Coorg: The Cookbook

This beautiful and immersive Indian cookbook introduces us to a small region in the country's southwest, known  for "its magnificent, silent landscapes, hills, valleys of rice fields, coffee, cardamom, and pepper plantations, its scattered villages."

It is the traditional home of the Kodava people, whose name was anglicized to Coorg during British colonization. Author Kaveri Ponnapa, a member of the Kodava and the author of an earlier history of the group, is aware that despite the current prosperity of the region, its singular character is eroding and her careful collection of the recipes gathered here includes many that have become uncommon during her lifetime.  

She is also careful to trace and acknowledge food which have come to Coorg through trade and migration, adapted to local ingredients and traditions.

Nearly every Indian regional cookbook is a reminder to those of us who know the country's cooking only at a distance that its traditions are vast and diverse, Coorg does an enticing job of presenting dishes which we, at least, have not encountered in other books. Among them:

• Stir-fried smoked and dried pork, which has its origins in wild boar hunts after which game was preserved and stored for the monsoon months when fresh meats were unavailable
• Tempered rice yoghurt, flavored with hints of fresh ginger and green chilies and wrapped in banana leaves for portability and eaten on hot summer days
• Roasted mud crab chutney, made using freshwater crabs, fresh coconut, coriander leaves, and lime juice
• Bitter orange pulp in milk curd seasoned with mustard seeds and garlic
• Tender wild mango pickle made using the lacto-fermentation method and seasoned with sesame seeds, cloves, cinnamon, and fenugreek
  

We're scarcely doing justice to the richness of this book and the obvious care with which it was written. A true tribute to traditional cooking, one that reminds us of the depth of A Child of the Rice Fields.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout. 480 pages.