Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
For this companion volume to the award-winning Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid travel west from Southeast Asia to that vast landmass the colonial British called the Indian Subcontinent. It includes not just India, but extends north to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal and as far south as Sri Lanka, the island nation so devastated by the recent tsunami. For people who love food and cooking, this vast region is a source of infinite variety and eye-opening flavors.

Home cooks discover the Tibetan-influenced food of Nepal, the Southeast Asian tastes of Sri Lanka, the central Asian grilled meats and clay-oven breads of the northwest frontier, the vegetarian cooking of the Hindus of southern India and of the Jain people of Gujarat. It was just twenty years ago that cooks began to understand the relationships between the multifaceted cuisines of the Mediterranean; now we can begin to do the same with the foods of the Subcontinent.

Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Delightful Mix of Travelogue and Recipies December 4, 2005
96 out of 105 found this review helpful

One of the joys, perhaps even a requirement of a good cookbook is for it to give you more than an endless list of recipies. It should teach you something about the country or region of the origin of the recipies. It might give you some ideas about the culture, the history, the whys and wherefores of the spices, perhaps the religious aspects.

And in this ares these authors excell. As the sub-title says, this book is about their travels throughout the Indian sub-continent. It shows something of the people, the way they live, the equipment they use to prepare the foods being cooked.

Then there are the recipies:

There are nine recipies for rice alone, one of the staples of my diet. I had shrimp with rice last night. But now I find myself looking at the beautiful color photograph of the Chile Shrimp Stir-Fry on page 216. It also has curry, cinnamon, lime juice, and more.

Any reason you can think of for not having shrimp two days in a row?

Well, one reason might be the pork curry in aromatic broth from page 279.

And to go with either one of these, cucumber salad with hot spiced mustard dressing from pages 61 & 62.

Banana-Pepper Rounds which seem to have a crisp caramelized skin over the cooked banana. Maybe serve this over ice cream for a combination of flavor and temperature.

Well, I'm stopping this writing and starting on a list to take to the supermarket. Thankfully they've made suggestions on alternates for some of the spices that I am unlikely to find in the small Nevada town in which I live.

Very well done guys!

4 out of 5 stars

Heavy, expensive mix of pics, food, and travel. Good March 4, 2006
26 out of 34 found this review helpful

`Mangoes & Curry Leaves' by the husband and wife team of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid is an application of the formula used in their previous book, `Hot Sour Salty Sweet' from the cuisines and lands of southeast Asia to the cuisines and lands of the south Asian subcontinent, made up of the countries Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

And, like the previous book, it is an expensive (listing at $45) combination of culinary information, travelogue, and photographs done primarily by the authors. To some lights, the combination of travelogue and culinary material in the heavy coffee table book style may seem to justify the hefty price. I, on the contrary, believe the book is just a bit of a lightweight, even as a photographic culinary travelogue.

The book's value as a cookbook is largely lost due to it's unwieldy size and the fear of getting spots of curry paste or yogurt on these expensively glossy pages. One also has to wonder why we need a new cookbook on this region by outsiders, when the cuisine of the Indian subcontinent is so well documented by native Indians and Pakistanis, such as Madhur Jaffrey, Yamuna Devi, and Julie Sahni. Like books such as Mary Ann Esposito's expositions on some of the regional cuisines of Italy, you definitely get the perspective of the journalistic outsider, rather than the native or the more scholarly or culinary professional approach of, for example, David Thompson's great reference on `thai food'.

On the surface, the book and its predecessor are both very impressive, until I started reading and comparing, for example, some of the text with the photographs referenced by the text. In general, I found many of the photographs to be not very illuminating, as in a picture on page 17 that purported to illustrate a mortar and pestle. I have examined this picture at length and simply cannot make sense of any mortar or pestle in this plate of chicken finger lookalikes and class of mint tea. At a stretch, one can sense a rough tabletop under the plate that is probably a mortar, but this faint glimpse gives me no sense of its size or shape.

The text, in general, is the type of writing you typically get from traveling writers. It is largely about finding cheap hotel rooms, railroad tickets, and home cooked meals. Compared to some of the greatest culinary writing of `distant lands' such as Patience Gray's `Honey from a Weed' or Amanda Hesser's `The Cook and the Gardener'. You do not even get the kind of humor you see in, for example, Mark Twain's travel writing.

This is not to say there are not a lot of tender and interesting moments and reflections here. It's just that the mix of the tourist and the cook do not compliment one another as well as they might.

The recipes, I find are, in general, very interesting, but I would never come to this book for instruction on Indian cooking, as it is so much easier to find good material in the books by the authors I stated above. I do find a bit of vagueness in some of the ingredient specifications, as in what kind of chili to use in particular recipes. In some recipes, the suggestions are excellent, in others, the specifications are skimpy.

Like `Hot Sour Salty Sweet', this is a better than average foodie's armchair book for after dinner reading. It will give you excellent inspirations to cook types of dishes from this region, but once you get hooked, you will be better served by getting Madhur Jaffrey's books for everyday use in the kitchen.

While the bibliography in this volume is long, I'm surprised that neither Davi nor Jaffrey are cited, as it is their books you will most likely find in print from an American supplier.

This is a very enjoyable book to read. The four stars are simply a warning that you may find better culinary content in less expensive and more authoritative books on Indian cooking.

3 out of 5 stars

a few nitpicks January 7, 2007
26 out of 28 found this review helpful

I agree that this is a great 'coffee table' type book and that the authors have done some immaculate research into some of the lesser well known cuisines of the subcontinent and have lovely pictures to document their travels. What I didn't care for are the 'Westernizing' of the names of the dishes. For example, Gulab Jamun (which is a pretty well-known dessert to most Indian food fans)becomes something like Cottage cheese soaked in syrup. As an Indian, I also found a lot of the dishes very underspiced. I know that with Indian food, it really is a matter of taste, but I often found myself adding up to 3times the amount of spices called for in a recipe. Because it's so bulky, I often find myself turning to my other Indian cookbooks which are easier to keep near me as I cook in the kitchen.

5 out of 5 stars

Beautiful and authentic September 29, 2006
21 out of 21 found this review helpful

I cannot imagine anyone writing anything negative about this book...my family and I come from Bangladesh and India and I have tons of Pakistani friends. The depth that the authors have gone into understanding ingredients and the cooking is remarkable. I cannot imagine how they came to know some of those details. Like my neighbor in PA who had written a negative review, I have also Jaffrey's books which i love but Alford and Duguid got into the very essence of real home cooking of the subcontinent. Other authors sometimes focus on party foods while this book advises the readers on what people really eat on a daily basis. The other travel advice is interesting and the photographs gorgeous although i understand the concerns of the Bethlehem, PA reviewer of pictures that are hard to interpret. Just let it go. They still do an even better job with this book than Hot Sour Salty Sweet. The book is great. I'm glad amazon offers it for a lower price than bookstores.

5 out of 5 stars

Good work in a cookbook/travelogue June 12, 2006
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

I am a novice American learning to cook Indian style. I have studied enough books to know that sticking curry powder in a melange of stewing vegetables is not really "getting it" in terms of creating an authentic Indian meal. In my search for authenticity, I think Alford & Duguid go a long way in presenting just that, scouring the villages & cities of India.
What a remarkable book! It's terribly interesting, and it has left so many impressions on me! I haven't made all the recipes, but what I've made have been delicious!!!
There is one paneer recipe that calls for 1/2 cup of garlic, minced or crushed (think it's Kashmiri Paneer). I was wondering why I chose it. It was utterly delicious. (I only cook for myself, so I made half a recipe. Another shortcut is to add cubed pre-fried paneer from the local Indian market, if you can get it!) It would break my heart to hear anybody complain about this book, probably, because I gather the authors took pains to put this baby together. One thing:
I think if you make dosas, you really should ferment that batter overnight. What I did when I made dosas was left the bowl sitting on top of my stove; I have a range-light that added a little heat. My batter was appropriately sour the next day, I think!!! Thanks, Naomi and Jeffrey

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