Customer Reviews

The spice box: Vegetarian Indian cookbook

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This little gem is my favorite indian cookbook. They are the kind of recipes you can make quickly and easily at home. This food has the hearty "peasant food" feel to it. Haute cuisine NOT. If you buy it you'll end up wanting your own indian spice box (I now own two). You're also apt to end up with a taste for some spices you can't easily get in your home town like curry leaves and green mango powder. I stock up whenever I'm in berkeley or Vancouver B.C. Many of the recipes can be made with ingredients you'll find in Muskogee. As for the rest, get the ingredients when you can find them. These recipes are not overly westernized and you'll appreciate it when you sit down with a little eggplant curry and dal or a cool raita.

The Spice Box can be used as a concise, informative introduction to the many spiced adventures of varied East Indian vegetarian cuisine. The Introduction contains definitions of Curries and Dals as well as descriptions of many of the most popular spices, in addition to mixtures of spices, such as garam masala, and basic procedures, such as roasting cumin seeds, grinding dals or spices, or breaking open a coconut. The Indian name for each ingredient or dish is always given after the English in parentheses, a practice to encourage the uninitiated.

Chapters are offered on Appetizers and Snacks, Soups, Vegetables, Dals, Egg Dishes, Rice Dishes, Indian Breads, Yogurt Salads (Raitas), Fresh Chutneys, Pickles, Indian Sweets, and the Finale, which is paan, or a betel nut spiced sweet wrapped in betel leaf. Classic curry recipes abound, including Pumpkin Curry, Tomato Curry, Turnip Koftas Curry, Mashed Zucchini Curry, Chickpea Flour Curry, and Pink Lentil Curry. The chapter on breads also contains many classic Indian bread recipes, including Raised Bread (Naan), Chappatis or Roti, Paranthas, Puri, and Fried Bread, or Bhatura.

The Yogurt Salads suggested provide a cooling note to the spicy curries and vegetable main dishes, and the Pickles and Chutneys add further authentic flair to the Indian feast. If the reader prefers, the Introduction contains a list of sources or places to buy Indian foods in the United States organized by region. But it is also incredibly fascinating to see the list of spices that go into a coconut chutney or a sweet mango pickle, for example. The Desserts chapter includes Rose Syrup Milk Balls (Gulab Jamun), Sugar-Coated Cookies (Sakkaarpara), and many wonderful vegetable puddings.

In all, The Spice Box packs a lot of stimulus into a slender package. It's appeal rests not only in its authenticity, but also in its accessibility. It is surely a classic.

Nancy Lorraine, Reviewer

This is by far the best Indian cookery book I have ever come across. It is a pleasure to use - I am delighted by it. The recipes are easy to follow and only require easily found ingredients. Everytime I cook from it my husband says "I feel like we've just eaten at a restaurant" we are so impressed! There is plenty for the vegan too.

Our favourites so far are the Whole Eggplant Curry (page 75), Hyderabadi Chili Curry (page 69) and the Pink Lentil Curry (page 112). There are so many wonders awaiting us - we haven't even tried any of the soups or apetizers yet.

My only criticism is the lack of photographs - it is nice to see photographs for reassurance if nothing else!

If you like delicious, authentic Indian food you'll love these recipes!

Being a vegetarian, I fell in love with Indian food during my many trips to India and wanted to learn how to replicate some of the dishes, so I purchased a variety of Indian cookbooks. I found them all to be difficult in that they assumed the cook already knew how to cook Indian food, or they required spices I could not find, or methods of cooking I was not familiar with. When I found The Spice Box, I found exactly what I was looking for - a Vegetarian Indian cookbook that was designed with simple instructions for the Westerner, and a description and explanation of the spices and all other ingredients used in the recipes. It also contained every type of recipe from Indian sweets to pickles to main dishes.

I own over thirty Indian cookbooks and I use this one the most.I have catered large parties with recipes from this book and all I get is compliments.
If you can afford only one book...this is it!

Definitely a great cookbook to have. The recipes are quite tasty and very straightforward. The book has the following chapters: appetizers, soups (great ones!!), vegetables, dals, egg dishes, rice dishes, breads, yogurt salads, chutneys, pickles, sweets. I was glad to see the mulligatawny soup since that can be a tricky recipe to find a good one and this one is. There are also some really great eggplant dishes like the whole eggplant curry that has peanuts, tomatoes and coconut in it. yum. Glad I bought this book!

This was my introduction to Indian cooking. the book was a great beginner's guide. It was very easy to use and the resultrs were excellent. I highly recommend this book to others.

Here are the recipes I've made so far, my thoughts on them as well as the book as a whole.
Deep Fried Fritters (Pakoras or Bhajyas)- I took her suggestion and dipped veggies into them before frying and they were delicious. My husband and I didn't talk much through dinner that night (even though it's an appetizer we had it for dinner).
Cabbage Rolls- I had a hard time getting the cabbage leaves cooperating so I had to blanch them first. It made tons so I ended up freezing a good portion of it. They had a nice kick and good flavor.
Mashed Curried Eggplant II (Baigan Bhutra)- we love this dish at a far away Indian restaurant so I was hoping to find a similar recipe. This was wonderful! The only difference is I use Japanese eggplant since that's all I can get here. I will continue using this recipe whenever eggplant is in season.
Turnip Koftas Curry (shalgam de Koftas)- turnips are really cheap here in Japan (when in season) and I wanted to find a good recipe. I tried this one. I found it odd to put shopped ginger, chilies, raisins, and cilantro inside the center of the balls but oddly enough it came out tasty. What a surprise.
Split Ming Beans Cooked in Yogurt (dahi ki dal)- so far my favorite dal I've cooked from any of my Indian cookbooks.
Pink Lentil Curry- If it wasn't for the fried onions this wouldn't have much flavor, but I find a lot of the dal dishes (not just from this book) are similar.
Rice with green peas (matar pullao)- a strange combination of cinnamon, raisis, cloves, and peas. Again, it worked and my husband and I enjoyed it.
potato filled bread (aloo paranthas)- this was a mess to make and I thought the instructions were a little unclear on keeping the filling inside, but we improvised and they turned out yummy.
Naan-this takes awhile to make but it's relativly simple and tasty.
I know I've used this book more times than I've listed above but these are the ones I specifically remember. If you are a novice at Indian food I wouldn't recommend this because there are no pictures and doesn't introduce you to certain ingredients that you may not be familiar with. Also, sometimes the directions are vague. For example, I've come across several recipes without times listed. Instead it says to cook until tender (I was unfamiliar with dals at the beginning and had no idea the time range.) But, you see I gave this book five stars and that's because everything I cook out of this book is wonderful. I am always gaurenteed to produce a good dish from this book. If you are looking for a more instructional book I would recommend The Everything Indian Cookbook: 300 Tantalizing Recipes--From Sizzling Tandoori Chicken to Fiery Lamb Vindaloo (Everything: Cooking) or Pure and Simple: Homemade Indian Vegetarian Cuisine. However, I like the food more from The Spice Box than Pure and Simple.

I read the book and it was very informative and had the recipies I was looking for. It is small and very clearly written. Just what I was looking for. I bought this book a long time ago, sold it and bought it again because I regreted selling it.

I love Indian food and will go to any Indian restaurant when I am in a new town visiting. There are several dishes I am familiar with, and as cooking Indian food is so unfamiliar to me, I wanted to start with recipes to something I knew: daal makhani, aloo gobi, palak paneer, chana masala, and mango lassi. This book has none of these recipes.

The book does have lots of blank spaces, though, so I could transcribe recipes that I found online. It was hard finding recipes that don't use "grams" or "milliliters" in online recipes. This book has easy-to-understand measuring standards, unfortunately it has none of the recipes I wanted to try.

Another difficulty: I love the tamarind sauce that accompanies the pakoras in an Indian restaurant, and wanted to make that. Directions are given for how to prepare a fresh tamarind to make "tamarind water." But none of the tamarind recipes in this book use tamarind water as an ingredient. They all call for use of tamarind paste, and no instructions are given how to make this from fresh tamarind pods. Again, I had to transcribe online instructions.

But with all this writing, it amounts to me writing my own book! The only recipe I have used that was originally in the book was to grind my own garam masala.

As for the ingredients like asafetida, mango powder, or rose water, they can be left out if you cannot find them in your town or possibly substituted. Ordering online is another option although with the exhorbitant shipping fees it might be worth your while to simply visit an Oriental store the next time you are in a metropolis.