A Taste of India: The Definitive Guide to Regional Cooking, by Madhur Jaffrey

[rachelmanija]

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

Comments

[swingandswirl]

Feel free to poke re: vegetarian and/or Indian food! Vegetarian food especially gets SUCH a bad rap, and it's so undeserved.

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.

[recessional]

I always end up thinking about the one episode of No Reservations where Bourdain said that the one place on the planet he would happily just EAT VEGETARIAN THE WHOLE TIME is in fact India. It was actually an interesting ep, as he then talked about how it was because of the range of things done with the food, and the fact that there wasn't this strong sense in the cooking tradition that it was "find something to replace the meat that should be at the heart of this meal", but rather just . . . food. Which happened to not contain meat.

That'd definitely be cool, if it's something that interests you to do! :D

[swingandswirl]

So the first time I heard one of Bourdain's rants about vegetarianism my reaction was, roughly, God, what a miserable uneducated lout. And then I got to Europe (France, specifically) and the United States, saw what horrors white people inflicted on poor unsuspecting vegetables, and realised the man had a point. It's a running joke with one of my Midwestern DW friends that they're not allowed to judge vegetarianism until I visit and have cooked for them, because 90% of white Western vegetarian food is just... no.

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?

[rachelmanija]

Have added to my circle to get in on this. ;)

[swingandswirl]

Welcome, lol. I'm going to try and get the first post out in the next couple of days. Do you have any particular likes/dislikes/limitations re: food?

[rachelmanija]

Sadly I hate eggplant, okra, zucchini and related cylindrical squashes, and cilantro. But don't let me stop you with those, because I know lots of people love them. I tend to cook fairly simple dishes without more than, say, ten ingredients (spices included), so if you have anything along those lines, that would be awesome.

[recessional]

Oh I BET. XD And yeah I hear Ethiopian food traditions are also great at doing meatless-but-still-real-food? But was never enough of a follower of his to see if he ever got there. But that moment of him earnestly explaining that in India he could happily be vegetarian (when legit everywhere else you see him in RAPTURES about meat) has always stuck in my head.

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'."