© AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact editor@rupkatha.com. Palate Tales, Kitchen Truths: Coming Home to Cooking in the Time of Covid Ananya Dutta Gupta, Ph.D Associate Professor, Department of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: ananya_duttagupta@yahoo.co.uk Abstract: “Palate Poetry, Kitchen Truths: Coming Home to Cooking” is a long essay comprising non-didactic philosophical reflections on the wisdom of home cooking attained over the first three months spent in Covid- 19 lockdown. I make a case for home cooking and home eating as an experiential strategy that can, mutatis mutandis, alert us to ontologies and knowledge systems that resist the seeming inexorability of neoliberal, millennial urbanised living. I do so without holding forth any normative rejection of technology and other exigencies of modern living; and gesture instead towards an inclusive paradigm where machines can be applied towards a promotion of food making and food sharing that is ethical, cosmopolitan, community- minded, ecologically aware, and yet forward-looking. The auto-ethnographic methodology covers both the analytical prose and the interspersed poems it provides a discursive matrix for. I found myself planting these poems (and accompanying images of food from my kitchen) at strategic moments in the argumentation so as to allow the reader, experimentally, a detour and respite from the critical density of the prose. I suppose I am experimenting with the possibility of treating of the same subject in different mediums and then gathering them back into the fold of the personal, reflective essay. Keywords: Poetry, auto-ethnography, Cooking, Pandemic, technology. At no time since I was a student abroad has my relationship with food been quite as intimate, compelling and fundamental as over the past three homebound months. Indeed, at no point at all, have I worn the mantle of sole preparer of meals for gastronomic dependents across the same length of time. I say this notwithstanding able ancillary assistance every now and then from my spouse. Perhaps this is an experience shared by numerous other middle or upper middle class women of the house in Bengal and India since Covid-19 arrived here. Yet the shared nature of this experience, almost a Bakhtinian escapade into “me-time” from “epic time” takes nothing away from the earthy profundity of the encounter and its lessons. Before novel coronavirus forced me to send my cook and two other loyal helpers on paid furlough, my weekday workaday contribution to meal-making had meant envisioning various possible combinations of available provisions, followed by verbal instructions and sporadic visual supervision of the making process. The engagement would extend to post-facto constructive feedback, with the hands-on implementer’s ungrudging readiness to learn and improve with practice gauged as a rite of passage. Occasions when I offered hands-on initiation or took on the project singlehandedly were those regular, though not frequent, on-demand special meals and refreshments for my housemates and visitors. The gnosis praxis collaboration with my cook would be true of any traditional gurumukhi art practice relying on oral and aural relay. Most often, our Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Special Conference Issue (Vol. 12, No. 5, 2020. 1-15) from 1st Rupkatha International Open Conference on Recent Advances in Interdisciplinary Humanities (rioc.rupkatha.com) Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V12/n5/rioc1s25n0.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s25n0