What is this place?
Thyme Travel is a food blog with a history problem. Or possibly a history blog with a cooking problem. Either way, the premise is simple: everything we eat has a story behind it, and those stories are usually more interesting than the recipe.
A biryani is not just rice and meat in a pot. It is a dish shaped by Persian court kitchens, Mughal ambition, colonial displacement, and the economics of potato farming in nineteenth-century Calcutta. A rare steak is not a timeless mark of sophistication – it is a surprisingly recent preference, made possible by an eighteenth-century cattle breeder in Leicestershire. The things we consider obvious about food – how to cook meat, what counts as a proper meal, which flavours belong together – almost always turn out to be contingent, regional, and far more recent than we assume.
That is what this site explores. The history, geography, trade, migration, science, and sheer accident that made our food what it is.
What you will find here
There are two kinds of content on Thyme Travel. The first is long-form writing – essays that trace the history and cultural evolution of ingredients, dishes, and cooking techniques. These tend to draw on food history, archaeology, primary sources, and the kind of questions that start with “when did we start doing this, and why?” They are meant to be read slowly, ideally with something good to eat nearby.
The second is recipes. These are dishes I cook at home, written up with enough context to explain why they work and where they come from. They range across Indian, Italian, Southeast Asian, and broadly Mediterranean cooking, because that is what my kitchen looks like. Some are traditional, some are personal variations, and most come with a short story about what led me to them.
Who writes this?
My name is Akhilesh. I write about technology, design, and history at asabharwal.com, but my food writing kept growing until it needed its own home. Thyme Travel is that home – a place where the research instinct and the cooking instinct can coexist without confusing anyone who came looking for a take on the latest MacBook.
If you want to get in touch, you can reach me through email - [email protected].