[Note: I wrote this piece in February 2005 and have revised it a bit. I scarcely remember what it is to eat inside in a restaurant anymore. I still have never been to India … .] Curry aromas waft promisingly in the cold winter air as the smudged glass door opens and closes with every … More A Brief Passage to India
Trick-or-treating may well have originated in the old custom of “souling,” as people went from house to house, begging (“mumming”) for “soul cakes,” actually prayers — in sweet form. Sir James George Frazer wrote about this practice in The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, a classic in anthropology, first published in 1890: … More Saints, Souls, and Haints: More Soul Cakes
Curry. I can’t live without it. And thus it was only natural that I used some of my Santa Claus money to buy myself a copy of Dan Toombs’s clever cookbook, The Curry Guy: Recreate Over 100 of the Best British Indian Restaurant Recipes at Home (2017). The cooking found in British Indian Restaurants. Or BIRs. … More The Curry Guy
I love food from India, I mean, I really, really do. And so when I had a chance to review Madhur Jaffrey’s latest, well, what could I say??? Heck, YES! Here’s my review, of a marvelous book, on that wonderful new magazine from the U.K. – Modern Salt: MADHUR JAFFREY’S “VEGETARIAN INDIA: A JOURNEY THROUGH … More Madhur Jaffrey’s “Vegetarian India”: My Review on the”Modern Salt” Site
For numerous reasons, lately I’ve been indulging in one of my passions – cooking the food of the Indian sub-continent. I just ran across again William Makepeace Thackeray’s “A Poem to Curry,” quoted by nearly everyone who takes a stab at writing about the mystery of curry, and how it traveled to the nooks and crannies … More The Poetry of Curry, or, a Traveler’s Tale
Several years ago, I set up an informal experiment with an observation of two: in my tiny two-person household, I cooked and ate only Indian food for one month, relying heavily on cookbooks by Julie Sahni and Madhur Jaffrey. I felt terrific, with more energy and alertness than I knew what to do with. Of … More The Wonder Spice: A Review of Turmeric, a Cookbook by Colleen Taylor Sen and Helen Saberi
Like most of you (I hope), I have been cooking from Julie Sahni’s cookbooks for years. I learned to feel utterly confident that Ms. Sahni’s recipes really work and come close to what people from India know about good food. One weekend my husband’s office held a pot-luck at a colleague’s house. Feeling assured that … More Julie Sahni -Talk About Great Indian Food!
The cow stood there, stoically it seemed to me, chewing with lazy abandon, while I fumbled with the focus on my camera. She rolled her big weepy eyes, as cows are wont to do when confronted with something new. Coincidence or not? I pressed the shutter and peered at the tiny LCD screen, the sun’s … More Keep Calm and Carry On: Cows as Zen Masters