Sambars & Curries

Well, that was fun!

We had Miz Shoes and the RLA over this evening to playtest a game MJ and I (in one of our rare joint efforts) are working on as a belated wedding gift for a couple who – in truth, we really don’t know that well. Why are we doing it? The bride is of Indian descent, and she and her husband had a slam-bang, all-out Hindu wedding last year. We were fortunate enough to have been invited, and the experience was too incredible for words.

These are not people who sign up at the bridal registry in your run-of-the-mill chain department store. They wanted people to make something for them. Well, this is what we do. Or what MJ does, rather, and under the circumstances, I got to have input on style and aesthetics. You know, the fun part.

And now, the playtesting begins. To bribe the Shoes, I promised an Indian dinner. And since the bride’s family is from Tamil Nadu in southern India, I am now entering a region of cuisine I’ve never been in before. What to do? Amazon.com to the rescue! And I learned that the flashy “premier” South Indian cookbook, Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India , by Chandra Padmanabhan, is not the be-all of the cuisine I had been led to believe. Mile-long ingredients lists, complicated (read – messy), and time-consuming instructions did not ensure success. Both MJ and I tried several different recipes in Dakshin (a couple of them we made more than once, thinking we had screwed something up), and only one them turned out at all (the recipe for idlis). Even so, it seemed like a lot of effort for just an “okay” result. I thought it was me.

Until I spotted this little gem: Vegetarian Samayal of South India: Delicious Cooking from a Tamil Cuisine by Viji Varadarajan. The customer reviews pretty much confirmed that it wasn’t just me — Dakshin apparently frustrates a lot of people. Viji Varadarajan – in her forward, as well as her recipes – is obviously not speaking to whitebread people like me. It’s apparent from the start that she believes her audience is primarily young people of Tamil descent, probably away from home, who she hopes to inspire to carry on the food traditions of their culture. And that’s cool. But you pretty much have to already have quite a bit of familiarity with Indian cooking and ingredients to be able to grok what she’s talking about – not to mention getting past the misspellings, unusual phrasing choices and grammar problems (where were her copy editors, anyway?)

And yet, despite all of that, if you do have some experience with Indian cooking, you will enjoy the hell out of cooking from this book! The recipes are streamlined, easy, and quick to follow. And they taste good! Success! Okay, I’ve only made three things out of it, but previously, I felt accomplished if I finished one recipe out of some other cookbooks. I always wondered how the average woman in India managed to put so many things on the table for one meal, when it took me most of an afternoon to cook one dish. Now I know. They’re really doing it Viji’s way. Right? I think I’ll try some more tomorrow. 🙂

Anyway, I don’t know how this turned into a cookbook review, but since it did, I’ll just say that I was very pleased with myself today (okay, it’s yesterday already), and if you want to branch out to South Indian cooking (with the previously mentioned caveats), Vegetarian Samayal of South India: Delicious Cooking from a Tamil Cuisine by Viji Varadarajan is a pretty darned good place to start. I swear – no one paid me to say so!