This award-winning cookbook is fascinating account of a distinctive Indian cuisine: the food of the Parsis, descendants of Persian Zoroastrians who fled to India after the fall of their country to Arab conquest in the seventh century. Over the years Parsi cooking retained many of its Persian roots but was influenced by local Gujararti cooking, the subsequent Moghul conquest, and colonization by Portuguese and British empires. As author Niloufer Ichaporia King writes, "By the latter part of the twentieth century, all this adopting and adapting and enriching had led to an urban Parsi cuisine with an immense range of taste and techniques, a real magpie cuisine. At one end of the continuum, you find a simple dish of pureed lentils with little more than salt and cumin; at the others, the potage of five different kinds of lentils, eight vegetables, and twenty-something spices that is our emblematic dish, dhansak..." Parsi cooking uses many kinds of meat, including pork and beef, which are not commonly eaten in that part of India. King is a renowned food scholar and her recipes are frequently accompanied by detailed headnotes on a dish's history or ruminations on all the influences which have combined in its lineage. Thus the appeal of the flavorful food is amplified by the illumination of a rich and varied culture. Hardcover. Line drawings.
