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rachelmanija Oct. 6th, 2018 11:46 am)
rachelmanija Oct. 6th, 2018 11:46 am)This is one of my all-time favorite books on food; I'm reviewing it because I recently re-read it. It's a survey of India's regional cooking, with recipes and photos. I have not tried the recipes as Indian cooking is really difficult if you don't have a background in it and know what dishes are supposed to taste like because you once ate them at someone's grandma's house; your results, by which I mean my results, are inevitably disappointing. So I am discussing this as nonfiction, not as a cookbook.
Jaffrey's prose is wonderful and her eye is sharp. She writes about food as one should, as inextricable from culture, people, and place. She also brings in relevant history. When she writes about places I've been to and dishes I've eaten, it's so vivid and matches so well with my own experiences that it made me feel like I'd traveled back in time. (It was written in 1985, so she's writing about the same time that I was in India.) If you want to take a virtual tour of a world that doesn't quite exist any more, if for no other reason than the passage of time, you could not do better.
All cuisines are regional, but India's are really regional, and in America at least, about 95% of them never got exported. Even having traveled in India, gotten invited to people's homes, and eaten a lot, I only heard of maybe half or a third of the dishes she mentions, and only ever tried one in twenty. But at least I got to vicariously experience them via her luscious descriptions.
It's a gorgeous book in every way. If you enjoy food or travel writing at all, I can't recommend it highly enough. It will transport you.
A Taste of India
Jaffrey's prose is wonderful and her eye is sharp. She writes about food as one should, as inextricable from culture, people, and place. She also brings in relevant history. When she writes about places I've been to and dishes I've eaten, it's so vivid and matches so well with my own experiences that it made me feel like I'd traveled back in time. (It was written in 1985, so she's writing about the same time that I was in India.) If you want to take a virtual tour of a world that doesn't quite exist any more, if for no other reason than the passage of time, you could not do better.
All cuisines are regional, but India's are really regional, and in America at least, about 95% of them never got exported. Even having traveled in India, gotten invited to people's homes, and eaten a lot, I only heard of maybe half or a third of the dishes she mentions, and only ever tried one in twenty. But at least I got to vicariously experience them via her luscious descriptions.
It's a gorgeous book in every way. If you enjoy food or travel writing at all, I can't recommend it highly enough. It will transport you.
A Taste of India
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I've used a lot of her recipes from her other books and have only been disappointed if my manual dexterity wasn't up to making things look good. My samosas, from Worlds of the East Vegetarian Cooking, taste just exactly right but look like weird lumpy rocks from space unless I take about five minutes for every one and refer constantly to the directions. But they taste lovely.
I was going to suggest that she got better at writing recipes for people unfamiliar with the cuisine, but a look at the publication date of the book (1988) shows that it's newer than Worlds of the East, which was published first in 1981.
I do automatically reject any recipe that has phrases like "just slip off the skins" or "the skins should rub off easily after soaking," because they don't; and I also reject anything that is coated in a batter and fried, because I cannot do that (somebody else in my house usually fries the samosas even though I ought to be able to do that, because they are trickier than they look).
You probably have higher standards for food than I do. That would make sense.
Anyway, thanks for the review; like you, I'd enjoy the book even if the recipes don't turn out to work for me.
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My mother bought herself a copy not long after I got mine, and then found she never used it, so she gave hers to me just a couple of years ago, and it should take me ten years or so to do this spine in. For some recipes, however, I irrationally feel that I want to use my own copy, mostly if I managed to spill something on the pages in question.
I would be surprised if it hadn't been reprinted.
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... I know your main point is that in this books she introduces you to stuff you might otherwise never have heard of or tasted, but I just had to pipe up with some general Madhur Jaffrey enthusiasm.
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If you like vegetarian food at all, I can't recommend Jaffrey's Vegetarian India and World Vegetarian enough - they're so, so good, and Vegetarian India especially is filled with the kind of wonderful home cooking most people outside the country aren't even aware of. It makes me miss having my own kitchen!
The nice - and frustrating - thing about Indian cooking is that there's so much variation just in terms of community/culture/life experiences that even people in the same family (like my grandma, mom, aunt, and me) can have wildly different ways of making the exact same dish, so yours may not taste like how you remember, but if it's a Jaffrey recipe, there's a pretty good chance it will be delicious anyway.
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And given all the weird things about my executive-function and ASD brain and so on "oh hey this name/person/prose style/etc you are already familiar with and positively disposed to is also a good resource for this!" is disproportionately helpful on that scale. >.>
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Would it help if I threw up a post on DW with some recommendations for Indian food and also vegetarian food in general? I'm default vegetarian (eat meat sometimes when I'm out of the country) and have spent a few years in the West, so I'm aware of limitations wrt ingredients and such.
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That'd definitely be cool, if it's something that interests you to do! :D
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I'd be happy to! I'm getting back into the habit of posting content on DW rather than mindlessly scrolling through Tumblr and this is a fun topic, lol. Do you have any particular likes/dislikes/limitations?
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So much of white/European-heritage and even quite a lot of other places Vegetarian Food is really just . . . trying to do their normal food traditions but replacing the meat with something, which doesn't really work. As opposed to the traditions where it DOES work.
I am medium-spice-tolerant for a white North American*; bananas are Not Food; I am habitually wary of things that have a custardy/soft-cheese-y texture in a way that's mostly left over from childhood; I tend not to love things like chutneys or stuff with similar texture when they are cold because of texture issues; goat cheese/goat milk sadly has an aftertaste for me that basically amounts to having the SMELL of a live goat as a strong taste in the back of my mouth; no actual allergies at this point! (Also I'm pretty much willing to try anything bar bananas and goat-cheese, the other notes are more 'I will stare at this for a long time like a cat being suspicious.'' XD)
*HILARITY: even just living in North Vancouver - which does have a LARGE number of restaurants/etc that are working in High Spice Level food traditions - has meant that now even talking to other Canadian/US culture-based people when asked "is it spicey?" I have to ask "okay what is our paradigm here". "If you were in an Indian or Mexican or Sechzuan restaurant in North Van this would be 'mild', but if you were in Edmonton it would be 'strong medium'."
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I like vegetarian food if it was always supposed to just be a vegetable dish. I don't like vegetarian food where it's a recipe normally made with meat but ingredients are substituted to make it vegetarian (or worse, substituted to make it vegan.)
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That said, I've had some really delicious originally-meat-made-vegetarian dishes, but in those cases the cook knew how flavours worked, and also wasn't trying to do one-on-one substitution so the end product wound up being 'really tasty parmentier/lasagna/meatballs that happened to not have meat' rather than 'omg get it away'.
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