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1
India cookbook (2010)
Published
The anchor of the shelf. Pushpesh Pant's book holds about 1,000 recipes and opens with a survey of the ten major culinary regions of India, so it works as a map before you commit to a single-region book.
Use it to look up a dish you met elsewhere, or to compare how one idea, a dal or a pulao, changes from one end of the country to the other, and then go deeper with the regional books below. Its size and density make it a book that lives in the kitchen rather than one you read cover to cover.
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Vegetarian India : a Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking (2015)
Published
Madhur Jaffrey traveled from north to south, and from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, for this one, gathering more than 200 vegetarian recipes in the homes and businesses of shopkeepers, farmers, doctors, weavers and more. The recipes keep their regional character, so a western-coast supper one night and a northern one the next taste properly different.
Meat eaters lose nothing: the dals, vegetable dishes and breakfasts such as poha, the flattened rice Jaffrey points out most Indian cookbooks ignore, are exactly the side of Indian home cooking that restaurant menus skip.
More about Vegetarian India : a Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking3
Thali (2021)
Published
The practical bridge between cooking single dishes and cooking a region. Maunika Gowardhan sets out four regional thali menu plans, Gujarati, Punjabi and Andhra among them, plus alternative selections, so you learn how a whole plate is balanced rather than how to make one curry with rice.
Buy it for the menus. The rest of the book is accessible everyday home cooking, useful but less regional, so a cook who already owns a general Indian book will get the most from the thali chapters.
More about Thali4
On the Himalayan Trail (2022)
Published
If your idea of northern Indian food is Punjabi, this is the corrective. Romy Gill's book covers Kashmir and Ladakh in more than 80 recipes: gustaba, lamb meatballs cooked in a yogurt gravy; wagen pakora, eggplant fried in gram flour; and kanguch yakhni, morels in a spiced gravy.
Travel photography and the life and history of the Kashmiri and Ladakhi people run through it, and that context explains dishes most general Indian cookbooks give a single page or skip entirely. It won the 2023 IACP award for culinary travel.
More about On the Himalayan Trail5
Dastarkhwan-e-Awadh (1997)
Published
The Lucknow end of northern cooking, where the point is patience rather than heat. Sangeeta Bhatnagar and R.K. Saxena, then head of Lucknow's Institute of Hotel Management, collected the recipes of Awadh's stately kitchens, with the anecdotes kept by descendants of the nawabs, talukdars and their cooks, and the slow-fire spice blending the region is known for.
This is the courtly side of the region rather than everyday home food, so save it for a weekend. First published by HarperCollins in 1997, it has since gone through further editions.
More about Dastarkhwan-e-Awadh6
Prashad Cookbook (2012)
Published
Gujarati vegetarian cooking from the Patel family, whose small restaurant was the surprise runner-up on Ramsay's Best Restaurant in 2010. Kaushy Patel learned to cook as a child on her grandmother's farm, and the 100-plus recipes run from simple snacks to full family dinners.
It is the clearest test on this list of whether a region's food holds up without meat, and Gujarati cooking passes easily. The family scale of the recipes suits a weeknight table, and the snacks alone justify the shelf space.
More about Prashad Cookbook7
My Bombay Kitchen (2007)
Published
Parsi food, the cooking of the Zoroastrian community whose ancestors left Persia for India, is a cuisine of its own, and this is the book that covers it in depth. It was the first book on Parsi food published in the United States by a Parsi, and it won the James Beard Award for Asian cooking.
Niloufer Ichaporia King writes from her own family's table, so its 165 recipes arrive with the story of how they are eaten. Be warned that it runs to more than 300 pages, and it rewards browsing more than a quick weeknight lookup.
More about My Bombay Kitchen8
Kamalabai Ogale's ruchira (1997)
Published
The Marathi cookbook that has sat in Maharashtrian kitchens since 1970 and has sold around 450,000 copies. Kamalabai Ogale began it as notes for her own family, and the English edition gathers vegetarian recipes from across Maharashtra.
The original measured in household bowls and spoons rather than restaurant scales, and the recipes keep that family-sized feel. It fills the gap between Gujarat and Goa that most English-language shelves leave empty.
More about Kamalabai Ogale's ruchira9
The essential Goa cookbook (2000)
Published
Goa cooks unlike anywhere else on the western coast, and Maria Teresa Menezes gives it a full volume: prawn balchão, sorpotel, mutton xacuti, oyster patties, tiger prawns, stuffed crab and bebinca, with particular attention to fish, prawns, pork and chicken.
This is the book for the pork and seafood dishes that vegetarian regional books never touch. It dates from 2000, and copies can be patchy outside India, so check secondhand sellers if the paperback is out of stock.
More about The essential Goa cookbook10
Grains, Greens, and Grated Coconuts (2007)
Published
Most Kerala cookbooks lean on seafood; Ammini Ramachandran's goes the other way, recording the vegetarian cooking of her Hindu family alongside the holidays and rituals of her childhood. Grated coconut is everywhere, as it should be.
Look for the pacha sambar, made with fresh green spices instead of sambar powder: it shows how far south Indian cooking sits from the packet mixes many cooks start with. A few specialty ingredients look daunting at first, so plan a trip to a South Asian grocer before you start.
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Cook and see (Samaithu par) (1968)
Published
First self-published in Tamil in September 1951 as Samaithu Paar, S. Meenakshi Ammal's book became the standard guide to the traditional cooking of the Tamil Brahmin community, and English editions followed in 1968 as Cook and See.
This is where to learn sambar, rasam and the rest of the Tamil vegetarian repertoire as households make it, not as restaurants serve it. The work runs to three volumes: start with the first, which sets out daily menus and kitchen basics, and save the festival and wedding menus of the third for later.
More about Cook and see (Samaithu par)12
The Bangala Table – Flavors and Recipes from Chettinad (2014)
Published
Chettinad cooking from the kitchen of The Bangala, Meenakshi Meyyappan's heritage hotel in Karaikudi, and the family recipes behind it. Written with Sumeet Nair and Jill Donenfeld, it runs through the courses of a Chettiar meal, from salads and rasams to fish and meat, and each recipe carries cook's notes for making it your own.
Restaurant menus abroad often reduce Chettinad to one peppery chicken dish; this book shows the whole table. It pairs well with Cook and See, since the two Tamil Nadu traditions could hardly be more different.
More about The Bangala Table – Flavors and Recipes from Chettinad13
Five Morsels of Love (2016)
Published
Andhra home cooking, specifically the Rayalaseema cooking of Archana Pidathala's family, built on the Telugu cookbook her grandmother G. Nirmala Reddy published in 1974. More than a hundred heirloom recipes come with memoir, and the book was shortlisted for the 2017 Art of Eating Prize.
Andhra food has a reputation for heat, and this is the book that shows the everyday cooking behind it. It is self-published, so specialist cookbook sellers are a surer bet than chain bookstores.
More about Five Morsels of Love14
Bengali Cooking (1997)
Published
Chitrita Banerji organizes Bengali cooking by season and festival, which is how the food actually works, and takes you into kitchens in both West Bengal and Bangladesh. The recipes are the dals, fish, vegetables and kedgerees of home cooking rather than restaurant fare.
It is a short, readable book, more narrative than most cookbooks, and it pairs well with the western and southern books here because a Bengali meal follows such a different logic. It began life as Life and Food in Bengal in 1991 and took this title in 1997.
More about Bengali Cooking15
The essential North-East cookbook (2003)
Published
The seven northeastern states, from Assam and Meghalaya to Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur, cook food that most Indian cookbooks barely mention. Hoihnu Hauzel, a native of Manipur, presents it as lightly spiced with hardly any oil, a tribal diet of jungle produce shaped over time by Thai, Chinese and Bengali influences.
It will surprise anyone who thinks Indian food means heavy masala, and it is cheap enough to buy on curiosity. A later updated edition adds Sikkim.
More about The essential North-East cookbook
