India, Aug. 2 -- Whenever I've heard Pushpesh Pant speak about food, whether in a three-hour Aaj Tak radio episode or from beneath the shade of a tree in Sunder Nursery, I always picture him with a mouthful of gulab jamun, mid-sentence. It's as if he's chewing on metaphor and syrup at the same time, swaad lagaake. This is not a complaint. It's a particular talent of talking as though the act of remembering is indistinguishable from the act of tasting. Every corner in this book is filtered through desire, rumour, and what the body once wanted at 4 pm in 1972. Pant's great trick is that he doesn't try to prove a thesis (which he admits early on), he makes the reader feel the absences around which his city has always existed. You can feel the smoke of a missing kabab stall, the sweetness of a jalebi you can no longer find, the way someone once said, "Yeh asli nihari hai" - and how no one says that anymore. This is not history as chronology. It is history as residue. Pant resists the academic impulse to flatten food into a stable "object of study". Instead, he treats it like an unreliable narrator who is part witness, part fabulist. He walks the reader through Mughal durbars, post-Partition refugee kitchens and 1980s buffets in government guest houses with the same tone: curious, never conclusive. It is a tone I find strangely ethical. He does not lie. He simply doesn't pretend to know more than he does. "Who is to say what is authentic anymore?" is the book's real question. A lesser writer might have lined up recipes, wrapped them in context and added footnotes like garnish. Pant offers traces. He gives you longing. And then he tells you that history, especially food history, is made of exactly that. This is where the book's revisionist quality emerges, not in the overwriting of old narratives, but in the refusal to grant them authority in the first place. From the King's Table to Street Food doesn't "correct" the record. It walks past it. Pant's loyalties are not with the court, archive or textbook. They're with the forgotten halwai. The refugee daughter-in-law who invented a new biryani with what she had. The rumour that this particular nihari joint used to serve the emperor's cook. All unverifiable. All valid. Pant doesn't need to say, "Food is political." He shows the reader a city rearranged by displacement, war, plague, economic migration, caste. And he does this, sometimes, in a single sentence: "We must also remember that many of the so-called traditions of Delhi's food are hardly older than 175 years." The statement dismantles the fantasy of some eternal, static culinary identity. It is a reminder that Delhi, like its food, has been in constant flux. Even the Mughal nostalgia is handled with a wink. Pant clearly respects the imperial kitchens, but is far more interested in what came after the empire broke. He is interested in the mutability of taste, in the way food adapts to new economies, new arrivals, new needs. In this sense, he is doing something quite radical: shifting the centre of Delhi's food story away from empire and toward entropy. The real protagonist of this book is change. To speak of food, Pant reminds us, is also to speak of gaps; of what is no longer eaten, or no longer made the same way. One of the more haunting threads in From the King's Table to Street Food is this disappearance. Food ways are how a people remember themselves and, when they vanish, so does a particular version of history. Pant never mourns these losses directly, but he circles them. He writes around vanished eateries the way one speaks of old friends no longer seen. No judgment. Just absence, noted. Delhi's foodscape, as Pant sees it, is not a static inheritance. It is a constant improvisation. He offers the example of how Mughlai cuisine was repurposed by post-Partition Punjabi refugees. What was once slow, courtly and ceremonial became fast, fiery and practical. Nihari and qorma changed hands. Changed oils. Changed meanings. The migrants who arrived from Rawalpindi and Lahore had different needs, different tongues. They didn't preserve Mughal recipes, they mutated them. This is culinary history as lived resistance in the kitchen. We then collectively arrive at a conclusion: food as adaptation. Not nostalgia. Not restoration. Not even survival exactly but a kind of semi-conscious synthesis. His prose mirrors this ethic. It lifts phrases from old Urdu poets. It riffs on colonial gazetteers. It quotes hawkers. It also speculates. There are moments where the digressions pile up. That's what food does when left alone, and that's what language does when released from a thesis. Still, the absence of critical friction can feel like a missed opportunity. For all its richness, the book rarely addresses power directly. Caste is mentioned only glancingly. Class appears more often, but largely as background. And while Pant is certainly aware of these forces, his inclination is to observe, not intervene. This reluctance feels generational, maybe even aesthetic. It seems his eye is trained on continuity, not rupture. But sometimes, I wished he'd push harder and ask who gets to narrate this city's food stories, and who disappears between bites. There is an intriguing dichotomy at play too: Pant is both an insider and an outsider to his own material. He is a trained academic, but distrusts academia. He is a Delhiwallah, but one who arrived in the city as a student. Some of his nostalgia is earned, not inherited. Amid the unique perspective this gives him, he celebrates the food itself. What stays on the tongue long after the meal is over? What stories repeat themselves in different accents? What dishes resurface years later under new names? These sit at the radical heart of the book. It's not about preserving Delhi's culinary past. It's about showing how the past lives on in distortion, in mishearing, in new combinations. What does this make the book? A field guide to edible memory, perhaps. By the end, you do not know more about Delhi's food history. But you know how it might have felt to eat your way through it. You know how the city might have smelled on a humid day in the 1960s. You know why someone once said the chaat at Bengali Market was "what love tastes like when it breaks your heart". You know that history, too, can be eaten and that its aftertaste is vivid. And maybe that's enough. Or maybe it's everything....