Indian cookbooks - then and now

"Books, even cookbooks, are written for a diversity of reasons and it is often more profitable to enquire why they have been written than analyse their contents in an uncritical manner. "

Shylashri Shankar/The Peepul Tree

I guess this particular post stems from one of those books on my desk - The Food of India - a large beautiful book which I picked up from the op shop for a song. Like it's companions in this series from the Murdoch stable on various world cuisines, it features all of the dishes that we probably all know from that country, plus a few more that we don't know. Plus a few photographic essays on various aspects of that cuisine - in this case street food. seafood, spices, breads, sweets and tea together with a very few words on those topics. A few of the recipes have a few words of introduction, but mostly there are none. It's a book to turn to for a recipe for tandoori chicken, biryani, chapati, korma and samosas ... and also for a few moments indulging in its sheer beauty.

It was published in 2005/2006 which perhaps was a watershed moment in the history of Indian food and Indian cookbooks in the Western world. Well in my lifetime anyway. I'm ignoring all the colonial and British Raj stuff in this post, and besides it comes up on a regular basis. I guess I'm talking about the late 40s, early 50s on, when the Indian food that was offered was just awful and often loaded with sweet sultanas. Not that you would have found it anywhere other than on a P&O ship - which is where I encountered it - my father being the guy who organised the food on offer. His lovely Goan cooks, I noticed ate rather more appetizing looking stuff with their fingers, which rather blew my very young mind. Such recipes - the ones with the sultanas - were also sometimes offered in the women's magazines. If it had turmeric and sultanas and was served with rice it was a curry.

But then came the Indian diaspora and the rise of the neighbourhood Indian restaurant, the kind that we all loved - and still do, where they served all those dishes which became staples on their menus, although not, initially at least, tandoori food because, probably, it was difficult to obtain the right ovens. Ironically it seems most of those restaurants in the UK were/are owned by Bangladeshis.

As I have, probably often, said, when we came to Australia there was just one Indian restaurant in Melbourne - Phantom India - somewhere near the University of Melbourne I seem to remember. And it wasn't as good - and a visit to an Indian restaurant in Sydney I seem to remember had on its menu curry - chicken, beef or pork, maybe lamb - hot, mild or medium. I will say no more. So I decided I needed to learn to properly cook Indian food - well what I thought of as proper Indian food - and so purchased the book at the top of the page - Cooking the Indian Way. Its recipes were relatively simple and somehow it was possible to obtain the turmeric, cumin and coriander, cardamom and fenugreek that its recipes demanded. And the taste was almost like the food we had eaten in those London Indian restaurants.

I suspect it wasn't majorly authentic however, or perhaps the recipes themselves were almost authentic, but their names had been dropped. The first recipe in the meat section, for example, is called Meat or chicken curry. There is even one just called Mince. There are hardly any of those names that are familiar favourites in Indian restaurants, Roghan Josh, Murgh masala, Do-piazza, Aloo gosht ... in this book. One of the very few is Dhansak with Meat and lentil curry in brackets, just so you knew what you were eating. There were also no pictures - unlike the Dhansak from The Food of India, shown here. The ingredients in both recipes are, however very similar, at least as far as the vegetable and dal components are concerned. The spices are a bit different, which is possibly a crucial difference but I would not know.

I was satisfied for quite some time however, until Charmaine Solomon and Madhur Jaffre burst upon the scene, although I did not really come across Madhur Jaffrey until later. It was Charmaine Solomon I think, who led me into a better appreciation of 'real' Indian food, which Madhur Jaffrey then expanded with her explorations of various regional cuisines. Although I did not come to it until much later, her book Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible is perhaps the most comprehensive and scholarly of the well-known Indian cookbooks as it covers the history of 'curry' and its manifestations around the world - everywhere that the Indians travelled and settled. These were mostly not recipes from Madhur herself - a large part of her output - happily recognised by Madhur herself - were recipes collected from here and there - almost always with an acknowledgement of the author.

"I was struck by the ribbon of tradition that runs through them all, traditions that, sometimes, can be traced back to Indian prehistory. This connecting thread and the variations in Indian food around the globe had me gripped with fascination." Madhur Jaffrey

Below two examples from her Bible - Vietnames pork with lemongrass and Natal red kidney been curry.

Tradition was all for many, many years, both in the books that were published by the famous and the not so famous, and served in the ubiquitous Indian restaurants. Familiar dishes, handed down from grandmas and mothers, slightly modified to suit the tastes of the audience, although at the same time there were 'posher' restaurants, and more experimental ones that began to serve 'real' Indian food, often concentrating on one area.

At the same time Indian immigrants, and their host countries' citizens who had been captivated by their food began to experiment and blend. Even Madhur herself - particularly in her Cookbook for Family and Friends creates dishes that combine the cuisines of different worlds. This is her A kind of shepherd's pie, which as well as British herbs, and a similar technique to the original, has Indian spices in the mince. I have to say I'm not particularly tempted by this one - maybe I'm a bit of a puritan when it comes to shepherd's pie - but there are others in the book which are genuinely inviting - Chicken with herbs for example, which again combines British herbs and Indian spices in a kind of traybake.

Today we have a bit of a battle going on I think between those who want to emphasise those traditions for fear of losing them, and those who like to experiment with cultural fusion. Sometimes that battle sometimes exhibits itself in one person. Meera Sodha - a British child of Gujarati immigrants and a vegetarian - now vegan I think - chef demonstrates that challenge, of maintaining your cultural roots, whilst adapting to new one. I only have one of her books - Fresh India from 2016 in which she talks about how her Gujarati mother adapted to the ingredients she could find in her new home in Lincolnshire, and how this has influenced the way she herself cooks. As did Madhur Jaffrey:

"many, like me, are creating new dishes that meld what we remember with what we can easily buy." Madhur Jaffrey

Maybe, in fact this is an example of these words from Sejal Sukhadwala in The Guardian for the heritage is definitely important, and yet I think Meera Sodha (and many others) sees herself as British.

"if you’ve been cooking your mother’s or grandmother’s recipe long enough to write about it, surely it’s now part of your own repertoire, and therefore your own recipe?" Sejal Sukhadwala/The Guardian

Her recipes are subtly both Indian and British all at the same time. Three examples: Tofu stuffed romano peppers; Rainbow chard saag aloo; Shredded brussles sprouts thoran/All Ways Hungry

In that same article Sejal Sukhadwala also said:

"While the disappearance of a historical cuisine makes me desperately sad, I also know that recipes are kept alive when a large number of people cook them, not when a few people record them."

Which brings me to the point where the immigrants are proud to experiment with the two cuisines that are their heritage, and deliberately merge the two - as is shown in my last book in this post - from 2023 - Desi Kitchen by Sarah Woods, in which the author visits specific Indian communities in disparate parts of Britain, and then devises herself, or copies, recipes that explore the diversity - even occasionally mixing in other cuisines as well. I did write about this book when I bought it - Desi or dépayse - inventing comfort food, so I shall say no more here - just a few examples: Onion bhaji scotch eggs; Butter chicken bhao buns, Welsh chilli rarebit and Hassleback potato shak - alas no recipes online for the last three.

I confess that this is not a properly researched post - I've just based it on my own Indian cookbook collection - I have others too but in the interests of brevity - well almost - I ignored them. I was struck however, by how they - Indian cookbooks - and also Indian restaurants and what can increasingly loosely be described as Indian food has changed over the years. The British, of course, have been adapting at ever increasing speed from way back in the 18th century, a speed that increases exponentially as time goes by. Today's young do everything at speed, hence the explosion of new ways to do old things. Back in my day we were slower to adapt and Madhur Jaffrey made the most of this as Judith Jones said:

"She was canny enough to realise, it was apparent, that she had to seduce us slowly, step by step."

And she did, although it seems that in Britain at least the traditional Indian restaurant is decreasing in number - sometimes for the same reasons that all small restaurants are - COVID, staff shortages, increasing costs, but also because now they have to compete with a n increasingly diverse range of immigrants who also want us to enjoy their cuisines. New Indian restaurants over there focus on things like street food, or particular regions - in a more 'authentic' way.

And with respect to my opening quote I didn't enquire why those books were written either. It's a question to bear in mind however, when writing future posts on cookbooks. There are still some on my desk.

Now I wonder who won the Melbourne Cup and did everyone get wet?

Yesterday's desk calendar recipe - another example of combining trendy things in one recipe - roast cauliflower, chermoula on that trendy yoghurt base.

YEARS GONE BY

November 4

2024 - Roast pork with Robert Carrier

2023 - Nothing

2022 - A tablecloth

2021 - Hummingbird cake

2020 - Missing

2019 - Tarragon

2018 - Biryani, biriyani, biriani, birani or briyani or is it really pulao, pilau, pilau ...

2017 - Nothing

2016 - A small miracle