The Modern Indian Restaurant Cookbook: 150 Restaurant Dishes for You to Make at Home

Readers on this side of the Atlantic will welcome Chapman's easy to follow handbook to Britain's award-winning curry-house cuisine. His fragrant, nuanced dishes are easy to make; most recipes have between three and seven simple steps. Unfamiliar techniques-like making curry paste, ghee and paneer-are grouped together at the beginning of the book, including time-saving techniques like pureeing ginger and garlic ahead of time and freezing it in ice cube trays. The recipes are adapted for the typical Western kitchen and cook, including some techniques that would be difficult to master without solid cooking experience. He reverses the process of making bhoona (a fried spice paste) so that it is harder to burn and provides useful emphasis in his recipes. ""From this point do not let your attention wander,"" he writes during the tricky moments. The recipes, though their techniques are simple, do include quite a few exotic spices: adafoetida, beetroot powder and ground white poppy seeds round out the flavorful sauce in the Rhogan Josh Gosht (Aromatic Lamb). With that in mind, he includes a short glossary and lists of spices in his appendix, detailing essential and non-essential spices. Each recipe has amusing remarks about its origin, which is usually a British restaurant. ""I've never come across this dish either in Bombay or in the whole of India,"" Chapman writes about the delicious Bombay Potato. And the recipe for Murgh Badam Pasanda (Chicken Pasanda with Nuts) includes three paragraphs about the British occupation of India. With their lively writing and opinionated treatment of curry cuisine, these recipes are a pleasure to read, a pleasure to cook from and, most importantly, a pleasure to sample.