This season brings several new cookbooks of subcontinental cuisine, including two from renowned Indian chefs.
In October, Knopf will release Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey, a seven-time James Beard Award–winning author. Publisher and author have a long history together: Knopf released Jaffrey’s first book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, in 1973.
For her new release, Jaffrey visited homes throughout her native India, gathering family recipes from farmers, shopkeepers, doctors, weavers, and many others. The book includes more than 200 recipes, plus numerous photos from her travels.
Vikas Khanna, a two-time Gourmand World Cookbook Award winner and Michelin-starred chef of New York City restaurant Junoon, also has a new cookbook, Indian Harvest: Classic and Contemporary Vegetarian Dishes by Vikas Khanna (Bloomsbury, Oct.). Khanna’s recipes have their roots in the garden he helped his grandmother tend as a boy in Amritsar, where together they grew basil, cardamom, tomatoes, peas, and squash.
In September, Flatiron is releasing Made in India: Recipes from an Indian Family Kitchen by British blogger Meera Sodha. The book was published in the U.K. in 2014 by Penguin/Fig Tree and earned praise from Yotam Ottolenghi and Nigella Lawson, among others. In it, Sodha collects her mother’s recipes—some 130 of them, or three generations’ worth, from beetroot and feta samosas to cinnamon lamb curry.
Two others of note: The Indian Family Kitchen: Classic Dishes for a New Generation by Anjali Pathak (Clarkson Potter, Feb. 2016), offers an Indian twist on dishes that will seem familiar to many U.S. cooks, such as one-pot chicken and green bean salad. Recipes from an Indian Kitchen by Sunil Vijayakar (Parragon, Oct.) compiles 100 recipes, including those for basic spice mixes and pastes, with step-by-step pictorial instructions to guide readers.
