Sameen Rushdie

Have you ever hired a porn movie and had to take it back to complain that the people on the cover weren't in it? I feel much the same about cooking books. The ones with lavish pictures in them purporting to be a recipe in the book, but. The pics are as faked as the acting in xxx movies. You are following the recipe to the 't' and you know that there is no way you can make your dish look like the picture. And cooking's tougher than sex. You can't even fake it. I WANT MY MONEY BACK!!!!

This book ISN'T like that. It has no pretensions whatsoever. It stands by its recipes. Some of them are splendid.… (meer)

One of the Indian cookbooks I rely on most, despite the fact that it has no illustrations and is not vegetarian.

The recipes are mostly from the Northern Indian/muslim tradition (as the author explains in detail in the introduction); they are good, well explained, and generally presented with some discursive text about food and/or culture. (I have occasionally read through this book.)

The sections on pulses, vegetables and grains are large enough (and good enough) to make this book quite useful to a vegetarian like me.… (meer)