An Invitation to Indian Cooking: 50th Anniversary Edition: A Cookbook Hardcover – November 21, 2023

If you are going to make ethnic food for your home, it is best to trust someone who has a track record of doing it right. Not all cookbooks are pretested well, and some have errors in them regarding cooking times, cooking temps and some are missing ingredients. This is a solid cookbook with a history of use by home cooks that is successful and is well regarded. If you're going to add one ethnic book on Indian cooking, this is the one that comes highly suggested.

This book and its author live up to their reputation. I highly recommend the Chicken Moghlai recipe in particular. I followed it to the letter and received effusive, over-the-top accolades on the results. The Gajar Halwa recipe i found called for about 4 tablespoons too much oil, which i had to strain out at the end of cooking, and about a tablespoon too little sugar, but it was a fine dessert after those adjustments. I put the gajar halwa in a casserole dish and decorated the top with a rangoli of ground pistachios and cashews, so it was green, white, and orange, those being the colors of the Indian flag 🙂. Overall i am very pleased with this book and give it my highest recommendation.

I watched the author's interview recently and was enthralled. I purchased this book for historical and cultural reasons. I am not that familiar with Indian food, but it sounded as if this is the definitive cookbook to start with for a novice to the cuisine. I just received the book and flipped through it - it looks great and like an old fashioned cookbook, (of which I have several, but in cuisines I am familiar with), however, since I am wholly unfamiliar with Indian food, I wish they had included photographs to give a general idea of what dishes are supposed to look like. I suppose that I can do online searches for images, but it would have been nice to have in this book. I am aware that it is an anniversary edition and that the original didn't include photos, but it could have been updated, as they updated with new forwards, etc.

I've only made one recipe. I chose one at random that I already had all the ingredients, the marinated pork chops. I have three kids. I have never in my life made a dinner that everyone was enthusiastic about eating but these pork chops were devoured in minutes. I didn't have to threaten or bribe anyone. My oldest even decided to pack leftovers for lunch at school! She never eats leftovers. If she packs leftovers, it's because we had pizza. Now I will say, my kids eat a wide variety of food. If you have picky eaters, I can't make any promises with them. But Im excited to give everything else a try in this book.

I have always like dining in restaurants that serve good Indian cuisine. Now, thanks to this book that many American home cooks have treasured for 50 years, I can explore all my favorites in my own kitchen. It happens that there's a well-stocked supplier of fresh spices and condiments in my city, so I can closely follow the recipes. It's a lot of fun, and the results are good to eat.

Recipient is very happy with it.

I saw an interview with the author on the PBS News Hour and decided I should add to my Indian cookbooks. So glad I did. Every recipe I've tried has been fantastic. Some of the more specialized ingredients are not hard to find. Really wish I had purchased this years ago. I highly recommend this for anyone's cookbook collection.

The book is full of lots of good recipes for cooking Indian recipes. The main issue I had was that Amazon shipped this book with a few other books in a box with no padding, so the book arrived damaged (corners dented and scratched) and then only option was to return the book for a refund. So I would give this book 3.5 stars but 1 star to Amazon for packaging,