50 Great Curries of India

I have cooked three recipes so far from this book and will probably not cook any more. The book is excellent in terms of describing how to use spices but the recipes themselves are incomplete and sometimes a little confusing. On a few occasions I have looked at recipes where the amounts of spice used and techniques for preparation were...well, just weird...

The book is very well illustrated and while the recipes may be quite advanced, it falls short in giving enough supporting information. Maybe if I stuck at this I could crack Cammelia's recipes. But can I be bothered? No. I compared her Chicken Makhani to the recipe on the BBC website (I think by Jo Pratt) and the latter was ten times better and a lot easier to cook too. It was also free. Enough said.

The best book on Indian cooking I have read, but... (1/1 people found this helpful)

I have read several books on Indian cooking through the years, but this is the one I keep coming back to. It gives good background information and explains the process of making good Indian food. Yet, if you follow the recipes slavishly, you may still be disappointed, because the quantities depend on the quality of the ingredients you use as well as your personal taste. Chili is just one example. It comes in so many varieties with different pungency, that you just have to experiment to find out how much you want to add. The book is still a great introduction to Indian cooking.

Great Book (1/1 people found this helpful)

This is a brilliant book, and from the onset let it be known that this is not to produce restaurant curry as is known in britain. This is regional authentic indian cooking. My curry making skills have come on in leaps and bounds recently and if you are not getting anything good out of the recipes I am afraid more practise is needed. You need to use fresh spices, preferable freshly roasted and ground yourself, and not out of the small commercial supermarket glass jar variety. Fresh spices and fresh ingredients which are properly cooked in the oil and flavours to bring the flavours out. Dont expect to see any Indian dish overloaded with 2 dozen different spices. A couple is all thats needed when you know how to bring the flavour of them out into the dish you are cooking.

The best of its kind in my opinion (7/7 people found this helpful)

I love the book and use it almost exclusively when making indian food. The recipes are easy to follow. Ok, the list of ingrediants can sometimes seem daunting but it is well worth the effort. The '50 curries' title undersells this a bit. A great deal of information is given about the philosphy of indian food, and indian ingrediants. The book provides recipes for breads, rice and side dishes. A book for lovers of indian food.

Fascinating introductory chapters, covering traditional ways of using spices (4/4 people found this helpful)

There are some great recipes in this book; there are several that aren't to my tastes admittedly, but many have become firm favourites that I use again and again. However, the reasons this book has stayed a favourite are the introductory chapters; the first 54 pages of the book (earlier version) cover topics from: an introduction to the philosophy of Indian food; how to use and prepare individual spices, and their purpose within a recipe; to how to rescue a curry that hasn't turned out quite how you expected.

I find a lot of curry recipes can be a little variable in terms of results, due to natural variance in the ingredients and the number of ingredients you have to use, so knowing how to safely deviate from a recipe when necessary is very valuable (and has since helped salvage more than one meal in our household!).

I haven't seen the DVD a previous reviewer has referred to, but was surprised to read it had nothing on breads, as I found the chapter on Indian breads (Roti) within the book to be very instructive, and I gave me the confidence to start cooking chapati at home. I've had a lot of success with many recipes from the book; they have variable levels of heat, but this has generally been described adequately in the descriptions, and they do range from very hot indeed, to mild and fragrant.

I also liked the section on vegetable and potato side-dishes, as this is an area that often seems not to be covered enough in other curry books; these two chapters alone mean this book sees use every time I cook Indian food.

Camellia Panjabi

Reader Reviews:

Too much background, recipes are flops (0/1 people found this helpful)

The best book on Indian cooking I have read, but... (1/1 people found this helpful)

Great Book (1/1 people found this helpful)

The best of its kind in my opinion (7/7 people found this helpful)

Fascinating introductory chapters, covering traditional ways of using spices (4/4 people found this helpful)

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