Comfort food, and some family drama
Food books are using anecdotes, hilarious asides, and nostalgia as key ingredients. See who's stirring the plot. The personal touch is what's elevating the books above mere repositories of recipes and connecting readers with authors.
What comes to your mind when you miss home? For most of us it's food. But for some of us, it's very specific memories of time spent with family, siblings, cousins and friends in the kitchen.
Dal-chawal prepared for comfort, Sunday feasts with farsan and sweets, Marie-biscuit-and-jelly pudding for special occasions.
So when Aparna Jain writes of her Behenji Maasi's famous Himachali mutton and Peggy Maami's celebrated chocolate cake in The Sood Family Cookbook, it sounds warmly familiar. You're drawn in by Jain's colourful family and the back stories accompanying each recipe. You want to know all about her brother Aditya and his culinary experiments, and you feel Peggy Maami is just like the culinary genius in your family, probably your own aunt.
The interests of the cook, the foodie, the non-cook and the bibliophile in you have been piqued - should you continue flipping through the pages or tumble out of bed to make the 'I-Don't-Cook Tagliatelle'?
In A Pinch of This, A Handful of That, another food writer and consultant Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal beautifully captures a similar sentiment attached to memories around. She describes preparing a year's supply of tomato ketchup as ordered by Moti Mummy, her Nani's Chak-Chak Continental meal and how her mother's dal soup was always the perfect antidote to her problems. The recipes and cooking secrets hold generations of zest for food - you're moved far more than you'd be by an ordinary cookbook.
Catch your daily dose of Fashion, Health, Festivals, Travel, Relationship, Recipe and all the other Latest Lifestyle News on Hindustan Times Website and APPs