Top Ten Indian Cookbooks.

Not much has changed since Apicius. Most cookbooks are still handwritten notes and even though fairly generic, many women still guard their recipes like gold. Till recently, few Indian women, especially in small towns, would willingly share their recipes .To get the exact ingredients of a dal makhani in North India was a task that required sleuthing skills and Holmesian questioning.There was always the option of catching the cook behind the memsahibs back and grilling him.

It sounds so Victorian but in a sense it was. Women were not encouraged to work outside , and their only realm of influence was the home . Socially acceptable work was running a boutique or a school in the home. Beyond that there were few ways in which a woman could give reign to her imagination or creativity.Where many women were so much more ambitious and smarter than their husbands , food was often a weapon of oneupmanship.Recipes were guarded like gold.

Old recipe books  whether of Roman or Eastern origin gave the ingredients but never exact amounts. Much was left to the imagination.Great cooks were celebrated and feted and the feasts they prepared were talked about long after.

Now with the huge number of cookbooks available it is pretty tough to select ones that will be really useful to the average cook. Sadly some of the best Indian cook books look like nothing on earth...no appetizing pictures, bad typefaces and cheap paper as well as indiscriminate copy editing with ingredients missing or instructions misplaced. So they need imagination and determination to cull the best recipes from them.

Others look so good it seems unbelievable that the recipes are generically bad; they are compilations of recipes picked out from here and there with photographs bought from photo agencies that often have nothing to do with the given recipe.

Years of coming up with awful food productions have helped me to make a list of pretty decent cook books. I have tried to keep the variety of Indian cuisine in mind and have listed as many books giving recipes from different regions as possible . As usual there are so many books about Tandoori and North Indian food which has become popular the world over. The real gold lies between the covers of those unassuming little books with authentic home cooking written by some dedicated housewife. Sumaithu Paar was originally a three volume tome written by Mrs Ammal as a labour of love. Every Tamilian bride got one set much as 'The Joy of Cooking' as become a must have on every American brides gift list.

This list threatened to become the Top Twenty... but I restrained myself.And cheated a bit. Note 2 a and b.

1.Indian Cooking;Madhur Jaffrey. Publishers: Barron's Educational Series; Expanded edition (September, 1995) ISBN: 0812065484 Written in a way that can be understood by everyone, with authentic home cooking recipes, this is a good introduction to North Indian cooking .

2. a. 500 Easy Recipes.A New Approach.Narayani V. Nayak . Published 1965.  Reprinted 1978. Great Saraswat recipes. Much better than the famous 'Rasa Chandrika' . I will be bringing out a new book with all her wonderful recipes later this year.Please check with me to order advance copies around January 2007.

2.b Moti Mahal -Tandoori Trails- Monish Gujral. Roli Books . ISBN 8174363165.From the original Moti Mahal in Old Delhi, an interesting background to the pioneers of popul ar tandoori cooking .North Indian

3.The Complete Vegetable Cook Book- Vasantha Moorthy .A guide to Cooking Vegetables in over 300 Ways.UBS Publishers ISBN 81-7476-009-1  An excellent book with a home cooked  South Indian flavour.

4. The best of Sumaithu Paar:The Classic guide to Tamil Cuisine.Meenakshi Ammal.New Delhi. Viking 2001.ISBN 0670 049  .A selection from the original volumes.

5. Dakshin.Chandra Padmanabhan.Publishers: Periplus Editions. ISBN 9625935274

6. Life and Food in Bengal-Chitrita Banerji. Reprint. New Delhi. Penguin 2005.ISBN 013032739

7.Annapurna-Mangla Barve. Maharashtrian Cooking . Mumbai . Publishers: Asoka Kesava Kothavale : Majestik Prakasaha, 1992. This has been a best seller in Marathi and might be available in English soon.

8.Jamva Chaloji- Katy Dalal .Parsi delicacies for all Occasions.Publishers.Vakils, Feffer and Simons Ltd. Bombay. ISBN 81-87111-06-2 A bit on the rich side but worth trying.

9.Wazwaan-Traditional Kashmiri Cuisine.The Waza brothers. Publishers:Roli Books. ISBN 81-7436-171-5 . Fabulous Kashmiri food written out fairly well. Just cut down on the amounts of ghee and oil specified.

10.Cooking Delights of the Maharajas-Exotic Dishes from the Princely House of Sailana- Digvijaya Singh. Publishers:Vakils, Feffer and Simons. 10th ed. 2002.Mumbai . ISBN 81-87111-14-3 .You might have to work out what some phrases mean, as the language is not very clear, but the recipes are superb.

P.S.Please note comments and links below  from Lindy at Toast to get copies from other booksellers.

P.P.S.Other readers favourites with links also mentioned iin the comments section.

Comments

[Barbara]

Thank you for this list--I have a quite a few Indian cookbooks (many published in India), but I only have a few on this list.

It is interesting to hear that folks from India value Madhur Jaffrey as much as the Americans and English do--I love her because she came to cookery later in life (much like Julia Child) and she has such a good way of communicating her knowledge--she explains things very, very well. Because she came to her own in the kitchen later, she gives confidence to beginners that they, too, can learn to cook as well as she did.

I will have to see if I can get ahold of some of these books.

Thanks again!

[Silverbrow]

Thanks for that. I've been trying to get hold of an informed list like this for some time. However, I am quite interested in getting hold of regional books, e.g. Southern Indian / Rajasthani etc. Can you make any recommendations?
thanks Silverbrow

[Meg]

Thanks so much for this! It's difficult for those of us who only know Indian food through European/American Indian restaurants to evaluate Indian cookbooks. Fodder for my Amazon wish list and just in time for Christmas!

[barrett]

What do you think of Julie Sahni's Indian Cookbook? I recently picked it up used but haven't cooked out of it yet.

[deccanheffalump]

Barbara, Madhur Jaffrey is one of my favourites too.

Silver brow I think the South Indian one I'd choose is Vasantha Moorthy , for sheer simplicity. No dosa, idli, sort of stuff here.Mostly good basic recipes for Indian vegetables.
For Rajasthani definitely the Sailana book.

Meg you are welcome!

Barrett I have Julie Sahni's Mughal Microwave but have never tried much from it, so I would not really be able to give an informed opinion. But she is practically unknown in India which might give you a clue how she is rated by the general public here.

[Lindy]

US readers and English readers might be interested to know that several of these cookbooks not available new on Amazon, and the like, can be found at www.bookfinders.com, which is a combination search engine covering the smallest and largest sellers of new and used books in the US and UK.

I have had great luck finding out of print books using this site. there are lots of copies of The Complete Vegetable Book, for example, and once I recover from my Christmas expenditures, I plan to get one!

[deccanheffalump]

Thanks for that link Lindy !

[Barbara Fisher]

Bookfinder is a great site.

You can also find a lot of out of print cookbooks on ebay--but the prices are usually better on bookfinder or Amazon's used books.

[rekha]

Prashad Cooking
J. Kalra, Gupta Singh
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/8170230063/qid=1148479885/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_0_1/203-5101563-0149506

i found this bk very good. please comment if u r aware of this bk.
Also, any recommendation for non-veg and paneer indian recipes, respectively. Thank u. much appreciate ur feedback and the list.
bi. rekha

[shalini Khanna]

Motimahals tandoori trail is one of the finest cook books with a history i have ever come accross.Three cheers for Monish Gujral for keeping his grand fathers legacy alive and more so keping the trail alive for others to follow

[raja]

Monish Gujrala Tandoori Trail gives excellent and easy to cook recepies and more over they are historic recepies as motimahals kundan lal was the inventors of tanoori chicken , butter chciken and Dal makhani.