Indian Vegetarian Cookbook

The recipes in this collection represent traditional Indian vegetarian cooking. Following a brief introduction in which Dalal describes basic cooking techniques and ingredients, there are recipes for soups (yogurt shorba), vegetable, dal (beans and lentils) and rice dishes (corn curry, vegetable kheema, korma rice), side dishes and salads (coconut curry sauce), breads (chapatis, papadums), snacks and sweets. Readers unfamiliar with Indian foods may be frustrated by the need to refer back and forth from recipe to glossary, as some ingredients are listed in recipes only by their Indian name (one recipe calls for moong dal, masoor dal, urad dal and toovar dal; the glossary explains that these are skinned and split mung beans, red lentils, black beans and red beans); and some readers may be unaccustomed to recipes that designate ingredient amounts by weight alone. But with time and patience, the reader should become knowledgeable enough to create sour and hot pepper soup, saffron pullao, green chutney, and parathas stuffed with vegetables and cheese. November 21