Be My Guest
by Knopf
A thought-provoking meditation on food, family, identity, immigration, and, most of all, hospitality--at the table and beyond--that's part food memoir, part appeal for more authentic decency in our daily worlds, and in the world at large.
Be My Guest is an utterly unique, deeply personal meditation on what it means to tend to others and to ourselves--and how the two things work hand in hand. Priya Basil explores how food--and the act of offering food to others--are used to express love and support. Weaving together stories from her own life with knowledge gleaned from her Sikh heritage; her years spent in Kenya, India, Britain, and Germany; and ideas from Derrida, Plato, Arendt, and Peter Singer, Basil focuses an unexpected and illuminating light on what it means to be both a host and a guest. Lively, wide-ranging, and impassioned, Be My Guest is a singular work, at once a deeply felt plea for a kinder, more welcoming world and a reminder that, fundamentally, we all have more in common than we imagine.“Basil draws on memoir, storytelling, religion, politics, and philosophy in this delightful and ruminative culinary cultural study . . . . [Her] powerful intellectual curiosity is sure to intrigue readers.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“Basil explores what it means to be a woman, an immigrant, a host, and a guest through the backdrop of food, specifically the Indian food that reflects her Sikh background . . . . Pungent details help bring readers into the moment . . . . [Basil] also touches on deep subjects such as racism, food waste, and how food can be healing, seductive, or even used as a weapon.”
—Kirkus
“An intimate, delicious and thought-provoking story, told with warmth, humor and generosity.”
—Nigel Slater, food journalist and author
“If the whole world digested Be My Guest, we’d be OK. It won’t happen, of course, and Basil doesn’t pretend that it will. Chauvinists, xenophobes, climate change deniers—inhospitable people the world over—will detest her compellingly beautiful book.”
—Alexander Gilmour, The Financial Times
“Reading this slender, rich exploration of what it means to cook for others is like pulling up a chair at the ideal dinner party.”
—Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian
“A powerful meditation on hospitality . . . . Packed with such brilliance.”
—Gareth Grundy, The Observer
"[A] philosophical meditation on the meaning of hospitality in forms large and small. It was directly inspired by Basil’s experiences with that nonprofit, founded to help refugees who arrived in Berlin at the climax of the refugee crisis . . . [A] slim yet powerful collection of theories on hospitality both given and received . . . Basil works through her own memories and experiences as a child, then a young woman hungering for the comfort of her mother’s cooking, and, finally, a grown-up learning to extend generosity to those in need."
—Luisa Weiss, Publishers Weekly
"[A]n alluring philosophical exploration of hospitality, food culture, community, inequities, and the meaning of sharing meals in various contexts. Part personal history and part cultural exploration, Be My Guest is an elegant little book that feels all the more welcome in the time of Covid, when people are daydreaming more than ever about getting together over meals."
—Sarah Neilson, Shondaland
"This memoir is a self-reflection on how food and the act of serving it are used to express love and support. Basil draws on food, family, identity, immigration and hospitality to look at the world at large and how food plays a central part in its dynamics. Basil draws on some of her earliest memories of food and how it affected her upbringing and relationship with her parents. Now a parent herself, she centers food in her book’s exploration of that transition."
—Urmila Ramakrishnan, KQED
“Written with poetry and heart, Basil manages to unite huge themes that affect us all while capturing the beauty of sharing.”
—Francesca Brown, Stylist Magazine
“A brave and beautiful exploration into food, race, memory and the very meaning of life. I read it greedily—and so will you.”
—Meera Sodha, food writer and columnist
“Be My Guest offers a rare combination of intellectual sophistication and emotional warmth. I enjoyed it very much.”
—Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall
“The subject of food and its many-threaded associations – of generosity and privation, sharing and hoarding, diversity and denial, pleasure and fear – is the starting point for this absorbing meditation on the interface of self with other in contemporary Europe. Priya Basil writes with honesty, clarity and wit about what it means to be hospitable in a culture of selfishness, and the problems and possibilities of commonality.”
—Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy
“A beautiful and personal book.”
—Fernando Augusto Pacheco, Monocle
“Buy the beautiful Be My Guest by Priya Basil for anyone you know who has incorrect political thoughts, including yourself. We all need to learn to be more generous hosts.”
—Sophie Morris, inews.co.uk
“A very elegant meditation . . . . It's clever, it's political, but it's also incredible emotional . . . . I recommend it very highly. It's just a lovely, intellectual and emotional reset to read."
—Octavia Bright, Literary Friction
“A candid, often very funny, insightful look at food and the complexity of hospitality - a brilliant book.”
—Jenny Lindord, author of The Missing Ingredient
“Subtle, funny and incisive, Be My Guest can be read in a day, but it will take weeks to digest it fully.”
—The Eden MagazinePRIYA BASIL was born in London to a family with Indian roots and grew up in Kenya. In 2002 she moved to Berlin, where she still lives. She has published two novels and a novella, as well as numerous essays for various publications, including The Guardian. Her fiction has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Basil is also the cofounder of Authors for Peace, a political platform for writers and artists, established in 2010.We begin as guests, every single one of us. Helpless little creatures whose every need must be attended to, who for a long time can give nothing or very little back, yet who—in the usual run of things—nevertheless insinuate ourselves deep into the lives of our carers and take up permanent residence in their hearts.
Our early dependence is indulged in the expectation that we, in turn, will become dependable. Maybe reaching adulthood really means learning to be more host than guest: to take care more than, or at least as much as, to be taken care of. Implicit in this outlook, it seems to me, is still an assumption that each person will, eventually, become a parent—the ultimate role, at least in cultures where the nuclear family is considered the foundation of society. A role I decided to forego. A choice that left me questioning what my part can be in the life-play of hospitality.
Whether you have your own kids or not, it’s hard to avoid the general shift from guest to host, which is the hallmark of maturity. This switch is perhaps most challenging in relation to our parents, from whom we can’t help forever expecting certain protections and ministrations.
Nobody in the world welcomes us quite like our parents do. The reception, if we’re lucky, is a simultaneous cosseting and taking for granted. An experience that’s, at best, comforting and exasperating in equal measure, unique in its loaded history of give and take, its private parameters of permission and expectation. Mothers, of course, host us as no one else can—in their bodies. A nine-month gestation. Guest-ation?
“That’s not enough!” I stare into the brimming pot of kadhi, a creamy curry made with gram flour and yoghurt.
My mother ignores me, goes on stirring the turmeric-tinged sauce.
“I could eat that all on my own—for breakfast!” I’m aghast at the prospect of running short of one of my favourite dishes in the world. Give me a ladleful of this atop a mound of freshly boiled rice and I will take it whatever the hour, over whatever else is on offer. There have been times when I’ve eaten kadhi at every meal for days on end. Why on earth has my mother made so little?
“Eyes bigger than stomach,” she says and sighs.
Her words are the oldest censure of my eating life, the most frequent, and the most unheeded. They have little to do with the size of my body, which is slender, and everything to do with the size of my desire, which is vast, unwieldy, panoptic. Mum plunges the wooden spoon deep into the pot for a last stir. The paddle emerges coated with translucent slivers of onion, specks of tomato, a scattering of coriander leaves. My mouth waters, all reason drowns. I start scheming strategies to control how much might be eaten by our imminent guests. We have to use the small bowls to serve. And Mum shouldn’t insist on extra helpings. And whatever happens, she can’t offer anybody a portion to take home.
“Stop being so silly,” Mum says. “There’s plenty here. And anyhow, I can always make more for you.”
But it doesn’t matter how much she cooks. She can never make enough. Not for me.
Mine is perhaps an odd strain of a common affliction, a variant of the consumption epidemic ravaging our capitalist societies: those of us who have the most still want more, much more, than we need. Could it be otherwise in a system premised on the false conviction that our existence as we know it depends on the continuity of one thing alone: economic growth? Our appetites must keep increasing to propel the economy. Eyes bigger than stomach— the refrain that sums me up also epitomises our contemporary condition. But are there situations where greed, if not excusable, is understandable, and maybe even necessary?
Kadhi is what awaits me every time I go see my mother. Mostly in London, but wherever she happens to be—Australia or Kenya, the countries where my siblings live—whenever I come, kadhi is cooked. It is what I take away from each visit as well; my mother prepares and freezes batches of the tarka, the spicy tomato base at the heart of much North Indian cuisine, the most time-consuming aspect of the dish. Roasting spices, browning onions, reducing tomatoes—this alone can take up to an hour, before the main ingredients of the dish are added and the whole mixture cooked further. In the case of kadhi, the tarka is a mix of whole fenugreek and mustard seeds, ground cumin and coriander, curry leaves, onion, garlic, turmeric, green chilli and tinned tomato. All I have to do at home in Berlin is heat up Mum’s tarka, add yoghurt and flour, sprinkle fresh coriander to finish, and I have the taste of another home, the feeling of time turning in slow, savoury spirals. Each bite holds the flavour of the past and the present, a lifetime of my mother’s love, her unstinting hospitality.
Things my mother has long done for me almost effortlessly become, with age and illness, more burdensome for her. This has not curbed her generosity, but every gesture costs her more. I suspect I began to notice the change long after it had started to happen. One day I went home and there was no kadhi. Mum was all apology. She had bought the ingredients, but had simply not felt up to cooking. “But I’ll do it now!” she said quickly. No doubt my face had betrayed my disappointment, which was not just about the setback to my stomach—substantial though that was—but the letdown of love. I knew that my mother would do anything for me, and the fact that she had not managed this relatively small task pained me. If even her boundless adoration, always ready to express itself, had not succeeded in pushing her over the threshold of limitation, she must be really unwell or really old. I felt her mortality, a frightening chill. She had never seemed so fragile, not even lying in a hospital bed, not even when she was totally grey from depression. I felt tremendously sorry for her—but also for myself. And I became angry, because my sense of what was most dependable in the world had been shaken. “It won’t take long.” Mum set a pan on the hob, started rifling for ingredients. I protested, both earnestly and falsely, that it wasn’t necessary, I could wait, kadhi didn’t matter. “If you help me with the chopping we’ll be done before you know it.” The sound of her voice was accompanied by the static of mustard seeds popping in hot oil, releasing a smell that pierced my nose as sharply as the tears welling in my eyes. “It’s the onions,” I insisted to Mum when she noticed. It was not the onions. It was life, tipping the scales of give and take.
Be My Guest is an utterly unique, deeply personal meditation on what it means to tend to others and to ourselves--and how the two things work hand in hand. Priya Basil explores how food--and the act of offering food to others--are used to express love and support. Weaving together stories from her own life with knowledge gleaned from her Sikh heritage; her years spent in Kenya, India, Britain, and Germany; and ideas from Derrida, Plato, Arendt, and Peter Singer, Basil focuses an unexpected and illuminating light on what it means to be both a host and a guest. Lively, wide-ranging, and impassioned, Be My Guest is a singular work, at once a deeply felt plea for a kinder, more welcoming world and a reminder that, fundamentally, we all have more in common than we imagine.“Basil draws on memoir, storytelling, religion, politics, and philosophy in this delightful and ruminative culinary cultural study . . . . [Her] powerful intellectual curiosity is sure to intrigue readers.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“Basil explores what it means to be a woman, an immigrant, a host, and a guest through the backdrop of food, specifically the Indian food that reflects her Sikh background . . . . Pungent details help bring readers into the moment . . . . [Basil] also touches on deep subjects such as racism, food waste, and how food can be healing, seductive, or even used as a weapon.”
—Kirkus
“An intimate, delicious and thought-provoking story, told with warmth, humor and generosity.”
—Nigel Slater, food journalist and author
“If the whole world digested Be My Guest, we’d be OK. It won’t happen, of course, and Basil doesn’t pretend that it will. Chauvinists, xenophobes, climate change deniers—inhospitable people the world over—will detest her compellingly beautiful book.”
—Alexander Gilmour, The Financial Times
“Reading this slender, rich exploration of what it means to cook for others is like pulling up a chair at the ideal dinner party.”
—Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian
“A powerful meditation on hospitality . . . . Packed with such brilliance.”
—Gareth Grundy, The Observer
"[A] philosophical meditation on the meaning of hospitality in forms large and small. It was directly inspired by Basil’s experiences with that nonprofit, founded to help refugees who arrived in Berlin at the climax of the refugee crisis . . . [A] slim yet powerful collection of theories on hospitality both given and received . . . Basil works through her own memories and experiences as a child, then a young woman hungering for the comfort of her mother’s cooking, and, finally, a grown-up learning to extend generosity to those in need."
—Luisa Weiss, Publishers Weekly
"[A]n alluring philosophical exploration of hospitality, food culture, community, inequities, and the meaning of sharing meals in various contexts. Part personal history and part cultural exploration, Be My Guest is an elegant little book that feels all the more welcome in the time of Covid, when people are daydreaming more than ever about getting together over meals."
—Sarah Neilson, Shondaland
"This memoir is a self-reflection on how food and the act of serving it are used to express love and support. Basil draws on food, family, identity, immigration and hospitality to look at the world at large and how food plays a central part in its dynamics. Basil draws on some of her earliest memories of food and how it affected her upbringing and relationship with her parents. Now a parent herself, she centers food in her book’s exploration of that transition."
—Urmila Ramakrishnan, KQED
“Written with poetry and heart, Basil manages to unite huge themes that affect us all while capturing the beauty of sharing.”
—Francesca Brown, Stylist Magazine
“A brave and beautiful exploration into food, race, memory and the very meaning of life. I read it greedily—and so will you.”
—Meera Sodha, food writer and columnist
“Be My Guest offers a rare combination of intellectual sophistication and emotional warmth. I enjoyed it very much.”
—Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall
“The subject of food and its many-threaded associations – of generosity and privation, sharing and hoarding, diversity and denial, pleasure and fear – is the starting point for this absorbing meditation on the interface of self with other in contemporary Europe. Priya Basil writes with honesty, clarity and wit about what it means to be hospitable in a culture of selfishness, and the problems and possibilities of commonality.”
—Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy
“A beautiful and personal book.”
—Fernando Augusto Pacheco, Monocle
“Buy the beautiful Be My Guest by Priya Basil for anyone you know who has incorrect political thoughts, including yourself. We all need to learn to be more generous hosts.”
—Sophie Morris, inews.co.uk
“A very elegant meditation . . . . It's clever, it's political, but it's also incredible emotional . . . . I recommend it very highly. It's just a lovely, intellectual and emotional reset to read."
—Octavia Bright, Literary Friction
“A candid, often very funny, insightful look at food and the complexity of hospitality - a brilliant book.”
—Jenny Lindord, author of The Missing Ingredient
“Subtle, funny and incisive, Be My Guest can be read in a day, but it will take weeks to digest it fully.”
—The Eden MagazinePRIYA BASIL was born in London to a family with Indian roots and grew up in Kenya. In 2002 she moved to Berlin, where she still lives. She has published two novels and a novella, as well as numerous essays for various publications, including The Guardian. Her fiction has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Basil is also the cofounder of Authors for Peace, a political platform for writers and artists, established in 2010.We begin as guests, every single one of us. Helpless little creatures whose every need must be attended to, who for a long time can give nothing or very little back, yet who—in the usual run of things—nevertheless insinuate ourselves deep into the lives of our carers and take up permanent residence in their hearts.
Our early dependence is indulged in the expectation that we, in turn, will become dependable. Maybe reaching adulthood really means learning to be more host than guest: to take care more than, or at least as much as, to be taken care of. Implicit in this outlook, it seems to me, is still an assumption that each person will, eventually, become a parent—the ultimate role, at least in cultures where the nuclear family is considered the foundation of society. A role I decided to forego. A choice that left me questioning what my part can be in the life-play of hospitality.
Whether you have your own kids or not, it’s hard to avoid the general shift from guest to host, which is the hallmark of maturity. This switch is perhaps most challenging in relation to our parents, from whom we can’t help forever expecting certain protections and ministrations.
Nobody in the world welcomes us quite like our parents do. The reception, if we’re lucky, is a simultaneous cosseting and taking for granted. An experience that’s, at best, comforting and exasperating in equal measure, unique in its loaded history of give and take, its private parameters of permission and expectation. Mothers, of course, host us as no one else can—in their bodies. A nine-month gestation. Guest-ation?
“That’s not enough!” I stare into the brimming pot of kadhi, a creamy curry made with gram flour and yoghurt.
My mother ignores me, goes on stirring the turmeric-tinged sauce.
“I could eat that all on my own—for breakfast!” I’m aghast at the prospect of running short of one of my favourite dishes in the world. Give me a ladleful of this atop a mound of freshly boiled rice and I will take it whatever the hour, over whatever else is on offer. There have been times when I’ve eaten kadhi at every meal for days on end. Why on earth has my mother made so little?
“Eyes bigger than stomach,” she says and sighs.
Her words are the oldest censure of my eating life, the most frequent, and the most unheeded. They have little to do with the size of my body, which is slender, and everything to do with the size of my desire, which is vast, unwieldy, panoptic. Mum plunges the wooden spoon deep into the pot for a last stir. The paddle emerges coated with translucent slivers of onion, specks of tomato, a scattering of coriander leaves. My mouth waters, all reason drowns. I start scheming strategies to control how much might be eaten by our imminent guests. We have to use the small bowls to serve. And Mum shouldn’t insist on extra helpings. And whatever happens, she can’t offer anybody a portion to take home.
“Stop being so silly,” Mum says. “There’s plenty here. And anyhow, I can always make more for you.”
But it doesn’t matter how much she cooks. She can never make enough. Not for me.
Mine is perhaps an odd strain of a common affliction, a variant of the consumption epidemic ravaging our capitalist societies: those of us who have the most still want more, much more, than we need. Could it be otherwise in a system premised on the false conviction that our existence as we know it depends on the continuity of one thing alone: economic growth? Our appetites must keep increasing to propel the economy. Eyes bigger than stomach— the refrain that sums me up also epitomises our contemporary condition. But are there situations where greed, if not excusable, is understandable, and maybe even necessary?
Kadhi is what awaits me every time I go see my mother. Mostly in London, but wherever she happens to be—Australia or Kenya, the countries where my siblings live—whenever I come, kadhi is cooked. It is what I take away from each visit as well; my mother prepares and freezes batches of the tarka, the spicy tomato base at the heart of much North Indian cuisine, the most time-consuming aspect of the dish. Roasting spices, browning onions, reducing tomatoes—this alone can take up to an hour, before the main ingredients of the dish are added and the whole mixture cooked further. In the case of kadhi, the tarka is a mix of whole fenugreek and mustard seeds, ground cumin and coriander, curry leaves, onion, garlic, turmeric, green chilli and tinned tomato. All I have to do at home in Berlin is heat up Mum’s tarka, add yoghurt and flour, sprinkle fresh coriander to finish, and I have the taste of another home, the feeling of time turning in slow, savoury spirals. Each bite holds the flavour of the past and the present, a lifetime of my mother’s love, her unstinting hospitality.
Things my mother has long done for me almost effortlessly become, with age and illness, more burdensome for her. This has not curbed her generosity, but every gesture costs her more. I suspect I began to notice the change long after it had started to happen. One day I went home and there was no kadhi. Mum was all apology. She had bought the ingredients, but had simply not felt up to cooking. “But I’ll do it now!” she said quickly. No doubt my face had betrayed my disappointment, which was not just about the setback to my stomach—substantial though that was—but the letdown of love. I knew that my mother would do anything for me, and the fact that she had not managed this relatively small task pained me. If even her boundless adoration, always ready to express itself, had not succeeded in pushing her over the threshold of limitation, she must be really unwell or really old. I felt her mortality, a frightening chill. She had never seemed so fragile, not even lying in a hospital bed, not even when she was totally grey from depression. I felt tremendously sorry for her—but also for myself. And I became angry, because my sense of what was most dependable in the world had been shaken. “It won’t take long.” Mum set a pan on the hob, started rifling for ingredients. I protested, both earnestly and falsely, that it wasn’t necessary, I could wait, kadhi didn’t matter. “If you help me with the chopping we’ll be done before you know it.” The sound of her voice was accompanied by the static of mustard seeds popping in hot oil, releasing a smell that pierced my nose as sharply as the tears welling in my eyes. “It’s the onions,” I insisted to Mum when she noticed. It was not the onions. It was life, tipping the scales of give and take.
PUBLISHER:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN-10:
0525657851
ISBN-13:
9780525657859
BINDING:
Hardback
BOOK DIMENSIONS:
Dimensions: 5.8300(W) x Dimensions: 7.4200(H) x Dimensions: 0.7600(D)