Indian Cooking -- The perfect intro to a grand world cuisine
Written: Aug 29 '02 (Updated Jun 08 '08)
Product Rating:
Pros: A great 'starter' cookbook for those interested in Indian cuisine.
Cons: A fairly small cookbook. Heavy on the meat dishes. Is that a con?
The Bottom Line: An excellent introduction to the cuisine of India for a novice home cook. Vegetarians would be better off with one of Jaffrey's later vegetarian cookbooks.
lyagushka's Full Review: Madhur Jaffrey - Madhur Jaffrey Indian Cooking
Who knew that Madhur Jaffrey ate meat? If you've followed this talented chef and cookbook writer lately, you might think she's become a vegetarian. And hey -- maybe she has. This book though, Indian Cooking, attests to the fact that she once cooked and consumed copious quantities of meat.
This was one of the first cookbooks I ever owned and it served as a great introduction to cooking Indian food at home. Its modest size and color photographs made it unintimidating, a quality that happens to be universal to all the Madhur Jaffrey cookbooks I own. For budding home cooks or those with little experience with Indian cuisine, Indian Cooking is the best entrée (pun intended) I know of into a great cuisine. It might also be of more interest to omnivores than her several subsequent vegetarian cookbooks.
Jaffrey starts this book from the assumption that the reader is unfamiliar with Indian food and cooking. Before getting into the recipes, she offers a brief personal introduction, a guide to the spices, seasonings and flavorings of Indian cuisine, a few pages on techniques, a discussion of menu composition and finally a very short list and description of useful equipment that the average home cook might not have on hand already. In these introductory chapters, Jaffrey explains everything carefully and clearly, in a voice that is reassuring and encouraging. She lets those with delicate palates, or worse - those cooking for family members with delicate palates - know that while Indian food is always "spicy," it need not be "hot."
With this excellent orientation accomplished, Jaffrey invites us to jump right into the recipes. These are arranged in nine chapters, mostly according to main ingredient, e.g. meat, chicken, fish, etc. Interspersed with 8 pages of beautiful color photographs, the recipes all sound so inviting and delicious. For the most part, Jaffrey fits each recipe on to a single page, making it easy to finish a dish without mussing the book with wet or dirty hands.
The formatting for each recipe is good. For most main or side dish recipes Jaffrey makes recommendations for menu composition in a brief introduction to the recipe. Ingredients appear in a narrow column on the left hand side of the page in bold print. Quantities are given in both metric and American measurements. When she calls for an ingredient (such as roasted cumin seed) for which a technique has been discussed previously, she gives the page number of the technique right in the list of ingredients. This is convenient for the beginner and forestalls aggravation. At the very top of the ingredient list, Jaffrey gives the number of servings produced. This is a somewhat odd place to put this information, accustomed as I am to finding it at the end a recipe. The numerical value makes it blend in to the ingredient list and hard to spot until you know where to look.
The procedures occupy a wider column on the right side of each page. The instructions are clear and concise, without any technical language. When she mentions Indian ingredients such as ghee or garam masala in the instructions, these words are italicized, making it easy to pair them with the page references in the ingredient list. In general, any information that would be at all novel to the average western cook is very well cross-referenced in the book. A few recipes require advanced planning, such as soaking chickpeas for 20 hours before cooking them. Others require hours of preparation and cooking time, but in fairness Jaffrey is up front with this information, pointing out that these dishes make appearances for special occasions in India.
Most of the main dishes in this book are centered on meat or fish. While there are some vegetarian dishes, Indian Cooking would not be the obvious choice for vegetarians or those who eat little meat. Any of Jaffrey's later vegetarian cookbooks would be a much better bet for these cooks. (See below for the link to my review of Jaffrey's World Vegetarian.) But what dishes Jaffrey has included in this modest cookbook! Lamb biryani, cod in spicy tomato sauce, Mughlai chicken with almonds and sultanas, fried potatoes with ginger and garlic, sour chickpeas -- each one is a gem.
With the exception of the few bread recipes, I think all the recipes could be successfully prepared by a careful rank-beginner cook. The breads chapter seems a little silly to me, since the traditional techniques for Indian bread preparation have to be modified so much for the western kitchen that the end product bears little resemblance to the original.
On the facing pages of each color photograph, each dish is identified by name followed by the page for the recipe. These pictures really get me drooling and fired up to cook. Looking at my copy, the many food and sauce-splattered pages attest to the good use this book has been put to in my home.
The chapters included in this 200 page book are as follows:
Introduction
Spices, Seasonings and Flavorings
Techniques
Menus and How to Eat Indian Food
Equipment
Meat
Chicken
Fish
Vegetables
Pulses
Breads
Rice
Relishes, Chutneys and Pickles
Soups, Snacks, Savouries and Sweets
Index
There is also a very handy (now that I live in Europe) conversion guide for American, British and Metric measurements, as well as a Celsius-Fahrenheit equivalence chart.
To sum up, I can strongly recommend this cookbook. It presents meat-based recipes which are not repeated in Madhur Jaffrey's later vegetarian cookbooks. Although I have owned Indian Cooking for more than a decade and it is a relatively small book, I still cook recipes from it on a monthly basis. It is the book I would suggest to a friend who was interested in exploring Indian cuisine for the first time. It's also a great compromise for cooks looking to broaden their repertoire while still providing for meat 'n potatoes types.
I can also recommend these cookbooks:
• World Vegetarian - suitable for slightly more experienced cooks & essential for vegetarians
• Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - Deborah Madison's compendium of vegetarian cookery - great dessert section
• Cooking with Pomiane - a deliciously nostalgic review of culinary history, narrated by a great wit
• The Boulevard Cookbook - sumptuous recipes from San Francisco's favorite restaurant
• America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook - trustworthy guide to all the fundamentals of home cooking
• Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America - accessible and delicious recipes for nibbles or a hearty meal
• The New Best Recipe - 1000 canonical recipes, perfected
• The Bread Baker's Apprentice - superlative, expert instruction for mastering yeasted breads
• Baking With Julia - Julia Child's award-winning "bakebook", covers all type of baked goods
• Dim Sum - a thorough introduction to these tasty Chinese morsels
• The Good Egg - fresh & tasty recipes based on the incredible, edible egg
• The Wellness Encyclopedia - an excellent reference guide to the nutritional facts on most anything you could put in your mouth
Chef magazine called this book s author the best-known ambassador of Indian food in the United States. For many years a bestselling cookbook, this sem...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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