A treasure-house of recipes and customs that define the Parsi way of life Celebrations, rituals and food inevitably go together. And so it is with the Parsis. From Navroz, the dawn of the Parsi New Year, to Navjote, the initiation ceremony of a young child, lagan or marriage, jashans and ghambhars, there is a variety of food to suit every occasion. In this unique book, Bhicoo J. Manekshaw takes the reader on a journey far beyond the traditional stereotypical dhan sakh recipe. For those who love fish, there is a choice of patrani machchi (fish in banana leaves), masala ni machchi or the famed tarapori patio made with sookha boomla (Bombay duck), amongst many others. The Parsi weakness for eggs, on the other hand, has created a range of mouth-watering dishes from the kera per eeda (eggs cooked on bananas) to the humble scrambled egg. There are also teatime snacks, sweets, and desserts and a chapter on kitchen medicine straight from grandmother’s recipe book. Interlaced with the recipes is the author’s piquant description of the customs, rituals and ceremonies that form the Parsi way of life.

Excerpt from The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees Some of the religious ceremonies and__customs are good in themselves from a sanitary or hygienic point of View. AS Prof. Max Muller says There is a reason at the bottom of everything, however, it seems unreasonable to us, in the customs and laws of the ancient world. 1 What is said of the old symbolism stands good, to a certain extent, for some old customs The Symbolism of to-day preserves the serious belief of yesterday and what, in an age more or less distant, was a vital motive, inspiring an appropriate course, of conduct, survives in the conduct it has inspired, long after it has itself ceased to be active and powerful. But, we find that, at times, too much of even a good thing spoils that thing. This is so in the case of some religious ceremonies and cus toms. We find that, very particularly, in the case of some purificatory ceremonies, for example, the Bareshnum. The original good simple ideas of purity, viz., freedom from contact with the impure, and isolation, if infection or impurity is caught or is believed to have been caught, are, at times, carried to tiresome extremes. No wonder, if they were SO carried to extremes in olden times, when we see, that cases of that kind happen even in modern times, under an alarm or panic of a sudden epidemic, as that of Plague in Bombay in 1896-97. However, such extremes tend to obscure the original good object. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From the late eighteenth century until India's independence in 1947, they became heavy users of colonial law, acting as lawyers, judges, litigants, lobbyists, and legislators. They de-Anglicized the law that governed them and enshrined in law their own distinctive models of the family and community by two routes: frequent intra-group litigation often managed by Parsi legal professionals in the areas of marriage, inheritance, religious trusts, and libel, and the creation of legislation that would become Parsi personal law. Other South Asian communities also turned to law, but none seems to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1905 Edition.