30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEAn Invitation to Indian Cooking, first published in 1973, is the book that made the Western world take Indian cooking seriously.
Madhur Jaffrey wrote it in New York, where she had moved as an actress and where she had grown tired of being served something yellowish brown with raisins in it and being told that it was Indian food. Craig Claiborne wrote about her in The New York Times, a publisher got in touch, and the result was a book that argues just as much as it instructs.
Its thesis is that curry does not exist. There is Punjabi cooking with tandoor and dairy products, Bengali cooking with fish and mustard oil, Keralan cooking with coconut and Gujarati vegetarian food, and they have roughly as much in common as French and Norwegian cuisine. Curry powder is a British invention that is not used in any Indian kitchen.
What still makes the book worth reading today is that it is genuinely written. Jaffrey tells stories about her family in Delhi, about the seasons, about what people eat when and why, and her tone is unmistakably firm. She has no patience for shortcuts and says so plainly.
The recipes cover soups, meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, rice, breads, chutneys, pickles and desserts, along with a section on summer food and grilling. The techniques are explained from the ground up because she assumes the reader knows nothing.
The book has been inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame and appears on virtually every list of cookbooks that changed something.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Arrow
ISBN: 9780099463245
Language: English
First published: 1973
