My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking

by Niloufer King, Alice Waters (Foreword)

Chef Samin Nosrat’s Top Ten Favorite Books for Vulture
Winner, 2008 James Beard Foundation Book Award in Asian Cooking

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.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, India, Food and Wine, Food Writing

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Ambica Rajagopal · Rating 5 out of 5]

unbelievable book on parsi cooking..written by this elderly totally parsi lady called niloufer ichaporia king who is an anthorpologist and foodie, who knew that chez panisse celebrates jamshedji navroz everyear based on menus by the author?

[Roukaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favourite books in my collection now. This book is chockablock full of recipes and I'm still working through them. I've had great successes with recipes from this book. I particularly use the chutney recipes and kevab (kebab) recipes a lot. It's definitely a book I recommend. This is a good reflection of Parsi food heritage.

[Libraryassistant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who knew that Parsi culture and cuisine meant Zoroastrian Persians who had fled to India from Iran? I certainly didn’t. But her stories and recipes were a fascinating glimpse into the blending of the two cuisines while maintaining the Parsi cultural traditions.
And it sounds delicious!

[Mills College Library]

641.5954 K539 2007

[Dray · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason this book did not really grab me. The historical notes were illuminating but the recipes seemed lackluster. Maybe I've read too many cookbooks.

[Aasinathena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best book I came across Parsi history,culture and food !

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is as much a cultural history as it is a cookbook, beautifully written and full of personal anecdotes that give the narrative a lively tone.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Niloufer Ichiaporia King, My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Cooking (University of California Press, 2007)

I was looking for an Indian cookbook. I am often looking for an Indian cookbook; if I only had to survive on one kind of food for the rest of my life, Indian would be my first choice (though Cambodian might give it a run for its money). Besides, if you want to bulk up the book count in a given year, there are few better ways to do that than cookbooks. In that regard, My Bombay Kitchen will not be of any help to you at all; over three hundred closely-packed pages here, none of this one-recipe-per-page stuff, and certainly no huge swaths of color photographs taking up space. This is an honest-to-pete cookbook, not a coffee table decoration. And so in the former regard, I definitely got what I was looking for. Well, almost. Parsi cooking, it seems, is a blend of Indian and Persian, so not bound by some of the usual conventions of Indian cuisine. Is this a bad thing? Of course not.

Many of the recipes here are variations on standard themes, so a good deal of what you're likely to get out of this (assuming you're proficient in the kitchen) is in techniques, new ways of blending ingredients, that sort of thing. In other words, you probably already make a lot of these recipes; King just gives you ideas for tangents that you may not have previously thought of. This is a good thing, and I prefer cookbooks that broaden horizons rather than simply giving you recipes. It does get a little daunting now and again, and the average cook may have a bit of difficulty getting hold of some of the ingredients called for (unless you live in King's part of California, where some of them grow natively), but she usually lists a decent substitution. You want this one, but be prepared to go through it slowly. *** ½

[Alisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars only because I do like my cookbooks to have glossy photos, and this has none. Still, lots of stories in the introductions to the recipes, lots of food anthropology (I like), and the one recipe I tried, "Mother's Wobbly Cauliflower Custard," (++ points for awesome name) was unique, tasty, and the reality matched the expectations I had after reading the recipe. I've marked down several more as must-tries. That's what I ask of a cookbook.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

King's book is a collection of Parsi inspired recipes from her travels across the globe. She also details the history of Parsi cooking and how Parsi cooks incorporated the ingredients and foods from all their travels.

[Thérèse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book: fantastic recipes, delightful writing about Parsi history and foodways, and about the author's own family.

[Carmen]

Sugar in the Milk: A Parsi Kitchen Story by The Kitchen Sisters on NPR

[Nichole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haven't cooked out of yet, but very much looking forward to it. I read it to cover to cover like I did Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The recipes look yummy & I love the history in it.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspiring

[Lindsey Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a wonderful culinary and cultural journey, written with heart and history. Parsis, it would seem, are culinary magpies, taking the best of every cuisine they encounter, and the author has done a great job of balancing between "traditional" Indian dishes and the fusion creations that have become just as authentic for Parsi households.

The only reason I'm not giving five stars is here is the quantity of dishes / discussion that rely upon ingredients that even the most savvy home-cook is not going to be able to find, unless you happen to be lucky enough to live in California or a huge foodie mecca. In my area, just getting curry leaves is a challenge, and I have an excellent Indian grocer nearby. It's not a huge portion of the book, but there's too many of these for my tastes (pun intended?).