India cookbook (2010)

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.