The Turmeric Trail: Recipes and Memories from an Indian Childhood [Hardcover]

Raghavan Iyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2002

Growing up in Bombay, Raghavan Iyer was immersed in a colorful, flavorful world of homemade Southern Indian cooking and irresistible street food (forbidden by his mother and sisters, but too good to pass up). In this touching, vivid, and expert cookbook, Iyer--now a successful caterer and cookbook author--returns to the recipes and memories of his delicious upbringing: rich curries and stews, irresistible rice dishes, spicy chutneys, crispy poori breads, grilled kebabs, savory vegetable samosas, ginger-spiked chai, and sweet fruit desserts.

With clear recipes that even a novice can master, this richly woven, deeply personal, and above all authentic cookbook brings Southern India to life. Anyone who likes to cook, loves Indian food, or is fascinated by Indian culture will relish the recipes, anecdotes, and reflections in The Turmeric Trail.

Editorial Reviews

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

From Library Journal

Born in Bombay, Iyer has lived in the United States since the early 1980s. A cooking teacher and chef, he's also the author of Betty Crocker's Indian Home Cooking. Here, he presents his favorite recipes from his southern Indian childhood, along with reminiscences and anecdotes about his beloved grandmother and the rest of his large extended family. The recipes are clear and detailed, with many useful tips on ingredients and techniques, but the prose is often fulsome and cliched. With an ever-increasing number of good Indian cookbooks available, including Smita Chandra's excellent Cuisines of India, Mridular Baljekar's Secrets from an Indian Kitchen, and Maya Kaimal's Savoring the Spice Coast of India, Iyer's contribution is an optional purchase for most libraries.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (June 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312276826
• ISBN-13: 978-0312276829
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,313,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bombay-native Raghavan Iyer(www.raghavaniyer.com), a Certified Culinary Professional, and a member of The International Association of Culinary Professionals, has acquired degrees in Chemistry (Bombay University), Hotel, and Restaurant Management (Michigan State University). He is a cookbook author, culinary educator, spokesperson, and consultant to numerous national and international clients including General Mills, Bon Appetit Management Company, Target, and Canola. He helped launch an Indian Meals program for Bon Appétit Management Company and trained all their chefs across the United States in Indian cuisine. He helped design a shelf-stable, Indian, ready-to-eat meals for Target's Archer Farms brand. Most recently, he was named a 2008 Sustainable Seafood Ambassador for the prestigious Monterey Bay Aquarium. He is currently the culineer for an upscale/casual Indian-themed restaurant that opened September 2009 in downtown Minneapolis called OM (www.omminneaplis.com).
He is the author of Betty Crocker's Indian Home Cooking (Wiley, 2001), The Turmeric Trail: Recipes and Memories from an Indian Childhood (St. Martin's Press, 2002) - 2003 James Beard Awards Finalist: Best International Cookbook, and the just-published 660 Curries (April 2008, Workman Publishing, New York). 660 Curries has been shortlisted among the top cookbooks for 2008 by National Public Radio, the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Food and Wine Magazine (among many others). The book has been named 2008 Best Asian Cookbook in the USA by World Gourmand Awards. He received the highly coveted 2004 International Association of Culinary Professional's Award of Excellence (formerly the Julia Child Awards) for Cooking Teacher of the Year, and was a Finalist for a 2005 James Beard Journalism Award as a contributing writer for EatingWell Magazine. His numerous articles have appeared in national food publications like Cooking Light, Fine Cooking, Saveur, Weight Watchers Magazine, Cooking Pleasures, and the internationally renowned literary food magazine Gastronomica.
Iyer is co-founder of the Asian Culinary Arts Institutes, Ltd. (www.asianculinaryarts.com), an organization dedicated to the preservation, understanding, and enjoyment of the culinary arts of Asia.
An accomplished and prolific culinary instructor at many international, national, and local venues, including the International Association of Culinary Professionals' Annual Conferences in Phoenix, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Montreal, Dallas, Seattle, and Chicago. With over 24 years of experience in the hospitality industry, Iyer is also fluent in more than six languages. Annually, he leads food and cultural tours to India.
He has appeared in numerous radio and television shows across the United States and Canada including Martha Stewart Radio, The Splendid Table (national public radio show with Lynne Rossetto Kasper), A Chef's Table with Jim Coleman (WHYY Philadelphia - NPR affiliate), WGN Morning News (WGN Chicago), Good Day Atlanta (WAGA TV - Fox Affiliate), Good Day Tampa (Fox Affiliate Tampa), The Morning Show (KARE 11 - NBC Affiliate in Minneapolis/St. Paul), and the Vicki Gabereau Show (national Canadian television talk show).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Warm memories, March 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Turmeric Trail: Recipes and Memories from an Indian Childhood (Hardcover)

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).

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No experience necessary......, May 18, 2008

By 

J & K Hyrkas "J & K" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Turmeric Trail: Recipes and Memories from an Indian Childhood (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sensitive portrait of a family, a culture and its many-flavored cuisine, August 23, 2007

By 

Judy Bart Kancigor (Fullerton, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Turmeric Trail: Recipes and Memories from an Indian Childhood (Hardcover)

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.