Monsoon Diary [Paperback]

Shoba Narayan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2, 2004

MONSOON DIARY weaves a fascinating food narrative that combines authentic vegetarian recipes from South India with tales from Shoba Narayan's life, stories of her delightfully eccentric family, and reflections on Indian culture. Shoba recounts her childhood in South India, a portrait of small-town life richly populated by characters like the flower woman who brings jasmine for the gods, the milkman who names his cows after his wives, and the iron-man who picks up red-hot coals with his bare hands. Food is so important to her family that when Shoba wins a scholarship to study in America, they only agree to let her go if she prepares a successful banquet. She returns home to an arranged marriage - to her surprise, the family have chosen well - and later there are visits from her many relatives, old and new, to her home in New York City. In MONSOON DIARY, Shoba Narayan's culinary talent is matched by stories as varied as Indian spices - at times pungent, mellow, piquant and sweet. Her characters, like Shoba herself, have a thing or two to say about cooking and about life.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

SHOBA NARAYAN is a food and travel writer and has written for a variety of press including Travel & Leisure, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Shoba won the James Beard Foundation's MFK Fisher Award for her story 'The God of Small Feasts', widely considered the most prestigious food writing award in the United States. She also comments for NPR's Weekend All things Considered. Shoba currently lives in Singapore with her husband and two children.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (August 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553816357
• ISBN-13: 978-0553816358
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #999,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Ghee...the vegetarian's caviar, slightly sinful, excessive", September 18, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Monsoon Diary (Paperback)

In all cultures, traditional foods shared with family become so integral to our inner lives that certain occasions are associated with certain foods forevermore. From her childhood though her arranged marriage twenty-five years later, author Narayan shares her own memories, recalling the foods which made them rich and vivid.

Filled with sense impressions, her earliest years are characterized by memories of Raju, the milkman who milked Tiger, his cow, on demand; Chinnapan, who set up his iron and ironing board under one of their trees and kept the iron hot by loading it with coals he picked up in his bare hands; and Jaya, his wife, whose face was bright yellow from the turmeric paste she habitually applied. In school Narayan and her friends would barter their lunches, trading back and forth in the currency of their mothers' specialties. Holidays and vacations were filled with memories of pungent family feasts.

During her college years in India, she applied surreptitiously to Mount Holyoke College for a fellowship and won it, only to run into significant opposition from her family. Her uncle suggested that if she, who had never cooked a full meal, could cook a vegetarian feast like those her mother cooked for the extended family, and have them like it, she might go. She did, and she went. Two years later, she won a scholarship to graduate school at Memphis State, this time cooking up a feast for potential donors in the U.S. in order to raise some of the extra money she needed. Later she would learn to cook traditional foods for her husband in the traditional ways.

Narayan's memoir is charming and sensitive, both to the cultural differences between South Asia and the United States, and to the realities of family life in both places. Through food she bridges the differences between our cultures and makes day-to-day life in each place understandable and accessible to people of other backgrounds. Mothers, with their desire to provide familiar foods for their families at year-round celebrations, are similar the world over, and Narayan uses them as the common denominator in our lives. As she shows us, everyone understands the universal maternal command, "Eat, eat." Mary Whipple