All stirred together

There is a literal feast out there. Where ever you look, culinary feats are constantly on parade taking over our private and personal space. From baking bibles, celebrity chef bestsellers, cookery books for kids, culinary apps topped by a host of cookery shows on every channel, looks like the heat is on full blast! Cooking has now become a national pastime and a spectator sport for every man, woman and child. However, in spite of the spate of culinary books that crowd the bookshelves, there’s nothing like a good old fashioned cook book that you want to take home to your kitchen.
Jeroo Mehta’s Cooking For The Family is just the foodie bible you may want to gift yourself this New Year. If you’ve got into a cooking rut, lost your cooking mojo or need new ideas for the next party you are going to throw, all you need is take a leaf out of the book and bring back the zing to your cooking. The revised edition of Cooking For The Family published by Popular Prakashan Private Limited (2012) that was first released in 1981, offers many more new recipes.
Whether you are a runaway bride, a bored housewife or a bloke with a passion for cooking, Mehta’s latest offering has a refreshingly honest take on simple, honest-to-goodness food that tugs at your heartstrings. Easy to read and quick to make no fuss evening meals make it a ready reckoner for a wannabe Master Chef. Add to it practical dinner party ideas and priceless tips that not only take the reader step by step in their experiments with food but also inspire and empower hopeful hostesses to whip up a tasty meal for family and friends.
We are not talking food snobbery here. While the revised edition of Mehta’s book may not talk of truffles, foie gras or ganache, it does enlighten readers about simple kitchen rules on how to clean fish or how to make a hamburger from scratch.
The book has easy-to-follow sections that include chutneys, yoghurt-based preparations, soups and starters, sauces, gravies and salad dressings, fish, meat, chicken, eggs, dals, rice and curries, vegetarian fare and accompaniments like chapatis, parathas and puris. Then there is the sweet story of desserts, cakes and teatime bites followed by preserves and pickles. The party menu for children is guaranteed to take the stress and expense out of organizing your kid’s birthday bash.
There is something for everyone. Eggitarians or egg lovers will take delight in trying out interesting recipes like eggs on bananas, eggs on mince or eggs with mayonnaise on shredded lettuce.

The green eaters have a wide array of recipe ideas to choose from. Mehta accommodates, apart from the traditional vegetarian fare, recipes like chutney stuffed cauliflower, cabbage rolls, Szechwan brinjal, baked pumpkin supreme, cheese soufflé and mixed vegetable and bean bake. Quite a few new recipes stirred in there.
The book which was a best seller is also peppered with practical tips on leftovers. They say nothing stimulates a cook’s ingenuity like magically changing leftovers into delectable and wholesome food. Mehta with her decades of experience in the kitchen helps with the perfect cover-up job that makes leftovers look as good as new. Interestingly, Mehta wasn’t exactly a cookery queen when she got married.
The culinarily challenged can rest assured that it’s never too late to become a (culinary) wizard or author a cook book. However, she started getting better at it with the help of her mother’s recipe book. Later, her passion for cooking inspired her to pen not one but three cookery books! The underlying reason for this being that she didn’t want other brides to go through what she did.
Fortunately for the reader the award-winning author has sussed it all out and has even introduced a section on menu planning that follows a simple formula of a starter, followed by a salad or vegetarian dish, a main course and a dessert or fruit.
If Cooking For The Family has not been passed on to you by your mother or grandmother, it’s worth investing Rs 275 in it. It’s a keepsake with simple recipes that may evoke nostalgic memories of another day. Like the time your mum used to make doodh powva or shrikhand before you moved on to those readymade packs at the supermarket or grocery store.
Cooking For the Family is a simple, pragmatic book that lives up to its title and delivers as promised. Go on, have a read whilst I savor the delicious looking Crumb Fried Fillets of Fish I have just made for myself with a recipe from the book.