Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Traveling Cookbook

By JULIETTE ROSSANT Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels through the Great Subcontinent (Artisan 2005) is a stunning coffee table cookbook by two globetrotting photographers and husband-and-wife team Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. Ever so lightly, this tome will transport you to landscapes, faces, and cuisines of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The recipes that the authors present are recreations of inspiring dishes they have encountered on their travels on the subcontinent. Each recipe head note recalls where the recipe came from and how the authors changed it and serve it in their Canadian home. The making of the book is the subject of an hour-long documentary by Jacques Menard for the Food Network Canada. The book wanders all over the subcontinent in no particular order. The table of contents groups recipes by ingredient, but as you leaf through the gorgeous pages, there are other headings like The Winchester with a lovely photo of rice meal mounded on leaves in a mountain village of Orissa, not actually a meal at The Winchester Cafe. On the facing page is an essay about eating at the Winchester in Sri Lanka where the food is south Indian Tamil. One of the authors (whoever is "I" for this essay) writes about eating hoppers (soft steamed skillet breads) and sambhar (tamarind-based soupy lentil stew) rather than the typical heavy meal of "rice and curry". He/she also describes the clear divisions in Sri Lankan society between Sinhalese Buddhists, Tamil Hindus, and Muslims. But in the Winchester, I somehow didn't notice the little statue of Buddha standing near the cash register, and the food had me fooled. The place had a Sinahalese feel, but the food was Tamil, and so was most of the staff. Then I was told that the owner was Sinhalese. When I finally got to meet her, I learned that she had visited Tamil Nadu, in South India, a few years back. She liked the food so much that she had learned to make it and soon she started serving it in the restaurant, along with Tamil dishes from Sri Landa. This may not sound like a big deal, but here in Sri Lanka, after two decades of civil war, it is a big deal. (p. 146) You may never want to make hoppers (recipe on p. 121) and lentil stew (recipe on p.188), but you may want to read observations: why eating on holiday matters in more ways than just energy for more fun. Mangoes & Curry Leaves is full of essays on food memories like the one following a photo of a Hindu shrine near Darbar Square in Kathmandu of a woman making an offering under the title Rebirth. The essay begins with one of the author's mother's death and then a trip to Ladakh noth of the Himalaya. The author goes to a monastery for a festival attended by pilgrims. One day a woman from Dard, a region off-limits to foreigners shares apricots with the author/s: After I'd eaten the fruit, sucking its tart flesh off the pit, she showed me how to crack the pit and extract the "almond" within. Later, during a break, we walked together to one of the tea stands and had tea and bread, dunking the bread in our tea as we watched the passing scene. And ever since, whenever I bit into a tart dried apricot, that encounter comes back: the sharp bright sun, the shy alert smile of the Dard woman, the scents of dust and goatskin and hot tea. (p. 185) There is no mention of conversation between the author/s and the Dard woman, and only a little discussion of the disputed territory between Pakistan and India. This is a passage about what food means, evoking memory, place and understanding. Book details: Publisher Amazon.com Barnes & Noble Previous articles: Manju Malhi's India With Passion Madhur Jaffrey: Our Lady of India, CBE [Cookbook Reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging, cookbooks --> back to superchefblog