It’s well known that vegetarian
food tends to be healthy and that a healthy diet can promote emotional
well-being. What’s more, spicy food
stimulates the body’s immune system, making one more resistant to illness. Those would be reasons enough to review a
book on Indian vegetarian cooking, but the clincher is that this is some of the
best tasting food around, and it’s hard to imagine a happy life without taking
pleasure in good food. These days, most
large towns in the US have an Asian or Oriental food store, and health food
stores and supermarkets are stocking a wider range of international
products.

Neelam
Batra’s cookbook The Indian Vegetarian has many recipes, including
beverages, snacks and appetizers, chutneys, sauces, salads, cheeses, legumes,
rices, breads and sweets. It has a wonderful
section describing the essential flavors and spices of Indian cuisine, which
explains when and why certain spice combinations are used.

This
cookbook is relatively sophisticated in its recipes, and so it would be best
suited to people who have already tried to cook some Indian food and are
starting to become more ambitious. The
recipes are easy to follow and are well planned. Don’t be intimidated by the long lists of ingredients for each
recipe, since most of them are spices, and once one has a well-stocked kitchen,
adding these spices makes no significant addition to the preparation time. The vegetables called for are mostly easy to
buy in one’s local market, but the spices may require a special trip to a
specialty store. Each dish is relatively straightforward to cook, although
since when one cooks an Indian meal, one is often tempted to cook several
dishes at the same time, a whole meal may require quite a lot of preparation
time. There are no pictures of the
dishes or the ingredients, and this might be a problem for those who are new to
Indian food, but it should create no difficulties for cooks who have some
experience eating and cooking similar recipes to these.

One of the
greatest strengths of The Indian Vegetarian is that it takes the mystery
out of South Asian cuisine. Its
explanations, written in uncomplicated language, are easy to understand. What’s more, the recipes themselves are
extremely appetizing. The index makes
recipes simple to find. It is in many
ways a better, more user-friendly book that that other classic of Asian
vegetarian cooking, Madhur Jaffrey’s World of the East, which aims at a
broader range of international food, including Thai, Indonesian, and even
Japanese.

To give
just two examples, the Tamarind and Ginger Chutney Sauce is simply the best we
have sampled, bearing no resemblance to the overly sweet anemic red sauce
accompanying appetizers in most Indian restaurants. The Okra Stuffed with Spices was also excellent, keeping the
vegetable spicy and firm. All in all,
Batra’s excellent book deserves high praise and a strong recommendation.

© 2002 Marysusan Noll and Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Marysusan Noll and Christian Perring live on Long Island, NY, and enjoy international vegetarian food whenever they can find it.

Categories: General