Customer Reviews

The Low Fat Indian Vegetarian Cookbook

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These are recipes that western cooks could make with western ingrediants for Indian guests with complete confidence.

If you love Indian food but worry that the food is often too high in fat: swimming in delicious clarified butter but too rich to be eaten more than occassionally, this book is the answer. The recipes are easy and quick to prepare. With the help of this cookbook you can have healthful Indian meals every day.

The author is a British writer of Indian cookbooks and presenter of TV cooking series. Her recipes are very clever in the way they reduce fat and enhance flavor. One of her secrets was revealed in her previous book "Indian Cooking Without Fat" c.1999; she roasts spices on a dry frypan, she does not fry them in oil. You'll have to read the book to discover more of her ingenious and simple cooking techniques.

There are only a few Indian ingrediants that are hard to find anywhere else but the imported food section, these are: asafoetida (a dry powdered spice, you may substitue garlic powder), besan (chick-pea flour), rose-flavored syrup.

There might be one fault with the book, and that is that it was written for a British audience but was not translated into an American-English version. To help, I flipped through the book and found this list of translations that might be helpful; although most are fairly obvious.

Some "British" to American translations:
"aubergine" = eggplant
"bicarbonate of soda" = baking soda
"beetroot" = beets
"caster sugar" = granulated sugar
"cornflour" = corn starch
"coriander" = cilantro
"courgette" = zucchini
"creme fraiche" = sour cream
"desiccated coconut" = shredded coconut
"double cream" = heavy cream
"English mustard" = dry mustard powder
"fromage frais" = cream cheese
"glace cherries" = marachino cherries
"root ginger" = ginger root
"semolina" = wheat flour
"semi-skimmed milk" = 2% milk
"soda water" = club soda
"star anise" = anise seed
"stoned dates" = pitted dates
"sunflower oil" = safflower oil

Mridula Baljekar's THE LOW-FAT INDIAN VEGETARIAN COOKBOOK isn't quite what I expected -- "low fat" cookbooks, in my experience, tend to eschew deep frying and ingredients such as butter, to offer alternative cooking methods that still capture the flavor of full-fat recipes, and to list the nutritional information for each dish. This one does none of these. Baljekar's idea of low fat is to suggest using half & half in place of full-fat cream. The "High Days and Holidays" chapter, filled with fritters, batter-fried vegetables, and eggs, has a disclaimer that the recipes therein should "be regarded as occasional treats by anyone following a low-fat diet." A helpful warning to be sure, but I spent my money on what I thought was "the" low-fat recipe collection.

American cooks -- at least those who do not live in big towns with specialty grocery stores -- may be frustrated by the lack of suggestions for replacing hard-to-find items like creme fraiche. I am also disappointed by the lack of Indian names for standard dishes, either on the recipe titles or in the index. Nonetheless, the recipes in THE LOW-FAT INDIAN VEGETARIAN COOKBOOK are fairly simple to prepare and tasty. While I would not recommend the book to those who are just beginning their foray into Indian cookery and want to know more about its traditions, or to those who are trying to count calories while they liven up their menus, it is a nice supplement to other Indian cookbooks.

The table of contents:
1. Starters and Appetizers pgs. 1-13
2. Salads and Chutneys pgs. 14-41
3. Soups pgs. 42-47
4. Protein Dishes pgs. 48-78
5. The Bread Basket pgs. 79-95
6. The Rice Bowl pgs. 96-122
7. The Vegetable Basket pgs. 123-169
8. Cooking Sauces, Marinades and Seasonings pgs. 170-181
9. Desserts pgs. 182-195
10. High Days and Holidays pgs. 196-253
11. Drinks pgs. 254-264