Barbara's Reviews
Cookbook Reviews
Made in India: Cooked in Britain: Recipes from an Indian Family Kitchen
By Meera Sodha
Fig Tree - 2014
Move over Madhur Jaffrey! This is a wonderful cookbook filled with fresh takes on Indian home cooking. I have been cooking out of it a lot in the last few weeks, and nothing I've tried has been a dud.
It has introduced me to new ingredients, which may be hard to come by for some, but I'm sure Internet offers solutions. I'm lucky to have an Indian Suriname grocer around the corner where I am able to get things like poha (flattend rice), sev (crispy chickpea flour noodles), and amchoor (green mango powder).
It also has recipes for ingredient that I think of as being very Northern European -- beets and cabbage, for example. The author's family came from Gujarat via Kampala but adapted recipes to suit locally available produce.
There are good explanations of Indian ingredients and pulses (with pictures), recipes that I'm already familiar with (Gujarati green bean, jeera rice) but also fresher versions of old favourites like saag paneer.
I'd recommend it to anyone interested in modern, homemade Indian cooking.