There are many firsts from the time you pick up this book. It is the first cookery book in purple I have ever seen. It is the first that could be mistaken for chick-lit, or an upcoming sequel to Mira Nair’s
Mistress of Spices. It also is perhaps the first cook book that relies more on sketches (both verbal and pictorial) than on photoshop-enhanced imagery. I guess what I am trying to say is, it all comes together and, really works.
I don’t claim any skills with recipes that could remotely be used to draw parallels with coffee-cup deciphering, but the best bit about the book was that it wasn’t just a compilation of recipes. It was a narrative that established the parameters and prerequisites for the author to have written this book.
‘Written’ is the key word here for, as I said earlier, it doesn’t read like a restaurant menu with ingredients and cooking methodology; it is a first-person account of someone who picked up her virgin karchi-kadhai as she took on the kitchen and Indian cuisines. As a result the language is simple but not ambiguous. Also, Indian cooking, seen how it is more holistic than methodical, is translated well into precise timings and quantities. The reader, especially if a non-Indian, will stand to gain something about Hindu philosophy too if he reads deep enough into how the process of cooking isn’t calculated and measured but more based on preferences and personal thresholds.
Full review
here Asian Age
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