#4

Food & Drink
Crack the Masala Code

In bookshops and on television, I always feel some level of affront at the sheer lack of variety of available cookbooks and chefs willing to work with non-European ingredients. Indeed, this manifests itself at all levels of the food industry, where Indian haute-cuisine is often neglected by the best known chefs with South Asians of similar calibre being quite ignored. Indian food, it seems, despite the leaps and bounds of recent years, is still largely the product of takeaway dining and greasy outlets.

Fortunately, efforts to bring the food of the sub continent are not entirely absent. Two new cookbooks have given fresh colour and verve that is not normally seen amongst Indian cookbooks.

The first of these, 'Curry Lovers', is written by the multi-talented and classically trained chef Roopa Gulati. Though her background and much of her previous work underscore an interest in mixing the best that South Asian ingredients and European tastes have to offer, this book is for the purist who wants something classically flavoured but with none of the hard graft.

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