Cookbook browsing today...
#CookAndSee #Part1 by #MeenakshiAmmal
I found this book at the back of dusty shelves of an Indian shop as they packed up to move premises (to St Bernard's Road, but sadly they have retired now). I loved that Alladins-Cave style of shop, and found many treasures there.
I grabbed it and it's 3 other "parts", and it became my primary South Indian/Tamil cooking teacher and mentor. It focused my efforts to learn about Indian food and Indian cooking. I made sambar after sambar, then rasam after rasam, then kuzhambu after kuzhambu, ..... and slowly cooked my way through this first book in the series.
This book is not for the feint-hearted. You do have to be a detective. Ammal wrote it in the 1950's for Tamil women, so there is a lot of assumed knowledge. And her initial writing style is like a maze. No joke. Sometimes I had to rewrite the recipe by hand to understand the steps and options.
I class it amongst my most treasured cookbooks.
ALTs are not working atm here. Thus: The cover of the book, with a range of South Indian/Tamil vegetarian foods including dosa, vada, idli, pongal, chickpeas, burfi, rasam, and more...