India Cookbook

"It is. It’s the first complete Indian cookbook . It’s a long book; it must be more than 800 pages. It’s rather like The Silver Spoon , in that it’s inexhaustible. It tells you everything that you are going to need to know about Indian cooking. What I can’t quite understand is how Pushpesh Pant, the author, managed to get so many different recipes from so many different places. They other thing that’s good about it is that the recipes actually work. That’s always the thing with cookbooks – do the recipes look good and do they actually produce the dish at the end? Let me tell you about the range, and then I’ll decide which one I like best. So looking through it, you’ve got nimakai rasam. It’s got certain spices, then you’ve got ground pepper, chilli, garlic, coriander and two limes. It’s a very particular South Indian type of lime-flavoured pepper water. Then imagine travelling 1,700 miles right up to the tribal parts of the Northeast, and the border with Burma. There’s a dish here which is called wak al galda, which is pork with sorrel leaves. You don’t get a lot of pork in India, but up in the Northeast, you’d probably be eating some kind of forest pig. Then, zooming back down to the Southwest coast, you’ve got Kerala crab curry, made with ginger, tamarind and mustard seed – or you can go up to Hyderabad in the centre of India, and there you have stuffed green chillies. You wouldn’t get a stuffed green chilli recipe in a regular cookbook in English; it’s a family dish. Another recipe is for green bananas in spicy yoghurt sauce. I’d tried that in Tamil Nadu, but I’d never seen a recipe until now. OK, so for my favourite, how about mutton kolhapuri, which is Maharashtrian hot lamb curry? If you can imagine the flavours, it has turmeric, ginger, cloves, red chilli, aniseed, coconut, poppy seeds, black peppercorns, potato, lamb, tomato… I’m a good cook. My wife, who is Indian, is a better cook. She can cook Japanese food superbly. I like cooking food from different parts of the world, so it’s good having an Indian cookbook which can actually tell you how to make things that you’ve tasted in the past, that you’ve never managed to make. I love the Indian cookery writer Madhur Jaffrey , but there are quite a few dishes in the Pushpesh Pant book which I’ve never seen written down before. It’s very well done. It’s for people who’ve started cooking Indian food, but want to move on from the standard things like chicken curry and want to try something a little bit different. I think that’s probably why this book has been a success. I’d say Cochin in Kerala, which is by the sea. It’s quite fun, it’s a mellow place. The culture in Kerala means that if you come as an outsider it’s not a particularly difficult region to visit. A lot of foreign travellers when they go to India for the first time go to places like Rajasthan, places like Jaipur, Udaipur, Jodhpur, and it’s usual, particularly if you’re travelling without much money, to be surrounded by aggressive touts all the time. People who travel in that way in the North often have quite a dispiriting experience. It’s only when they’ve been back to India a couple more times and have a little more knowledge of other places, that they see a bit more than you find in those tourist hotspots. The second place I would probably pick is Mumbai. It’s a huge, vibrant, noisy, unequal city, where there is always something going on. There are people from different parts of the country who have gravitated there. It’s also a place you can travel around from. For example, you can go to the winery in Nashik, where they started making wine, which I wrote about in my book. Or you can go to Goa, or other parts of Maharashtra, the state that surrounds Mumbai. But the city itself, you’re never going to get bored in Bombay. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter My third choice would probably be somewhere like either Ladakh or Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh. Dharamsala is a hill station which is also the headquarters of the Dalai Lama’s exiled Tibetan administration. It’s a mixture of Tibetan and Indian and Himalayan culture. It’s a very beautiful landscape with the Himalayan mountains rising behind it. If you think of the difference between being by the water in Cochin and then being in the mountains in Dharamsala, it’s extraordinary that you’re still in India. They’re all part of that Indian experience. You should go to Dharamsala; it’s an extraordinary place. And listening to the Dalai Lama speak is quite a remarkable experience. He’s personally very impressive. He probably has a greater personal charisma than anyone else I’ve met."