A New Cookbook
Fresh recipes and inspirations

After word of my growing obsession got back to my family, I found the book An Invitation to Indian Cooking (Madhur Jaffrey [1973]) under the Christmas tree. This book was perfect! While it was aimed at someone like me who was interested in learning how to cook, the recipes were not dumbed down. This book became an invaluable resource for me because it contained some of the dishes I had been seeing in restaurants along with many, many new ones. It allowed me to try some of the restaurant favorites with a guiding hand. And try them I did, even though the results were mixed.
Among several less successful ventures, I managed to find one recipe from Invitation that had staying power. On page 168, a dish named Sookhe Aloo (Dry Potatoes) caught my attention, and it turned out quite well the first time I made it. On the next page, I also tried a variation of that recipe, Pyazwale Sookhe Aloo (Dry Potatoes with Onions). While I liked both versions, I didn’t like everything about each of them. “What would happen,” I asked myself, “if I merge the recipes using only the ingredients that I like from each?” It’s not likely I would start another fire, right?
Somehow I figured out which spices I wanted to use from the first recipe and added them the second — which already included the onions that were “missing” from the first. I settled on a blend, which I thought would be the final version. And while the combination worked, it was hardly final! I kept adjusting the recipe over the years, and eventually arrived at a dish notably different than either of the original versions. I still refer to it as Sookhe Aloo, and continue to make it occasionally.

While Invitation was approachable and spawned a few initial successes, a second book brought from home, The Art of Indian Cuisine, was more challenging. As I leafed through it I was intrigued by many of the unfamiliar recipes in the book. These dishes seemed quite complex compared to my other cookbooks and utilized many spices that I had never heard of such as black cumin or sambhar spice. However, taking the complexity as a challenge, I found a recipe, Massaledarh Bhogar (Asafoetida Flavored Lamb) and decided to give it a try. Asafoetida, also known as hing, is a spice with strong scent and a rather unique taste. I had taken a liking to it when first cooking Sookhe Aloo, and its inclusion may have convinced me to try this recipe. Compared to many others in the book Massaledarh Bhogar at least looked pretty easy to prepare. It also turned out quite well the first time I made it.
After a year or so of trying different recipes from the three books at my disposal, I found myself cooking more often at home. Many recipes were attempted only once. I would make a dish, and if it didn’t come out well, I would abandon it and move on to the next. A few recipes, though, got a second or even a third try.
During this time, I was using restaurant curries as the yardstick to compare my cooking with. But most of my cooking seemed a world away from the restaurant dishes. “Why is my curry not like their curry?” became a recurring mantra that I would repeat for years. I had yet to understand how generic a term curry really is. But more to the point was my preparation. I was not following instructions carefully and still had to learn several important techniques such as browning onions correctly. But I kept trying new recipes and eating at restaurants. One day in the fall semester of my junior year I realized that between my cooking and restaurants, I had eaten Indian food at least once a day for a month. Obviously I was doing well enough to justify my continued efforts.