The Essential Madhur Jaffrey (Ebury Great Cooks) Book

Is Madhur Jaffrey essential? The answer to that must be "yes". Few writers can have contributed so comprehensively to a transformation in public eating habits and expectations. Madhur Jaffrey has done much to encourage discrimination where Indian food is concerned, in a career spanning 25 years, all the way back to her ground-breaking Invitation to Indian Cooking of 1974. There was a time when, outside Indian restaurants, what was passed off as curry was a terrible undifferentiated molten brown slurry, infested with rags of meat and harsh with the scent of cheap, stale curry powder (let us not speak of the sins that were committed in the restaurants). Maybe in places it still is, but at least there is now no excuse. The Essential Madhur Jaffrey is a generous compilation of about 200 recipes from throughout her career-- her favourites, she says. They certainly deserve to become anyone's favourites. Soups (not really Indian, these, but Anglo-Indian), snacks and starters, meat and fish curries, vegetables and dals, together with all the accompaniments of bread, rice, pickles, chutneys and relishes, and a choice selection of sweet dishes such as halvas, make up a wonderfully varied collection, presented with Madhur Jaffrey's customary precision and enthusiasm. As always, her food is an absolute delight to cook and eat. The current edition is one of a series of elegant, practical and durable paperback reissues from the Ebury Press: very handy indeed in the kitchen. It deserves to become battered and stained with much use. --Robin DavidsonRead More