India: The Cookbook [Hardcover]

I ordered "India the cookbook" after looking through it in a store. I was really impressed as to the scope of dishes covered. A lot of the dishes seem really simple to prepare once you have purchased the proper spices.

The book is well organized by: Spice mixtures, pickles chutneys raitas, snacks and appetizers, vegetables, fish and seafood, meat, pulses, breads,rice, desserts, drinks. There is even a section of recipes from contemporary restaurants located outside India.

Each recipe has an Indian name and English translation, key to a photograph, spiciness guide, region of origin. Each recipe gives measurements for ingredients in grams, ounces, cups. There are lots of juicy photographs in colour plates that show you what the dishes should look like. The printed pages of this book are beautifully coloured and are of a lightweight but strong paper printed and bound in Italy. There is a brief introduction about Indian cooking, how to eat Indian meals, geographic regions. I have successfully cooked Indian food before and am excited to expand my repertoire. I would recommend this book to people who have previous cooking knowledge.

What a fabulous book...I have a small collection of about 65 Indian Cookbooks, but it's true what it says on the cover of 'India Cookbook' ~ It really is "The Only Book On Indian Food You'll Ever Need" and had I bought this one first, my collection might have been reduced to this one book.
The only fault I found is that it does not have 960 pages as it states in the 'description', nor does it weigh 1.6kg ~ it actually has 815 pages (including the index) and weighs 1.5kg (the weight is written on the book cover). The difference in weight may explain the missing pages...however, the ISBN # is the same. hmmm
The bottom line is, if you're interested in cooking the food of India, buy this book!!!
BTW ~ it comes sealed in plastic, in a cloth bag that has the same design as the book cover...so cute!!

The fact that this book has about 740 pages of recipes speaks for the work that went into producing this book. It may indeed be the only Indian cookbook you'll ever need, however, to make that completely true, there are some changes that could be made. I do a lot of ethnic cooking and have a range of Indian recipes that I begged, borrowed or stole from Indian friends. I know my way around most of the ingredients. I did find that this book was overwhelming and even a bit extreme as to the sheer volume of recipes included. As an example, there are 82 pages of lamb recipes...I'm guessing about 60 recipes. Great for those who like lamb, but perhaps not really necessary. As well, I found a lot of the recipes were very similar and could maybe have been narrowed down. Here are my comments on the book:
- many many recipes for sauces, chutneys and spice mixes were given, but no indication of where they were used or what meals they could accompany
- there were many pictures, but they were inserted in clumps of picture pages, and were not adjacent to the recipe - making the book a bit of a road map to a final product
- lack of matching pictures for all recipes makes it hard to tell the end product you should be aiming for
- no accompanying description, history or background on the dishes - you're on your own for determining how to put together a meal or to choose accompanying side dishes
- the book publishing is low quality - pages are similar to newsprint - may not be an issue, but I have concerns with the longevity of this book - especially if it were to be used often
- pictures that were included were low quality...some hard to see what the food looked like, very dark pictures
- the index of recipes is listed by the title of the recipe, not by the type of food eg. You cannot look under "samosa" and find all the samosa recipes
- there are duplicate recipes
- on the plus side, each recipe ingredient is given in multiple conversions where appropriate
I think this book will be a good reference, but it will not be a book that I pick up looking for something to cook. Instead, if I hear or see an Indian dish elsewhere in the media that interests me, I'd pick this book up to see if I could find a recipe for it. This book is recommended for vegetarians (though all meats are used, there are a lot of recipes here for vegetarians), or for the serious ethnic cooks that know their way in and out of Indian cuisine. If you're a newbie with Indian cooking I'd probably recommend a different cookbook.