Sephi Bergerson

I have to review this book as two separate books.

As a photo journal, it is a beautiful book. It transports your to the streets of India and the food vendors there. The size of the book is easy to sit with and page through, looking at the pictures and reading the captions.

As a cookbook, the book contains 50 recipes as the title says. Many other cookbooks could provide you with these recipes - probably from a more authoritative source. The foods are indeed street foods and thus common everyday dishes. Most Indian cookbooks will likely include versions of the 50 recipes included here.… (mere)

The recipes and photos are more interesting than I thought they’d be. Some that caught my eye:

Bread Pakoras (yes they used an “s”)—no recipe with the photo, but this looks kind-of like an inverted cheese pakora (i.e., a slice of cheese surrounded by what is normally the potato-based filling, enclosed in sliced bread, battered, and fried.

Vada Pao (Indian potato burgers)—these can be quite good. I need to compare recipes for them.

Mirchi Vada (deep-fried stuffed green chillies)—I almost didn’t look at the ingredients, since these can be very spicy, but wow! Potato, cumin, dried pomegranate seeds, dried mango powder, salt, green coriander, and ginger... How interesting!

Malpua—one has to look at the photo caption and the recipe for this. (I really hope this is the only instance of that! If I had not seen the photo and caption first, I would not have realized that these pancakes are supposed to be dipped into a special syrup!

Phal Ki Chaat (mixed fruit delight)—I dunno: in addition to the fruit, there are potato and cucumber. Reminds me a bit of Indonesian Gado-Gado. The dressing is kind-of interesting (mint paste*, mixed w tamarind pulp and chaat masala). The fruit (etc.) mixture also includes lemon juice, black salt (I have some but don’t recall ever seeing a recipe that calls for it!), and red chilli powder. *Until I hit a recipe for mint paste a few pages after the other recipe, I thought one was supposed to buy it!

Bread Pakora—kind-of a savory, vegan French toast. This is on page 90. If I hadn’t been typing notes, I’d never remember there was a photo of this way back on page 11!

Hmmm. First, the recipes are not in synch with the photos. And there is no cross-referencing between them. Second, most of the time, there is no indication of subrecipes—or where one can find them in the book. (See my comment under Phal Ki Chaat.) Third, as was the case with the malpua, there could be critical information with the photos, again with no indication of that. Therefore, it would be wise to attentively read this book AND the photo captions, annotating the recipes as necessary. (Sorry if you don’t want to write in cookbooks; you might want to make this one an exception.) Finally, I realized that this book is not organized in any logical fashion: it skips from sweet to savory, from beverage to solid. Toward the end, I did realize that the photos kind-of span the day, from morning into the night. Or, rather, there is morning, the time that is at least in theory in between, and then the night. But that doesn’t seem to correlate with the recipes more than a few times.

On the plus side: this book contains several recipes that sound interesting. Also, the photography is splendid. This makes since because the author is a professional photographer.… (mere)