the spice trail

I am on my Christmas break these days. This year, I am cooking (last year I re-did a couple rooms in my house). It is something about time of from work, this time of the year, I always find myself new projects.
Anyhow, this year I decided I would cook. I love cooking; my audience has dwindled over the years. Uma and me aren't big eaters, or for that matter much interested in eating. But both of us agree that cooking is a lot of fun. My kid brother ( not such a kid anymore ) was my best audience ever. He would eat most anything I made and tell me it was wonderful :). Ah those days ...
Anyhow, back to cooking. I was shopping online ( at Amazon) for a couple friends of mine when I came upon this book, actually the website thought that I might like the book( how thoughtful). I hadn't bought a cook book in a while and this looked interesting ( From Curries to Kabab's, recipes from the Indian spice trail). So I got it. It is a lot of fun. It is full of tiny little history bits about spices and origins of recipes. Madhur Jaffery, the author, has traveled quite extensively to Africa, Caribbean, Europe, south-east-asia. And she traces the recipes from these places and retails stories about how the immigrant Indian population modified the recipes to work with the available spices or sometime add Indian spices to local recipes to give them Indian flavor.
The recipes are not for the amateur, she misses out important processing steps sometimes and unless you know how to cook, you'd be a little lost with what to do with the celery tops and scallions. It is fun reading the book, and cooking from the recipes in it, I guess I am a little old-fashioned, I like books and CDs even in the digital age.
The book is by no means complete. Madhur, being from the western part of India, seems to know more about that area and since these recipes are culled from friends and acquaintances, have extensive coverage from Kenya, South Africa, Trinidad. They cover Thai, Indonesian, Malay and Chinese food too. Eastern Indian isn't and Kashmir food is completely missing. There are some attempts to go south but most of them are tentative (limited to seafood and some hyderabadi recipes). It is a pretty ambitious undertaking, to trace the cuisine of the second most prolific people in the world. And the attempt is very good.
She writes with love for food like a patient aunty teaching me to cook. And then she throws in some wicked comments, which make me look at her in surprise before I burst out laughing. I have tried a bunch of stuff, but this is one thing I tried just because I loved the way she described it.

South-African Chicken Biryani While a moghlai biriyani is mild, pale, elegant and delicately savory. Designed to be eaten with equally delicate yoghurt preparations, the South-African one is vibrant, spicy and piquant; definitely the hot chick at the dance.