ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the strong relationship between Parsi characters and Parsi food culture, through a critical reading of Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man and Mistry's Family Matters. It also explores how metaphors of Parsi food and culture can be linked to larger issues of gender, nation, and identity. In the case of the minority community of Parsis, food is of paramount socio-cultural, ethnic, and religious importance. The chapter investigates how culinary skills and kitchen politics associated with these Parsi women characters become powerful manifestations of gender difference, sexual desire, and the sanctity of domestic space. It deals with the subtle relationship between food politics and caste purity, and, thereby, nationality in the selected texts. The chapter focuses on how symbolisms of food and other gastronomic details help the Parsi characters in these fictions to negotiate the paradoxes of their ethnic identities, and the anxieties of extinction of this minority community.
