If you have a penchant for the esoteric and enjoy Indian restaurants, you might like the experience of perusing your local (or perhaps not so local) Indian grocer. To be confronted by rows and rows of foodstuffs, none of which you have ever seen before in your life, except perhaps sticking out of a curry you ate once, is an eye-opening experience.

Get yourself a copy of Julie Sahni's user-friendly guide to cooking Indian cuisine yourself in the west, and you may be able to reciprocate the eye-opener by introducing the glazed grocer to a non-Indian who knows what is in all those packages and cooks with them all on a regular basis. Your friends and other appreciative slobs in your life will think your cooking miraculous good after a short study of Classic Indian Cooking

Sahni was trained to cook by two routes. Firstly, she had a in-home in-service training under the auspices of her own family, simply preparing the family faire on a daily basis. Secondly, she underwent a more formal apprenticeship to a master chef of the Indian cuisine. She combines these two schools of thought and ways of cooking with an occidental American turn of phrase and an eye for the differences between the way the two cultures cook and think, and the foods they know. This unique combination of talents permits her to write a book about traditional Indian cooking which is particularly understandable to western cooks.

Sahni begins after her passionate introduction by introducing those elements of Indian cooking which would be most unusual to the western reader. These, the fundaments of cooking authentically in the Indian style are essentials and will later become second nature, but this book understands only too well that second nature is preceded by first principle and endless repetition. The first things introduced therefore are the spices and the cooking techniques.

Julie Sahni’s introduction to the cooking techniques and spices of Indian cuisine would easily have made a book on their own. These long detailed chapters take you through both the common spices and their common uses and properties, but also where to find them, what effect you get from them, and to what traditional group of Indian spices (there are four or five major style groups) the spices belong. Again, when you have cooked all the dishes in the book this information will begin to make intuitive sense to you, but it is here, by careful application of yourself, that you will begin to piece together the mystery of why Indian food tastes so good. At every possible turn Sahni goes out of her way to explain what common western grocery store foodstuffs most strongly resemble (and can therefore be substituted for) esoteric Indian equivalents. She also simplifies things further by decoding many of the Indian names for ingredients so they make more sense in the language used to describe them in our own neck of the woods.

Many of the foodstuffs required for cooking Indian food can indeed be located in your local grocery store. there are probably some sections of the grocery store that you have walked past endless times and never really seen properly, or looked straight through. This book will have you taking a long hard look at the Mexican spice section, the pulses and grains, not to mention re-evaluating the best use for a couple of chops of lamb or a bag of shrimps.

The section on the basic cooking techniques of Indian cuisine is likewise immensely helpful and rewarding. I am going to assume, you understand, that you are actually going to go ahead and get some stains on this book by using it, and experimenting with the enclosed information. If you read cookbooks and descriptions of cooking techniques for leisure reading, we live in worlds somewhat different. I may not be your best reviewer (actually I am really no-ones best reviewer, except perhaps my dog.) All my cooking books, even the painfully pricey ones have splash marks all over them. Anyway, where was I? Yes…..techniques. There are perhaps only a couple of things that Indians do on a daily basis in their kitchens that you do not do yourself….there is plenty of browning, frying, basting, braising, and other familiar techniques. To produce good Indian food you may have only to fine tune your technique in these areas.

Again, Julie Sahni makes this book special in the fact that she is so aware of how things are normally done in both an American and an Indian kitchen and can therefore help you understand how to adjust your current technique. A good example is the frying of onions….frequently in the States this is done to a point where the onions are translucent and soft. In India it is more commonly the case that the onions are fried to the very edge of caramelization. The author goes into exquisite detail to help you get the hang of this.

On the subject of techniques and principles, two more sections much later in the book are especially devoted to the preparation of the staples of most Indian meals; rice and bread. Basmati rice is new to a lot of people in the west but one they have learned how to prepare it properly they come to agree that for fragrance and taste there is little substitute. As it happens, if you are diabetic, Basmati rice is even more desirable, since it has a very low glycemic index. As for Indian breads, archeological excavations at the Giza plateau in Egypt would seem to indicate that both the recipe and the basic technique for preparation of this delicious filling bread have been unchanged for thousands of years. This does not stop me burning it on a regular basis. Again, the author goes into a lot of detail to help you master the various breads.

It has to be said, I have probably made as much use of this book in judging Indian restaurants on my first encounter with them as I have in preparing my own food. Because I am completely confident of the authenticity of the advice in this book, and the fact that it is so graphically and carefully described, I have used the understanding I have gleaned from this book on many occasions to determine if dishes are being prepared in an authentic style by restaurateurs. I am not particularly saying that there is nothing to be gained by the artistic flair and variations one might encounter from restaurant to restaurant, but this book did teach me that a poori should come to the table crisp and puffed up. I always order a poori on my first encounter with a new restaurant. If they can’t get that right, I have learned a lot about the rest of the menu. I include this information to indicate to you that over the ten years I have been seriously cooking my own at-home Indian food, I trust this recipe book as much as any I have found.

The recipes themselves represent every kind of dish, in the fashion typical for a comprehensive tour of a region’s cuisine. Everything from soups, starters, main meals and side dishes in meat, vegetable, pulse and dairy are all represented in separate sections, with notes on each section and each individual recipes suggesting what might go well with each dish.

Some categories of dish more specific to Indian cuisine are as well represented as any other…this includes such items as wafers, pickles, yoghurt-based drinks.

The end of the book features an extensive glossary including phonetic pronunciation guide, and a list of mail order suppliers. You may currently consider driving 100 miles for an Indian grocer to be unthinkable, but if you put this book into practice on a regular basis, I bet you don’t for long.

Recommended: Yes

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