It’s hard to fault this as a reference cookbook, but I’ve come to see it as a minor obstacle to my developing more proficiency with South Asian cooking. A long time ago, when I first wanted to work in that direction, I tried and didn’t care for Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks (several of them) for a variety of reasons, so I turned to Batra next.
There’s a space, it seems to me, between this sort of encyclopedic representation of everything in a cuisine and a kind of baby-steps entry point to it. I have several Chinese and Japanese cookbooks that I think inhabit that middle space very well. Even a cookbook with encyclopedic scope can do that very well if it’s organized in a particular way.
For example, rather than the conventional by-ingredient or by-type approach, organize the encyclopedia by region and talk about how each region differs in its preparations and flavor profiles. Or sequester the author’s favorite or most individually distinctive recipes (they’re scattered throughout Batra’s book, and some are quite appealing) in a front section. Organize it by suggested menus or pairings (or put those throughout). Put the twenty most familiar Indian recipes in the beginning and talk about each one—how they got into Indian restaurants outside of South Asia, what the major variations or different approaches are to each one. Something, anything, to give a cook a way to work through the book with some sort of method or perspective in mind.
This is me trying to make the cookbook the problem when maybe it’s just me that has the issue, I suppose. All I can say is that there are other cookbooks that have been productive pathways into cuisines for me that were big and comprehensive but organized differently than this one.
It’s also, as I’ve said in earlier Cookbook Survivors, that the South Asian pantry has a lot of distinctive spices and ingredients and for the most part those are not available even in large conventional supermarkets in the mid-Atlantic. I was at a Wegman’s yesterday and I was really struck that the Indian-themed section was all of two shelves, shared with Middle Eastern and Greek ingredients, whereas the Chinese, Japanese and Korean ingredients took up about 15-20 shelves. Partly that’s about some of those ingredients being used in a lot of relatively conventional dishes outside of those cuisines—almost everybody who cooks has some soy sauce on hand. Even one of my favorite shopping destinations, H-Mart, caters way more to Latin American cuisines than it does South Asian. (Though there are some pretty decent South Asian speciality markets in this area.)
The goal for me in working into a cuisine is to get to that point where I buy fresh ingredients for a week’s cooking knowing that I’m covered in my pantry for a variety of kinds of cooking, where I cook from the underlying grammar of a cuisine upwards into a dish, and thus can decide night after night what I’m in the mood to make. Sure, there are special dishes in every single cuisine in the world that take planning and preparation: no home chef has a kitchen that is just ready to go for anything and everything if the produce and proteins happen to materialize. But with South Asian food, I pretty much have to go back to the recipes for almost anything, and I want to cross a threshold of being able to just compose some basic dishes on the fly.
Anyway, time for a sustained working with Batra’s cookbook. This is going to be a multi-week project—you can’t judge a thousand recipes by doing four or five of them. For today’s menu, I’m making:
Baked okra. Why? Because I have some very fresh okra from the garden on hand. I’ll sprinkle some chaat masala on it as per Batra’s suggestion.
Fork-mashed potatoes with peanuts. This is a recipe that Batra says she’s especially proud of. And I have some really good Eva potatoes to work with.
Spinach with paneer. This is one of my partner’s favorite dishes. Wegman’s didn’t have the brand of paneer that you sometimes see in stores around here, and making paneer from scratch is a minor hassle (I’ve done it), so I’m using farmer cheese, which is a bit softer and saltier than paneer but I think will work ok as a substitute.
Murgh tikka masala. My daughter orders chicken tikka masala preferentially any time we eat Indian cuisine, so it’s a recipe I ought to know in all its variations and stylings.
Naan. Easy to make, done it plenty of times, but good to have.