84 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Vedic Vegetarian Cusine, May 26, 2000
This review is from: Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking (Hardcover)
As a Vedic Vegetarian book, it contains no recipes that use garlic or onions. Two vegetables that are staples in other Indian cookbooks, and suprisingly through the substitution of other spice combinations, the recipes do not lack flavor at all.
Some of the dishes are hard to take on, but all are delicious. The information included here is indispensible, not just for the recipies, but for the explaination of countless spices, techniques and ingredients that one often wonders about in other cookbooks, which will often only clarify with an "Available in Indian Groceries" annotation. This book includes a list of actual sources for the spices, should the need arise to obtain black onion seed, and no one in Boseman has it... This lexicon of information makes it possible for one to improvise endlessly from the recipes provided, which I believe, are just samples showing the possibilities.
All in all, the combination of tasty recipes and the voluminous definitions, explainations and sourcing material make this an excellent cookbook, both for the cookbook collector, and the serious home gourmet.
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74 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential Reference For Indian Vegetarian Cuisine, March 17, 2005
This review is from: Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking (Hardcover)
`The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking' by Yamuna Devi can be placed among those great expositions in English of national cuisines such as Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking', Marcella Hazan's `Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking', Diane Kochilas' `The Glorious Food of Greece' or Mimi Sheraton's `The German Cookbook'. And, this book has an IACP Cookbook of the Year award to prove this fact. This book even exceeds the ambitions of the books by Kochilas and Sheraton in that while these authors do an excellent job of surveying the entire national cuisine from either a serving or geographical point of view, they do little to analyze their cuisines in the way Nancy Harmon Jenkins dissects and builds a picture of the Mediterranean cuisines in `The Essential Mediterranean'. Ms. Devi does this and more.
In fact, as big as this book is, it does itself and its readers a service by covering only the Hindu vegetarian cuisines, without touching on the cuisines of India which allow eating meat, primarily lamb and goat. Even more specifically, the author is specifically dedicated to that part of the Hindu religion that embraces Krishna. I will not touch on that aspect of the book except to point out that this means there are areas of Indian and Pakistani cuisines that this book does not cover. For those, the first stop is obviously the books of Madhur Jaffrey who, in her `Indian Cooking' does cover many meat dishes with lamb and goat.
Indian vegetarianism as presented by Ms. Devi in this book is relative broad in that it allows a broad range of milk products. So, while `vegetarianism' allows much more than a diet of vegetables, grains, and beans, Ms. Devi treats vegetable cookery with a depth I have not seen in any book except James Peterson's book, `Vegetables'. Ms. Devi presents three basically different ways of cooking the same vegetable and suggests that these three methods may be applied to every different type of vegetable. The first method is Sauteeing and Braising Dry Vegetables (cooked entirely in oil. No water.) I believe this is what the French would call a vegetable comfit. The second method is to saute in oil followed by a braise in water based broth. This is closer to what a western cook would call a braise. The third method precooks the vegetable in water and finishes it with high heat in oil (ghee) or highly flavored sauce or broth. Pairing them up with a choice of several different seasoning mixes permutes these three methods. The author sets off with this introduction to discuss the various different types of vegetables and how the various methods can be applied to each vegetable.
Most of this is not too different from what you can get from a close reading of Marcella Hazan's books. The Indian way with milk and yogurt is an entirely different matter. The Indian traditions with milk products seem to be about 180 degrees away from the European traditions involving aged cheeses. The only point of similarity between Indian yogurt and Western European traditions are with the Italian ricotta and the Spanish queso fresca. Even contemporary American yogurt is not the same material as traditional Indian yogurt. While much western yogurt is made with skim or reconstituted dry milk, Indian yogurt is made from fresh whole milk. From yogurt, the Indians derive a fresh cheese and a curd that serves the same purpose as the Far Eastern tofu.
As with milk, the Indian approach to bread is just about as different from the western European tradition as you can imagine. It would be fascinating to read an analysis of the differences between, say Italian and Indian bread making traditions. The two biggest differences is that while the Italian tradition requires yeast and a hearth, the Indian tradition uses no yeast and does almost all baking on a griddle to produce a wide variety of flatbreads. Thus it is quite odd to find that while the Italian tradition does include a version of the French crepe, there is not a very big niche for pancakes, but the Indian cuisine seems to outdo even the wide range of American variations on the pancake / flapjack / hoecake / Johnny cake genre.
While the French may have exhausted most of what can be done with their superb, high fat Normandy butter in their rich cuisine, the Indians may just have outdone them by a bit when it comes to using butter, in the form of ghee as a cooking medium. While the French are satisfied with simply clarifying butter, the Indians take this process one step further and cook the clarified butter to a nut brown color which can be stored at room temperature. One implication of the central role of ghee in Indian cooking is that if one wishes to embrace Indian cooking fully, one needs to be prepared to embrace the use of saturated butter fats, which from a purely nutritional point of view may bring back to your diet the saturated animal fats you are avoiding by not eating meat.
The two greatest contributions to British cuisine from the Indian subcontinent are curries and chutneys. This, this book includes an entire chapter to chutneys, which may be made from either fresh or cooked ingredients. My biggest surprises were to find peanuts and cashews in chutney recipes in addition to the expected fruits and spices. In addition to chutneys, there is also a sizable chapter on related pickles, jams, sauces, and gravies. Oddly, there is no chapter on curries or even on the subject of garum masala. There is a brief article on garum masala in the superb appendix, `A-Z General Information', but no in depth discussion of Indian spice culture.
If you take on this book, it will probably be wise to find a good Indian or Pakistani grocery for some of the less common ingredients and to have someone with whom to ask advice on techniques and equipment.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Book to Grow With, November 12, 2001
This review is from: Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking (Hardcover)
My Mother gave me this book when it was first published, and I hung onto it for ten years before beginning. I'm so glad I did! Over the past five years, I have cooked an ever widening range of it's dishes, and I have years worth of cooking still to try. I knew nothing about Indian spice combinations or an indian kitchen before reading this book, and it has transformed the contents of my cupboards. Definitely a book to grow with. The only cookbook I use more is "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" by Deborah Madison, which actually references this one!
Recipe Quality: Almost every single recipe produces a dish that my family and all my friends love. I find that for our taste, we can generally cut the oil by 30-50% and the dish is right for us. Also, we tend to add more salt, up to double. Also, for some reason (we think it's because we use heavy cast iron soup pots so little steam escapes), we almost always have to cut the amount of water in the dals by about 40% or so, to avoid completely watery dal. But the spicing and proportions are otherwise dead-on to produce mouthwatering favorites.
I do agree that there's too much fawning over the author's mentor in the introductions to the recipes. However, many of the intros give little vignettes about being in households in different parts of India, and these I found fascinating. I only wish this part of the book had been expanded upon a little, so I could come away with a clearer idea of the differences in regional cooking.
Overall, a terrific introduction to Indian cooking and one that can keep teaching you new tricks for years.
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