Author(s): mridula baljekar, rafi fernandez, shehzad husain, manisha kanani
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2007
Pages:
Review: First the good:
1) Great pictures, and generally easy to make recipes, and the ones I have tried do work.
2) I like the intro and the way the cooking basics are described.
Now, the bad:
The book does not even come close to representing the various regions of India or represent the majority of cooking. I do not understand the basis on which the authors decided to select recipes. There is a large section on Balti dishes, which, as the authors state, is Indian inspired, but not traditional Indian food. All this is great, but it is included at the expense of LARGE regions that are entirely ignored. For example, where are the Gujarati dishes? Of the vegetarian dishes, I am surprised to see that the region of India that is PRIMARILY vegetarian and has a great variety of hugely popular dishes is excluded altogether.
Also, what about the entire southern Indian region? There is a soup or so from the South of India, but dosas? idlis? How could these hugely famous foods be ignored so completely? Even the regional breads are not included while there are multiple recipes that are a slight variation of one another.
There is a single recipe (the bombay potatoes) from the large metropolitan city of Mumbai, but otherwise, the entire myriad of dishes that come out of Bombay/Mumbai are pretty much also ignored.
A very large portion of the book is dedicated to small variations of various meat dishes. This is not representative of India because a very very large part of Indian food is actually vegetarian.
The book should have clarified that it has recipes from SELECTED REGIONS of North India, Pakistan, and English-Indian food, but not claim to be the “Best ever” “Indian” cook book. This claim is not substantiated.
It seems to me that the authors just lazily chose recipes based on what they knew rather than attempting to reach out to represent the true representation of Indian food.
All in all, my suggestion is to use this book in conjunction with several other Indian cook books because relying on this alone will have you miss out on a great variety of Indian food.
Price: Buy This Book