Seasons of Splendour
Page 14
Write a recipe using the smelliest things you can think of – old socks? Wet dog? Strong cheese? How much of each ingredient? A pinch? A kilo? Should they be chopped? Whisked? Baked? Fried?
Write out your recipe, step by step, so King Kans would be able to have a horrid, stinking perfume made up for his demon.
Did You Know?
The story of Ram and his search for his wife Sita may have been written in the fourth century BC. The story, called the Ramayana, is a very long poem of 24,000 verses, in seven books. It is thought to have been composed by a poet called Valmiki.
Another ancient and important poem from India is the Mahabharata. The main theme is about a war and two families of princes. It has been described as ‘the longest poem ever written’.
India is a huge country, and there are many different kinds of cooking. Each region has its own, depending on what will grow in its particular soil and climate. Some dishes from the south are very highly spiced, and some from the north are milder.
Sweets and sweet puddings are popular everywhere! Rice pudding in India may start with rice, sugar and milk, like rice pudding in Britain, but can be flavoured with cardamon, saffron, raisins, and nuts such as pistachios and almonds.
Spices from India have been highly prized in Europe for thousands of years. At first the spices were brought overland, but this took a long time and made them very expensive indeed. Sometimes wars stopped them reaching Europe at all. At last European sailors found out how to reach India by sea – by sailing round Africa – and this started a whole age of exploration.
Many people in India are Hindus. Some scholars think it is the oldest religion – and round the world there are more than one billion followers.
In Hinduism, the eternal duties include honesty, not hurting living things, patience, forbearance and compassion.
There are many gods and goddesses in the Hindu religion, and many holidays and festivals to celebrate them. The dates of these special days are worked out using a complicated calendar, based on the phases of the moon. Indian scholars have studied astronomy and maths for centuries to help with these calculations.
Puffin Writing Tip
In Seasons of Splendour, Madhur Jaffrey tells us what happened when she was a little girl. We learn about life in her grandfather’s house, and some of the wonderful stories she was told.
If you write your own life story, you are writing an autobiography.
Can you think of something that happened to you when you were younger, and turn it into a story?
Your story starts here …
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Penguin Books was a big idea from the mind of a man called Allen Lane, who in 1935 invented the quality paperback and changed the world. And from great Penguins, great Puffins grew, changing the face of children’s books forever.
The first four Puffin Picture Books were hatched in 1940 and the first Puffin story book featured a man with broomstick arms called Worzel Gummidge. In 1967 Kaye Webb, Puffin Editor, started the Puffin Club, promising to ‘make children into readers’. She kept that promise and over 200,000 children became devoted Puffineers through their quarterly instalments of Puffin Post.
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First published by Pavilion Books Limited 1985
Published in Puffin Books 1987
Published with black and white illustrations 1992
Reissued in this edition 2016
Text copyright © Madhur Jaffrey, 1985
Illustrations copyright © Michael Foreman, 1985, 1992
Cover illustration by Michael Foreman
The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-96641-0
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