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Improvisations: Rice
A short non-fictional essay, published in The New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/20...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/20...
4 pages, Unknown Binding
First published November 23, 2009
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About the author
Jhumpa Lahiri
108 books14.7k followersNilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Her debut collection of short-stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was made into a major motion picture.
Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013) was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.
On January 22, 2015, Lahiri won the US$50,000 DSC Prize for Literature for The Lowland. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America.
In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome, Italy and has since then published two books of essays, and began writing in Italian, first with the 2018 novel Dove mi trovo, then with her 2023 collection Roman Stories. She also compiled, edited, and translated the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories which consists of 40 Italian short stories written by 40 different Italian writers. She has also translated some of her own writings and those of other authors from Italian into English.
In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University from 2015 to 2022. In 2022, she became the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Barnard College of Columbia University.
Her debut collection of short-stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was made into a major motion picture.
Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013) was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.
On January 22, 2015, Lahiri won the US$50,000 DSC Prize for Literature for The Lowland. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America.
In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome, Italy and has since then published two books of essays, and began writing in Italian, first with the 2018 novel Dove mi trovo, then with her 2023 collection Roman Stories. She also compiled, edited, and translated the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories which consists of 40 Italian short stories written by 40 different Italian writers. She has also translated some of her own writings and those of other authors from Italian into English.
In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University from 2015 to 2022. In 2022, she became the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Barnard College of Columbia University.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 2, 2025
In a short article called ‘Rice’ in the Improvisations column of The New Yorker of 23 November 2009 Jhumpa Lahiri detailed her father’s skill and experience preparing pulao.
It is a love letter to her dad, which edifies her devotion to family and throws light on own character and writing.
She describes her father, then 78, as a methodical, meticulous man with a gift for exact quantification in the kitchen, famous for making a Persian rice dish called pulao, enjoyed on festive occasions notably ‘anaprasan’, when infants eat solid food for the first time.
Pulao is rice sautéed in butter with cinnamon sticks, cloves, bay leaves and cardamom pods. Add to this cashews (halved) and raisins (golden), ginger, salt, sugar, nutmeg and mace, saffron or turmeric. Then simmer and bake. The recipe is adaptable, never quite the same, but never a failure, made in London, New England and elsewhere, for a few or 400, her dad never unnerved by the need for adaptation as indeed, neither is she.
In 800 words we learn of Jhumpa Lahiri’s love and respect for her father, a recurring motif in her work, and her gift for story-telling in exquisite and in this case mouth-watering detail. She describes her father ‘counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal (fifteen)’ and later, when he makes the pulao ‘raisins (unlike the oatmeal raisins, these must be golden, not black).’ Her writing is full of poignant relationships between fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and their children, and vice versa, trying to make sense of the worlds they inhabit in one place or another.
Like her dad, Lahiri is someone who has moved from one continent to another, and like her dad she seems unphased by the obstacles which come her way or which she actively seeks, like moving to Rome or learning to write in Italian, her third language.
Short form or long form, one language or another Dr Lahiri is a wonder.
It is a love letter to her dad, which edifies her devotion to family and throws light on own character and writing.
She describes her father, then 78, as a methodical, meticulous man with a gift for exact quantification in the kitchen, famous for making a Persian rice dish called pulao, enjoyed on festive occasions notably ‘anaprasan’, when infants eat solid food for the first time.
Pulao is rice sautéed in butter with cinnamon sticks, cloves, bay leaves and cardamom pods. Add to this cashews (halved) and raisins (golden), ginger, salt, sugar, nutmeg and mace, saffron or turmeric. Then simmer and bake. The recipe is adaptable, never quite the same, but never a failure, made in London, New England and elsewhere, for a few or 400, her dad never unnerved by the need for adaptation as indeed, neither is she.
In 800 words we learn of Jhumpa Lahiri’s love and respect for her father, a recurring motif in her work, and her gift for story-telling in exquisite and in this case mouth-watering detail. She describes her father ‘counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal (fifteen)’ and later, when he makes the pulao ‘raisins (unlike the oatmeal raisins, these must be golden, not black).’ Her writing is full of poignant relationships between fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and their children, and vice versa, trying to make sense of the worlds they inhabit in one place or another.
Like her dad, Lahiri is someone who has moved from one continent to another, and like her dad she seems unphased by the obstacles which come her way or which she actively seeks, like moving to Rome or learning to write in Italian, her third language.
Short form or long form, one language or another Dr Lahiri is a wonder.
February 11, 2025
I really liked this short read. It was very cutesy but also homey. It reasonated with me especially about how special the dish was to her father in a way, even if she tried to remake it, she couldn't. I really enjoyed how we were able to see the relationship with her father. Like even though these aren't "typical" acts of love-defined by american standards-it still bleeds through how much they care for each other. I feel like this gave me a lil closure about my own parents.
October 2, 2021
A short and a nice read!
March 31, 2022
It was a delectable essay that felt personal being a Bengali and I devoured it in minutes.
November 25, 2014
This was a wonderful quick read.
September 14, 2015
I truly enjoyed how the author explored her father through the lens of his signature dish.
March 5, 2016
I just love how she writes about cooking and food in that it accentuates the cultural value of it!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews