Community cookbooks: A treasure chest of family secrets

Published from MumbaiBoss.com

In the first cookbook I laid my eyes on, Sindhi vegetable pickle is followed by a dish called ‘Spaghetti Balls’. It also features such delights as paneer spaghetti pie, Portuguese bread toast (which is stuffed with groundnut chutney and is baked wrapped in a banana leaf) and ‘Royal Cocktail’. It remains among my most used cookbooks, but I have never tried making any of these dishes. My mother sends me the pickle, a winter gift every year. And I don’t think anyone will have the stomach for a pie that contains spaghetti.

Delicious Delicacies (the title of the book) was printed in the 1970s by the Ladies Wing of The Sindhi Youth Association of Bangalore. My mother brought it with her to Mumbai when she got married. It was always by my mother’s bedside table and from it she would make “masala butter biscuits”, hooking me on to the combination of savoury, fat-rich cookie dough, green chillies, curry leaves and cilantro. Now I use the book to make not just the biscuits but Sindhi traditional specialities, such as patti samosas, thandai and the besan-based mithai thaley baddhi (a flat, chewy mithai).

My latest acquisition is Bhojan No Anand. While it sounds like it might mean ’there is no pleasure in eating’, it actually means ‘The joy of food’ much like ’the joy of sex’. And much like that other primal pleasure, it is supported by some (food) porn. Each of its five volumes contains five compact books, and a DVD of tutorial videos showing how the recipes are made. A volume each is dedicated to a different component of the Gujarati thali, so Vol. 1 contains books on starters, salads, raita, chutneys and pickles, and so on. As cookbooks go, it has enough meals to keep me going for years, with a unique combination of thali items every day. It is published by The House of MG, where MG stands for Mangaldas Girdhardas. MG was a businessman and philanthropist in the 20th century; his vacant family home was restored and converted into a boutique hotel in Ahmedabad. The books are available at the hotel store.

Community cookbooks come in all sorts of looks, shapes and sizes. Delicious Delicacies is in the shape of an arch instead of the standard rectangle, for no apparent reason. Cooking at Home with Pedatha has the writers’ pedatha or aunt on the cover, because she was the source for the Andhra recipes within. However they may be sauced up, community cookbooks are not only for the serious cook. I have owned many of these books for over a decade, way before I attempted food journalism or getting a chef’s degree. I haven’t cooked a single dish from some of them. For anybody with diverse tastes, community cookbooks allow you to reach back in time, and stir a pot on someone else’s stove. I look at the ingredients of the Maharasthrian vangi bhat recipe in the cookbook Ruchira to compare them with the list at the back of the same ready-to-cook preparation by MTR. From The Art of Persian Cooking, I like to see how well aab gosht has travelled from Persia to Crawford Market’s Gulshan-E-Iran.

In fact, these cookbooks can be fun for anyone who eats out in Mumbai or cooks for their own family. They help us recognise influences in what is being served at Indigo or at Purepur Kolhapur. They show us what is missing in Matunga — a nice vazhaithandu thayir pachadi, which is essentially tender banana stem and coconut in raita. We can identify what’s in our East Indian friend’s lunch tiffin—chicken guisad curry with peppercorns, Kashmiri red chillies, coconut juice and maybe even sultanas. We can thus skim through community cookbooks like novels or travel guides. Read them in bed for the fun of it, or flip through them when a meal of regional food is on the horizon.

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Recipes and food writing are now everywhere. There’s Wikipedia (though it’s hit-and-miss), and the billions of recipes on the tens of thousands of food websites populating the Internet. But they’re better for an overview, or when we are specifically looking for something to cook, or know more about. Community cookbooks are about discovery, they are personal, and the stories hidden in the recipes stay with you like characters in a beloved novel. Online blogs come closest to them, but many often miss out on the measured tone of a cookbook, which comes with the gravitas of words permanently set on paper, and with deeper contexts; writer, editor, publisher all thinking about the reading market in different ways. However, to get your hands on a real book which you can stain, scribble in the margin of, and show to your friend’s grandma, the net is still super handy. In addition to the ones mentioned in this piece, here are books that you can find on either Amazon or Flipkart to get your collection started.

• T he East Indian Kitchen by Michael Swamy • The Emperor’s Table: The Art of Mughal Cuisine by Salma Husain • The Konkani Saraswat Cookbook by Asha S Philar • The Essential Kerala Cookbook by Vijayan Kannampilly (All of Penguin’s Essential series is excellent, they have Sindhi, Andhra, Maharashtra, Goa and many more.) • Kashmiri Cuisine Through the Ages by Sarla Razdan OR Wazwaan: Traditional Kashmiri Cuisine by Khan Mohammed Sharief Waza • Bangladeshi Cuisine by Shawkat Osman • My Bombay Kitchen by Niloufer Ichaporia King • Bihari Vyanjan by Rekha Arun Kumar • Samayal: The Pleasures of South Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Viji Varadarajan • Purba: Feasts from the East: Oriya Cuisine from Eastern India by Laxmi Parida

When shopping for community cookbooks, look for ones by authors who belong to the community whose cuisine you want to learn about; they are most often the ones written most passionately.

This story by Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi was originally published on MumbaiBoss.com