Kashmiri Cuisine Through the Ages

Sarla Razfdan grew up in a Hindu family in Srinagar, the largest city in India's Jammu and Kashmir region. Despite the promise of its title, her book is not a history, but a cookbook filled with her own and family recipes, as well as those she has gathered from other cooks in the region, including her Muslim neighbors. Razdan writes as one comfortable cook sharing her recipes with another. Instructions assume you know your way around a kitchen, but woven between the recipes are notes on substitutions, on cleaning or prepping a particular local ingredient, and on pairing one dish with another in a meal. Recipe names are provided in English as well as local languages and—somewhat uncommonly for books published in India—measurements are provided in metric and in US customary units. One of the pleasures of cookbooks published in India is their ability to expand on what commonly appears on restaurant menus in the US or in US published books. Kashmiri Cuisine Through the Ages accomplishes this through recipes for dishes such as sun-dried black lentils with potatoes, radish leaves with eggplant, salmon cooked with green apples, and lamb cooked with plums. Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.