Comfort food, and some family drama - Hindustan Times
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Comfort food, and some family drama

Hindustan Times | ByBhairavi Jhaveri
Mar 22, 2014 07:35 PM IST

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.



Brown-Rice-Poha
Brown-Rice-Poha
Word of mouth: Get your hands on these
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Images/popup/2014/3/Book-brunch-1.jpgThe Sood Family Cookbook by Aparna Jain

A Pinch of This, A Handful of That by Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal

A Sense for Spice by Tara Deshpande Tennebaum

More Than Just Biryani by Andaleeb Wajid

The F-Word by Mita Kapur

The Married Man's Guide to Creative Cooking by Samar Halarnkar

Bong Mom's Cookbook by Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta n Dining with the Maharajas by Neha Prasada and Ashima Narain

Diva Green by Ritu Dalmia

A Chef in Every Home: The Complete Family Cookbook by Kunal Kapur
What's coming up
A cross-community book, The Khan Family Cookbook by Zarine Khan (Roli Books)

A cookbook about the Tamil Nadu communities by Sabita Radhakrishna (Roli Books)

A book on Amritsar by chef Vikas Khanna (Roli Books)

A guide to the food, lifestyle and traditions of Awadh (HarperCollins)

A Kutchi Memons cookbook (HarperCollins)

Inventive cuisines (HarperCollins)
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