The Seasoned Cookbook

Like people, cookbooks can be articulate and helpful, or incoherent and inane.
There are cookbooks and then there are cookbooks. Bookshelves around the world are groaning with them. Publishers say that they are the fastest selling category. “Hot cake item hai, ji – barah mahinay – year round!” a Delhi publisher confidently declares, every time he sends me a slightly underdone cookbook manuscript to edit. And he’s right. He’s never stuck with leftover copies going stale on his shelves. They are all simply gobbled up – even those that are hastily and indifferently thrown together with recipes pinched from here and there, and unimaginatively named Indian Cooking, or Chullah or Rasoi, or simply: Cookery.

These books are usually coyly and monotonously dedicated to ‘My husband and family who were willing guinea pigs’. Or to ‘My Mother, who is a fantastic cook’, etc. That done, the writer then weaves drunkenly through the recipe, sometimes giving you measures in cup fulls, sometimes in grams, sometimes in ounces, depending on the original source of the recipe. An Ingredient mentioned in the list often fails to appear in the entire Method – leaving you wondering if some of the Ingredients are there just to play Twelfth Man - to be used only if you spill or forget to buy one of the other ingredients. Also, there are delightfully enlightening instructions like…. “dip the cutlet in egg and make jaali” (in a recipe for lacey cutlets). Or “Make one-string syrup or else laddus will become rocky”. (Nowhere in the book is this ‘one-string syrup’ explained.) Or my favourite: “You will know meat is well-cooked when the goat smell stops and kabab smell starts.” Bon apetit!

Then there are those cookbooks that have outstanding, well-written, reliable recipes, but are simply strung together in the order in which the writer thinks of a recipe…. So, for instance, over 100 superb recipes for an array of rotis and naans appear all jumbled together, without benefit of indexing, alphabetizing, regionwise grouping…nothing. It makes for quite an adventure….in which, before you reach your original destination - say, Coorgi Roti – you find yourself wandering off on an all-India tour of Kulchas, Dosas, Theplas and Luchhis. It’s fun really, if you have the time.

The truly good cookbooks, every real and armchair cook’s delight, are those that are meticulously, painstakingly put together, each recipe tried and tested and confidently explained. Many of the entries are abundantly cross-indexed, so one recipe points you to another cousin-recipe related by region, function or ingredient. Ingredients appear in easy and consistent weights and measures; and intricate aspects of the method are lucidly explained. These books are a joy, not just for the seasoned cook, but for people (who will remain unnamed) who need to look into a cookbook, step by step, even to make vegetable khichdi. Such books also include little tips and words of caution. For instance, one cookbook that tells you how to make khandvi, tells you how to spread the hot dough quickly on several pre-oiled plates, and cautions you NOT to have anything going on the back-burner till you have made and put away the khandvi completely – exactly the kind of trap I would have fallen into because of the apparent simplicity of the dish.

The cherry on top of the icing is when good cookbook writers (or their able editors) have a deft touch, not only at their kitchen counters, but at their writing desks too. Then you’re guaranteed not only good dishes, but also fascinating little insights into the world that every recipe inhabits.

By far the most wonderful cookbooks are the handmade, homegrown ones: files, folders and diaries full of cuttings and handwritten recipes seasoned over the years with stains and aromas from the kitchen. Most good cooks cherish and nurture these compilations, garnered from so many sources, written and oral. In the best tradition of competitive cookery, many of the entries have little notes and tips in hieroglyphics – special inputs that are meant to be shared only with the most worthy. In fact, my great grandmother, universally known as ‘Uma Kaku’, would not let anyone note down her recipes. She would only ‘narrate’ them - and moreover, even in the telling, there was an ‘aam janta’ version, in which she conveniently forgot to mention some key ingredient or process – a trade secret reserved only for those close to her heart. In those pre-copyright days, this was a rather neat way of protecting ones intellectual property rights.

Another truly enchanting aspect of these homemade digests is how the compiler-cook usually scrupulously noted down the source of the recipe. For instance, my mother has an old diary full of recipes. On the page dated 14 May 1969, she’s written: ‘Tomato pickle (Parsi)’ – and at the bottom of the recipe is the meticulous footnote: ‘Mrs Godbole’s recipe, learnt from Abaan Mistry’. So it acknowledges the primary source and secondary source too. With absolutely no compulsion to do so. (Quite a lesson for so many modern-day academics who suddenly suffer from amnesia when it comes to footnoting their work.)

When I opened the diary to the tomato pickle page, it conjured up a hot Bombay afternoon, over 30 years ago, when Mrs Godbole brought humungous quantities of garlic, red chillies, tomatoes, vinegar and oil to make the pickle at our house – because her in-laws could just not stand that ‘non-veg odour’. You can almost smell that sensational vinegary pickle off the page. Here too, there are hieroglyphics in the margin - obviously some key tip that tells you when to take the bubbling cauldron off the stove – or how to store it – something reserved only for the inner circle. But my mother’s not telling.