A New Throw Enters the Mardi Gras Parade: The Cookbook

They throw lots of things at the Carnival parades in New Orleans: plastic beads and stuffed animals, glittered shoes and doubloons, light-up swords and toilet plungers. But cookbooks?

The Krewe da Bhan Gras, a group that has been performing bhangra, Bollywood and other South Asian dances in parades for the last three years, has handed out a thousand of them this season. The slim cookbooks feature 18 family recipes — a veritable who’s who of South Asian dishes, from chana masala to begun bhaja to Sri Lankan love cake.

Food items have long been a favorite giveaway at the Carnival celebrations in New Orleans. Most famously, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club hands out elaborately decorated coconuts, as has been its tradition since 1910. You might catch a MoonPie or beignet mix at a parade as you watch a dance troupe with a double entendre food name shimmy by.

But cookbooks are something new, according to Arthur Hardy, the founder of the Mardi Gras Guide, now in its 49th annual edition.

Throws, as the parade trinkets are known, date back to the late 1800s, when candy, peanuts and sweets were tossed from floats, Mr. Hardy said. The Rex Organization, which will parade on Tuesday, introduced glass-bead necklaces in the 1920s, and in 1960, aluminum doubloons, which Mr. Hardy still considers a perfect throw because it includes the date, parade theme and organization in one small souvenir.

“In a tiny little circle you had everything you needed to know to commemorate your visit to the city and to that parade,” he said. “It was a wonderful keepsake.”

Today, krewes have become known for a signature throw, and some of the bigger parades have signature throws for each float, with collectors vying along the route to catch each one. “Each organization tries to have something unique,” Mr. Hardy said, “and it’s a competitive battle for bling.”

The cookbook was designed by Jayeesha Dutta, 47, a Krewe of Bhan Gras member. It was a natural choice for this group of about 100, many of them doctors and medical professionals, as the organizers first met through a potluck group for South Asians in New Orleans. Ms. Dutta said those dinners were “a very diasporic experience.”

In 2023, the first year the Krewe of Bhan Gras dancers took to the streets, they gave out spices, like the Bengali five-spice mixture panch phoron, along with a QR code linking to a digital cookbook of eight recipes. “We stopped doing that because spice packets were exploding in people’s fanny packs,” Ms. Dutta said. “It was messy.”

This year’s cookbook was professionally printed, and dancers offered it up to spectators during four parades, along with 1,000 magnets with a recipe for chai, and some 20,000 bangles.