The Turmeric Trail: Recipes and Memories from an Indian ... (ISBN 0312276826)

Amazon.com Review:
The Turmeric Trail's beguiling author, Raghavan Iyer, arrived in America at the age of 16, steeped in the southern Indian cooking of his youth. In addition to his love for the extraordinary vegetarian Tamilian food that his grandmother and mother prepared, he had enjoyed the tempting street fare of Mumbai (Bombay), where he was born and raised. His book includes 125-plus recipes encompassing curries and stews, rice dishes, chutneys, poori and other breads, grilled kebabs, ginger-laced chai, and sweet fruit desserts. Readers will delight in authentic, approachable formulas for irresistible fare like Corn with Roasted Chilies and Coconut Milk, Chicken in Saffron Almond Sauce, and naan (grilled bread) with fenugreek and garlic--versions they're unlikely to encounter in other Indian cookbooks. But the greatest pleasure of the book is Iyer, who writes with a droll, impish wit and the sure ability to evoke scenes of Indian domestic and public life in all their teeming intimacy. For example, after being slapped by his "otherwise favorite French teacher," Iyer recounts a trip, instigated by his "newly arrived sister-in-law," to eat lentil croquettes sold by a distant vendor. "There's nothing like Mumbai street life to diminish the shock of a slap," he continues. "The piercing horn of the three-wheeled rickshaw, noisy as a pressure cooker's whining, and the angry ringing of a bicyclist's bell jarred me back from my self-pity to the life-risking task at hand--crossing the street." The croquettes, finally, justify all. "After the first mouthfuls, I understood (my sister-in-law's) zealous fervor.... Suddenly, I was a disciple, too, having been blessed by their divine presence that nudged me to open my heart's door to my brother's wife." With an enlightening introduction and comprehensive glossary on ingredients and techniques, good tips, and many more wonderful stories, the book is an entrancing and practical treat. --Arthur Boehm

Warm memories:
As another south indian settled in USA the book brought back very vivid and warm memories of southern india and mumbai. While the recipes are as standard and perhaps lacking in detail in some ways, the stories and memories associated with them are very real and common across many south indian households. The introduction with the grandmother's story brought tears to my eyes - and i also loved the flowing and somewhat natural way of relating food to people (the sindhi lady, sardari vendor) and the strong familial ties to his sister and family that are expressed through food. That said - indian lifestyle, however, is fraught with tradition and rigid, lot of times oppressive beliefs that are not obvious and very hard to come to terms with, especially if you are a woman. I dont' believe it is within the scope of this book to address those issues but i do believe in some places the author tends to paint life as pinker than it is (arranged marriage, life with in laws, caste/community related issues).

Trite and contrived:
Sorry, I hated this. I actually tried out some recipes and they did not turn out well. I am an Indian and cook quite a bit of Indian food. So I was dissapointed. I felt the recipes slanted heavily towards "street food" rather than a good range of Indian cuisine. I couldnt stand the text - it reads more like one of those travelogues that gives the "foreigners" a romanticised view of India. Blah, blah, blah ... I found the prose heavy-handed and annoying.

Special Stories to go with Special Recipes:
The Turmeric Trail is one of my favorite cookbooks and I have scores of Indian cookbooks, as I'm sort of a gourmet chef. I wrote a cooking column for a sailing magazine for a couple years and one of my favorite articles was my "Two Ways to Tandoori" which you can read in one of my "Amazon So You'd Like to Guides," if you want. Tandoori chicken is just delicious. Anyway, while I was making the guide, I listed fifty cookbooks from my collection. I have more. I know, I know, one would think a couple books would be enough, but it's sort of an obsession with me, making food taste great and I just love to see how others have done it. While I was doing the guide, I pulled out all my Indian Cookbooks, had them all stacked around me. Then I decided to pull out all the ones I didn't think I could live without. It came to an even dozen and The Turmeric Trail was one of the books. The recipes are just divine. I've never been to India, been a lot of places, but never there. Delhi, Bombay, Ganges, names that just ring with adventure. I imagine I'm there every time I cook up something Indian. I can feel the smells as they wrap their delicious flavors all around the kitchen, or galley, if I'm cooking on board the sailboat my husband Dub and I live on half the year. You won't go wrong with this book. Check it out. Check out my other eleven too. Cook up something from India tonight, taste the adventure. Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne

Sensitive portrait of a family, a culture and its many-flavored cuisine:
From the Orange County Register November 3, 2005 by Judy Bart Kancigor, author of Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family Picture yourself halfway around the world, isolated from family and friends, living in a completely different culture where your holidays are unknown. How do you spend your first Christmas? In 1982 cookbook author and award-winning cooking instructor Raghavan Iyer, then 21, left his native India to study in the United States. Two months later, as his family in Bombay celebrated the joyous festival of Diwali, he sat in his room, consumed by loneliness and self-pity. "Everybody was back home celebrating, having a good time and feasting on pal paysam (creamy rice pudding). Instead I was studying with a Cadbury's milk chocolate and potato chips." Diwali, celebrated this week - the New Year falls tomorrow on the fourth day - is as important to Hindus, Sikhs and Jains as Christmas is to Christians. Known as the "festival of lights" - celebrants decorate the home with oil lamps - the holiday signifies the renewal of life. New clothes are worn, fireworks are exploded and sweets are exchanged. "It also signifies the homecoming of Rama, who was banned into a forest for 14 years," explained Iyer by phone from his home in Minnesota where he is currently working on a new book, "660 Indian Curries", to be published in early 2008 by Workman. "But the bigger part of the celebration is a tribute to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth." Iyer is the author of "Betty Crocker's Indian Home Cooking" (Wiley) and "The Turmeric Trail: Recipes and Memories from an Indian Childhood" (St. Martin's Press), which was the 2003 James Beard Awards Finalist for best international cookbook. Little wonder. More than a cookbook, "The Turmeric Trail" is a deeply personal, vividly recalled love letter to his family, to his native Mumbai (Bombay) and to the exquisite and varied flavors of his mother's and grandmother's cooking. "...hold my hand along my turmeric-brick road," he beckons, "yellowed with ageless stories, perfumed with spicy aromas, and peppered with succulent dishes." In "The Turmeric Trail" Iyer brings Diwali to life through the memories of his eight-year-old self arising with excitement. "In our family it was the tradition to wake up before sunrise and burst firecrackers early in the morning," he told me. "So you can see how popular we were with the neighbors, but it was something they expected." His mother would always make fried noodles called sev for the holiday, he recalled. "You push the dough through a sev nari, a mold that is common in Indian cuisine - you can use a cookie spritzer - to produce strands as thick as spaghetti." On Diwali friends and neighbors exchange sweets, "everything from kaaju katri (cashew squares) to gulab jamun, which are like beignets soaked in sugar syrup and flavored with cardamom or even saffron, to roasted garbanzo bean flour bars called mysore pak," noted Iyer. "We'd take plates of them to friends and neighbors, and they'd empty our plates and fill them up with sweets from their own kitchens." To continue the tradition, Iyer will host a Diwali party this weekend. "During the day I will make the noodles with my son Robert, who is 6 1/2," he said. "I always make it a point to wear something traditional, and Robert will too. In southern India, where my family comes from, men wear a wrap-around garment that falls to the ground called a dhoti. For the holiday we buy new clothes and dress up." And of course it wouldn't be Diwali without his mother's pal paysam. PAL PAYSAM (CREAMY RICE PUDDING) From "The Turmeric Trail" by Raghavan Iyer 1/2 gallon whole milk 1/2 cup uncooked basmati or long-grain rice 1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk In a large, wide-rimmed saucepan or Dutch oven, bring milk and rice to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring constantly to prevent scorching. Continue cooking milk down, 30 to 35 minutes, stirring occasionally and scraping sides of pan to release collected milk solids, until milk is reduced to 5 cups. Pour in condensed milk and continue simmering about 15 minutes. Serve warm or chilled. Serves 6.

No experience necessary......:
I am not Indian (unlike many of the other reviewers it seems) and had very little experience with Indian food (and had never cooked it myself) before I got this book from the local library. So far, every recipe I've tried has come out phenomenally, but of course some of them weren't quite as easy as the recipe made it sound. But they still came out great. I am now in the market for this book because I consider it a MUST HAVE for any home cook. I also love the fact that in the whole book, there are only 5 recipes that include meat (that's not counting the fish/shellfish recipes since my partner and I still eat those). It's very hard to find a good ethnic cookbook of any kind that is at least mostly vegetarian.