Components required for cooking a meal

Today, hundreds of cookery books are available in the market. They contain various recipes. These books give no consideration to preserving and enhancing sāttviktā (predominance of spiritual purity) in the food while cooking. Hindu culture stresses not only on the ingredients of the diet being sāttvik, but the process of cooking being sāttvik too. Only when spiritual measures such as chanting, purifying the kitchen beforehand by sprinkling water mixed with Holy ash (Vibhūti), beginning the cooking after praying, are given prominence as part of spiritual practice, we get help for the food to become completely enriched with Chaitanya (Divine Consciousness).