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Pushpesh Pant is Professor of International Relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Food writing is his sideline, and it shows in a good way. He collects and organises rather than constructs a narrative, and he has done so with academic thoroughness.
There are more than 1,000 recipes across 960 pages, organised state by state, alongside sections on spices, basic preparations and regional characteristics. It is the most comprehensive compilation of Indian food published in English.
Expect a reference work rather than a book for casual browsing. Text dominates, photographs are few in relation to its size, and the recipes are short and matter-of-fact. You do not primarily turn to it for inspiration; you look things up in it and find the dish you have heard about.
If you are only going to own one book on Indian food, Madhur Jaffrey is a better place to start. If you have already been cooking Indian food for a while, this is the one you are missing.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 960
Language: English
First published: 2010
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Indian cooking consists of dozens of regional cuisines that differ from one another as much as European countries do. What is served as Indian in the West is a narrow slice of that, namely Punjabi restaurant food filtered through Britain. This book covers the rest, state by state and as the food is actually cooked in homes, and it has no equivalent in English.
