As usual the festival shopping rush disrupted the book bazaar at Abids scattering the sellers from their usual places to different corners of the streets. The books too were disturbed as a result and the some of the sellers displayed only a fraction of their wares. However, it did not bother me much because eagle-eyed that I become wherever books are found I managed to spot a few good titles, four, to be exact. Once again there were more cookbooks than other titles in last Sunday’s haul that was quite heavy. One gargantuan tome that I found was almost nine hundred pages long and twice as thick as a brick.
It was solo browsing too as none of my friends turned up, and the first find was a cookbook. I spotted ‘The Best of Goan Cooking’ by Gilda Mendonsa with one of the sellers on the pavements on the road leading to the Taj Mahal hotel. The cover of ‘The Best of Goan Cooking’ had a charming look and I bought it right away without even checking out the recipes inside. I got this nice title for just fifty rupees. This was one of the two cookbooks I found at the same seller.
The other cookbook title was ‘Food is Home’ by Sarjana with the sub-title ‘The Little Book of Italian Cooking.’ I had seen it earlier too but somehow wasn’t tempted enough to buy it. But last Sunday I picked it up and after leafing through a few pages decided it would be better to buy it. I know nothing about Italian dishes except pasta that I haven’t yet tasted. It wasn’t to learn to prepare pasta I bought this book but to know something about Italian cuisine. However, this book isn’t a cookbook but a sort of memoir as Shobhaa De says in the introduction. This title too I got for fifty rupees.
I saw a nice copy of ‘Nectar in a Sieve’ by Kamala Markandaya which had a different cover. I thought of buying it but somehow I decided not to. But now I think I should have bought it since I love to collect old editions of books by Indian authors. Maybe next Sunday if I happen to find it I will buy it. Then I had also seen a hardcover copy of ‘Complications’ by Atul Gawande that I should have bought though I already have a copy of this title. This hardcover seemed a different and earlier edition but the price pencilled on it deterred me.
The next two finds were at Chikkadpally on the way home. It was an exciting find. I spotted a beautiful copy of ‘Misplaced Objects and Other Poems’ by K. Satchidanandan. It was a Sahitya Akademi book and was almost new. It has eighty five poems translated by Satchidanandan himself from the original Malayalam into English. I was thrilled to find this collection of poems by one of my favourite Indian poets.
With the same seller I found what I can only call as the Mother of all Indian cookbooks. I found ‘The Madhur Jaffrey Cookbook’ an intimidating tome of almost nine hundred pages. It was actually two books- Eastern Vegetarian Cooking, and An Invitation to Indian Cooking, combined into one. I had to think for a long time before deciding to buy this book though I knew I would never find it again anywhere. It was published by Tiger Books International of London, which was a name I haven’t heard before.
‘The Madhur Jaffrey Cookbook’ was not one of the thickest tomes but the thickest book I had bought so far. With over 650 recipes in it, it would take about two years for me to go through the recipes in it at the rate of one a day, that is, if the wife lets me experiment in the kitchen.
No comments:
Post a Comment