My Bombay Kitchen
Author: Niloufer Ichaporia King
The Persians of antiquity were renowned for their lavish cuisine and their never-ceasing fascination with the exotic. These traits still find expression in the cooking of India's rapidly dwindling Parsi population--descendants of Zoroastrians who fled Persia after the Sassanian empire fell to the invading Arabs. The first book published in the United States on Parsi food written by a Parsi, this beautiful volume includes 165 recipes and makes one of India's most remarkable regional cuisines accessible to Westerners. In an intimate narrative rich with personal experience, the author leads readers into a world of new ideas, tastes, ingredients, and techniques, with a range of easy and seductive menus that will reassure neophytes and challenge explorers.
Judith Sutton - Library Journal
The Parsis are descendants of Persian Zoroastrians who fled to India, primarily Bombay, centuries ago to escape the Arab invaders. King, a talented cook with a background in anthropology, grew up in Bombay (Mumbai) and has lived in San Francisco for many years. Here, she offers a wide-ranging, highly readable introduction to her culinary heritage. She describes Parsi cooking as a "magpie cuisine . . . gleeful[ly] borrowing" from other influences over the years. She begins with a brief history of the Parsis and an introduction to her grandmother's and mother's kitchens and then presents more than 150 recipes, both sophisticated and homey, many of which will be unfamiliar even to most Indian-food lovers. The headnotes are informative and entertaining, and the book concludes with a selection of menus, a detailed glossary, a source guide, and a bibliography. Highly recommended.
Book review: Crisis in Bethlehem or Wages of Wins
Microwave Gourmet
Author: Barbara Kafka
Learn to use your microwave oven to do everything you hoped it could and more with breakthrough techniques and recipes that will change the way you cook forever.
First published in 1987, Barbara Kafka's Microwave Gourmet redefined the way people thought about the microwave oven. Microwave Gourmet is the only book that clarifies which dishes are at their best when made in the microwave, which are the worst, and why.
There are over six hundred delicious recipes for everything you can conceivably want classics like Filet of Sole with Almonds and Turkey with Cranberry Sauce and Saffron Risotto, plus old-fashioned favorites such as Baked Macaroni and Cheese and an American Chocolate Layer Cake that cook up in five to ten minutes. Microwave Gourmet lets you eat good, homemade food in no time at all.
Microwave Gourmet is an indispensable reference and a ground-breaking book that will change your mind about using the microwave forever.
Publishers Weekly
Kafka focuses here on producing interesting, pleasing dishes rather than on teaching readers how to operate their new microwave ovens. Microwaved classics like sauce espagnole may raise conservative eyebrows, but she is, by and large, successful in her attempt. Swordfish with tomato and basil, truite au bleu and catfish fillet with cornbread stuffing make much of the oven's capacity for cooking fish. Recipes range from family dishes, such as chunky beef chili and pork chops with sauerkraut, to company fare, including pheasant with currant cream, squab with seasoned butter under the skin and shad roe with sorrel sauce. Ingredients emphasize fresh items rather than prepackaged shortcuts; in fact, recipes for such pantry items as peach chutney and cranberry sauce are included. Unfortunately, the concluding reference ``dictionary'' is of uneven quality. Vogue food editor Kafka is the Tastemaker Award-winning author of American Food and California Wines and Food for Friends. Illustrations not seen by PW. (September 29)
Library Journal
Kafka's fans have been reading her recipes and instructions for the microwave oven in bits and pieces in the New York Times and elsewhere, and will surely welcome this book. Her thorough and creative approach is simply the best in the field. She's ``finicky about weghts, measures, size of dishes and kinds of coverings,'' and has become a convert to the ``virtues of microwave cookingrapidity, simplicity and perfect results.'' The scores of recipes include classic preparations such as sauce espagnole, tuiles, various risottos, borscht, and beignets. Kafka's culinary ingenuity is displayed, for example, in her instructions for coconut milk and for shrimp butter. There are really two books in one here: the recipes and a ``Dictionary of Foods and Techniques,'' wonderfully useful. A new standard, well-priced and highly recommended. SP
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