Vegetable Oil

In the old days, ghee was used as a cooking fat for most Parsi dishes. Then came health consciousness and the increasing use of oil, often hydrogenated to look like ghee. In time, hydrogenated oil was found to be even worse for the health than ghee, and we then started using unhydrogenated oils. Because we seem to want to live in a state of perpetual anxiety about what we eat or cook with, one vegetable oil after another gets put on trial and condemned. My recommendations for Parsi cooking are to use peanut or grapeseed oil for deep-frying; to use sesame, grapeseed, or sunflower oil the rest of the time; and to be unafraid of ghee where its taste makes a difference.