Product Description

Based on a broad range of regional Indian cuisines, the recipes in this volume have been selected to provide ideas for all kinds of occasions. From meat and fish curries to vegetarian meals and recipes for chutneys and pickles. Also included are notes on ingredients and equipment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #89632 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Is Madhur Jaffrey essential? The answer to that must be "yes". Few writers can have contributed so comprehensively to a transformation in public eating habits and expectations. Madhur Jaffrey has done much to encourage discrimination where Indian food is concerned, in a career spanning 25 years, all the way back to her ground-breaking Invitation to Indian Cooking of 1974. There was a time when, outside Indian restaurants, what was passed off as curry was a terrible undifferentiated molten brown slurry, infested with rags of meat and harsh with the scent of cheap, stale curry powder (let us not speak of the sins that were committed in the restaurants). Maybe in places it still is, but at least there is now no excuse. The Essential Madhur Jaffrey is a generous compilation of about 200 recipes from throughout her career-- her favourites, she says. They certainly deserve to become anyone's favourites. Soups (not really Indian, these, but Anglo-Indian), snacks and starters, meat and fish curries, vegetables and dals, together with all the accompaniments of bread, rice, pickles, chutneys and relishes, and a choice selection of sweet dishes such as halvas, make up a wonderfully varied collection, presented with Madhur Jaffrey's customary precision and enthusiasm. As always, her food is an absolute delight to cook and eat. The current edition is one of a series of elegant, practical and durable paperback reissues from the Ebury Press: very handy indeed in the kitchen. It deserves to become battered and stained with much use. --Robin Davidson

Customer Reviews

Excellent reference book
A really handy compact cookbook with lots of ideas, some taken over from the famous, successful 1983 book (MJ's Indian Cooking) but many are new. Nicely presented recipes and all (at least the many I tried) very cookable. Only weakness: I like pictures. But that's why I also bought "Foolproof Indian Cookery" by the same author!

Sadly no pictures
This book was quite disappointing as there are NO pictures, something I feel is essential in a cookery book. The recipes seem easy but you have no idea what you are aspiring to and the way the dish should finally look. Most of the spices used are readily available (even here in Spain) except for Asafetida which I had never come across before (even in England) and no alternative is suggested.
The method for cooking the recipes is written as an easy to understand narrative

Authentic and delicious
This is the only Indian cookery book I use, because the recipes are straightforward, and the flavours are fresh and clean.

Jaffrey writes well, and makes her food sound appetising. The recipes are approachable and she gives helpful hints on combining different dishes.

This is a small, sleek paperback. There are no pictures, but that did not bother me at all. In a way, without pictures to distract you from presentation, it makes you concentrate on the flavours when choosing what to cook. I still enjoy browsing through it.

I have recommended this book and lent it to friends, who have gone on to buy their own copy.

Highly recommended.