Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India [Hardcover]

Maya Kaimal MacMillan (Author), Brian Hagiwara (Author), Zubin Shroff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1996

This engaging cookbook, which features the tropical dishes of South India, demystifies the cuisine and offers more than 100 recipes with light, tropical flavors and simple praparations, along with sumptuous photographs of the food and the region. 24 full-color illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Few cooks know their subject as personally as Maya Kaimal MacMillan who in Curried Favors focuses on the less familiar cooking of Southern India, particularly the province of Kerala, her family's original home. "Curry," she informs us, correctly refers to a range of dishes calling for differing blends of spices known as "masalas." Coconut, curry leaves, and mustard seeds are particularly key in the wet masalas often used by her aunt and others in Southern India. MacMillan offers intelligent substitutions, where necessary. Curried Favors provides detailed directions so you can comfortably try dishes such as Idli, Yogurt, Aviyals, Kichadis, and Pachadis as well as more familiar northern favorites such as Khormas and Biriyanis. Something of a mini-coffee table book, Curried Favors would be a good gift, thanks to its handsome presentation and MacMillan's conversational commentary.

Review

"Looking for a great cookbook?Not only is it a beautifully bound bookbut its offerings are delicious alternatives to now mundane dishes like curry chicken and rice." -- Redbook

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Abbeville Press; 1st edition (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789200554
• ISBN-13: 978-0789200556
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 8.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,594,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Indian Food, Easy to Follow Recipes, May 31, 2000

By 

drdebs (CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India (Paperback)

My recipe for success: After you receive this book, make a list of all the spices and cooking stuff (like Tamarind Paste) that you don't have. Go shopping. Come home and start making the best Indian food you have ever tasted. Begin inviting your friends over for the best Indian food they have ever tasted. Enjoy.

This wonderful cookbook is a treat in many ways. There are beautiful pictures, clear explanations of techniques, detailed descriptions of products you need (and substitutions if you can't find curry leaves, like me!), and accurate estimates of time needed for preparation and cooking. And that doesn't even take into account the marvelous food that you will rather effortlessly produce!

Indian food is really starting to become popular in the US, and in Europe South Indian food (the kind featured in this book) is the trendiest wave of Indian cuisine. I find the cuisine of South India less heavy and "brighter" than many Mughal dishes, and I think that even those of you who haven't particularly liked Indian food in the past will gobble up the food in this book. Some of my favorites include Shrimp Thiyal (yummy coconut-shrimp curry), Lamb Korma (admittedly a Mughal dish, and you can easily substitute chicken), and the spinach Dhal (green split peas with spinach and flakes of coconut).

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The closest to home-town receipes ever found!!, February 4, 2001

By 

Soudamini M. Nath (Murrieta, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India (Paperback)

The book is well written and demonstrated with color photos. This makes it very impressive. The receipes are easy to follow. I gave this book as a gift to my son, since he always asks me the receipes for some of the Kerala food. Every time I give him the receipes, he loses it or complaints that the measurment is not easy to follow. Then I found this book and I was really excited. This is the best Kerala receipe book that I have ever found that is close to my home town cooking. Thanks to Maya.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy, accessible recipies with great results, November 6, 2001

By 

Leslie D. Ehrlich (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India (Paperback)

I do a lot of cooking, and this book enables me to produce more flavorful, interesting results for a given -- modest -- amount of work than just about any other book on my shelf. And you don't have to love or even know anything about Indian food to love the results.

What makes it so terrific? First, the recipes are clear and easy to follow, from the crisp ingredient lists to the step-by-step instructions that give just the right amount of detail to keep you confidently on track. No more guessing about how brown the onions should be; she tells you.

Next, while the ingredient lists can be long, half tend to be spices you simply throw together before you start, and just about everything can be found in the average American supermarket. (Yes, really.)

Third, from a technique perspective its demands are modest -- chop, saute, simmer -- so even novice or unconfident cooks can produce good results. And, most recipes take the same basic steps in the same order so the more you use the book the more you grow in speed and confidence. The only thing that's a pain is she sometimes calls for a meat which is hard to find off the bone, e.g., chicken thighs. Sometimes I bone... and sometimes I substitute boneless chicken breasts. Either works just fine.

Lastly, the meat recipes come with accompaniment suggestions -- veg, rice -- which is very helpful for those not well versed in Indian cuisine.

All in all, this book is now one of few dependable staples I take down every other week to do my menu planning and shopping lists. And it will be for you, too.