disgusting. "That's what we ate, still eat — and I will continue to do so."

Recipes from "Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada" by Shahu Patole

Translated by: Bhushan Korgaonkar

Wajadi (intestines)

Wajadi is not necessarily liked by everyone. Even amongst those who like it, some people prefer only the part that looks like a Turkish towel while others prefer the part that looks like a honeycomb. The preparation of wajadi depended on ingredients available in the household.

Ingredients

1. Thoroughly washed and cleaned wajadi, chopped
2. Salt
3. Turmeric
4. Ginger-garlic paste or in pieces, whatever is available (optional)
5. Green coriander, chopped

Method

1. Heat a pan or wok and put in the chopped wajadi. Wajadi has fat, so it does not need added fat or oil.
2. Add salt and turmeric and mix. Add the ginger-garlic pieces or paste if desired.
3. Cook, while stirring, for an hour and a half.
4. Add as much hot water as desired and cook a little longer. For those who like it plain, the dish is ready.
5. For a spicier version, add any other spices you like and cook a little longer.
6. Garnish with coriander and serve. 

Moholachi poli (honeycomb)

Large wild bees are extremely aggressive. Their hive is known as agyamohol. Agya means fiery and mohol means hive. No one would usually dare to touch these hives as the bee attacks are brutal and strings acutely agonizing. But people would eat the hives of smaller bees. There are two main types of smaller bees: lavangi (fiery like clove) and kagadi (thin like paper). Lavangi bees look slightly reddish. They make their hives in the open. These bees are aggressive too and sting the attackers. That's why people cover their faces and create smoke to chase off the bees before touching these hives. Kagadi bees are darker but otherwise look like lavangi bees. They are not as aggressive and so they build their hives in comparatively inaccessible locations. These bees fly away even with the smoke of regular bidis and cigarettes. There was a delicacy made from the hives of both these types of bees.

One can easily spot the three sections of the hive. A puffed-up pod attached to the branch or an external object, which stores honey, the next part below it contains eggs and larvae and the last part is work in progress. The bigger the pod, the more the honey. The first part is used for extracting honey, the second part is used as a delicacy and the third part would be given to dogs. It was said that the dogs went a bit bonkers after eating it.

Ingredients

1. Honeycomb containing larvae and eggs (Editor's note: honeycomb is sold commercially in the U.S. but without the larvae and eggs)
2. Oil or fat
3. Onions, chopped
4. Red chili powder
5. Salt

Method

1. Cut the honeycomb into small pieces
2. Heat a little oil in a pan and fry onions till brown
3. Add chili powder and salt, mix.
4. Add the honeycomb pieces, saute a little. Cover and reduce heat to low. 
5. Let it cook for a while. Serve. 

This honeycomb preparation tastes perfect with jowar bhakri. It is tasty and nutritious. It should be eaten hot as it is high in wax and protein. It gets stuck in the mouth if eaten cold, just like animal fat. This dish has a distinct "hot n' sweet" taste.

Chigur (flowers of tamarind)

Chigur or tamarind flowers were eaten, too. The tamarind tree blossoms copiously. There were usually a few trees in or near the village on common lands, which were accessible to everyone. Chigur goes well with red lentils. This sour dal tastes good.

Ingredients

1. Oil 
2. Onions, chopped
3. Red lentils
4. Red chili powder or chopped green chilies
5. Salt
6. Chigur

Method

1. Heat oil in a tava or pan
2. When it is hot, add the chopped onion. Stir. 
3. Add the red lentils, red chili powder or green chilis and salt to taste.
4. Add the chigur and saute it for a while. Sprinkle some water, cover and lower the heat. Let it cool. 

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