Discover Rich and Varied Vegetarian Cooking With ‘Vegetarian India’
Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week is Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey (Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House), an award-winning cookbook author and actress.
In the 43 years since her first cookbook on how to cook Indian food, the groundbreaking An Invitation to Indian Cooking, Madhur Jaffrey has written more than 20 books, including seven James Beard Award–winning cookbooks, several children’s books, and Climbing the Mango Trees, a memoir of her childhood in India. And that’s in addition to starring in numerous cooking shows and winning accolades for her work as an actress.
When it comes to writing cookbooks, Jaffrey calls herself, “a one-woman band,” because she does all the shopping, testing, writing, and editing on her own. For her latest book, Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking, Jaffrey’s process also involved extensive travel throughout India to hunt down the best vegetarian food recipes her country has to offer.
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“I wanted to go into the little pockets of India, buried in the mountains, buried in the desert, states of India or parts of states in India that I have never gone into. And I thought this time I’m not going to take a plane. I’m going to go by car and just wander around, and see what’s everywhere, because in India you take one step and the food changes. There is such a variety of vegetarian food and no one can really know it all unless they walk the length and breadth of India and who can do that?”
Chili-Fried Eggs from Sri Lanka (Photograph: Jonathan Gregson)
With so much travel involved, Vegetarian India has been a long time coming and Jaffrey notes that she’s been gathering the recipes for years: “While I was doing other things, I just kept collecting recipes for this particular book and wherever I went I would ask people in a particular household, how do you make cauliflower? What are your different ways of making cauliflower?”
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And she didn’t settle for them just writing down their recipes. Instead, Jaffrey tracked down home cooks all over India, and followed them into their kitchens to see exactly how each dish is prepared.
“I don’t want to get a recipe that they have written out for me, because then I have no sense of how it tastes, how they made it,” explains Jaffrey. “They don’t say how long they cook it, they don’t give the heat ever and I need to know because I need to tell you.” And, Jaffrey notes, even following cooks into the kitchen isn’t foolproof, as many are reluctant to share their secrets.
“They don’t want you to make something as well as they make it,” says Jaffrey. One cook would leave one ingredient out and then another would leave out something else, which meant a lot of detective work went into figuring out each recipe. But for Jaffrey, the effort is worth it, if it means preserving recipes that would otherwise be lost.
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Berry Pilaf (Photograph: Jonathan Gregson)
In this particular book, Jaffrey shares more than 200 vegetarian recipes. Vegetarian cooking may be trending now, but it has a long and rich history in India. Jaffrey points to the birth of Buddha and the rise of Buddhism, thousands of years ago, as the source of India’s embrace of vegetarian cuisine. Prior to that, Indians ate everything from beef to pork to peacock, but the incredible popularity of Buddhism, meant that much of the country stopped eating meat.
Jaffrey also explores another one of India’s culinary traditions in the book, the medicinal properties of different ingredients and the way that dishes are created in a nutritionally balanced way. In India, explains Jaffrey, there are foods to eat when you have various ailments, such as a cough, a cold, or inflammation.
“Food is not just there for feeding the stomach,” notes Jaffrey. “It has medicinal purposes.” This kind of information has been recorded and passed down for thousands of years, explains Jaffrey. “Your grandmother doesn’t sit you down and say this is good for this, this is good for this. You hear it every day and then you’re bound to learn it” and it affects the way you cook and create meals.
And for anyone who thinks vegetarian cooking is too limited, Jaffrey counters this by encouraging cooks to “look at the things you don’t know and examine them and eat them and see how amazing they are, so you’ll never be bored.” Of course, the 200 plus recipes in Vegetarian India, are another excellent place to start.
Visit Yahoo Food throughout the week for recipes from Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey (Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House).
Check out other cookbooks from Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week:
Lucky Peach Presents: 101 Easy Asian Recipes
NOPI by Yotam Ottolenghi and Ramael Scully
