Sometimes I go through my voluminous library of cookbooks. It’s not so much an urge for food porn. It’s more like being a musician and reading scores for songs, which I regrettably can’t do (can’t read music). But I read them for sport, for ideas, for mind-fodder. But sometimes I get really annoyed.
I think I have maybe ten books on Indian cooking alone. Some of them are from the U.S. and some are from the U.K. But every single one of them has a different recipe for basmati rice. If at all.
It’s just gross inefficiency on many levels. It’s like you wrote out Brahm’s Fifth but only gave vague directions as to where the sharps should be. But those are the easier ones to parse.
The maddening ones are where they specify, say, 3 ounces of coriander. Three ounces of coriander? What the fuck, I’m supposed to get out my coke scale and weigh the fucking thing? How about a quarter cup?
But what takes the cake is the “5/8ths of a cup of yogurt” for a Cream Cheese Kofta Curry in the cookbook “Complete Indian.” Five-eighths of a cup? Waaah? How about “A little more than half a cup”?
Considering 95% of the world makes dinner with no measuring whatsoever, it seems ridiculous that a cookbook can be published, well, so ridiculously. What the fuck is a medium onion? Please tell me.
And why are there fifty ways to cook basmati rice? Every single cookbook I have has a different formula. Thank god I found mine and now it comes out perfectly every time. Two cups of water for one cup rice? Recipe for a very effective glue.
Lesson: most cookbooks are like the charts for the Beatles that you find in music stores; bogus, simplified instructions that will always produce a mere parody of the real thing.
cream cheese kofta curry?? that kind of sounds nasty... i never thought cream cheese would be part of indian cuisine.
ReplyDeleteWell, chalk it up to publisher desperation. But it really exists in a real book. Looks like the author is Pakistani.
ReplyDeleteI think Italian cookbooks have way more integrity than Indian . . . they seem to mainly agree with each other on ingredients/methods, but the Indian ones are all over the place.
I agree with you about measuring. I do everything by eye, so I always have trouble coming up with quantities for my recipes on my blog. Perhaps I should add a disclaimer and tell everyone it is a guesstimate.
ReplyDeleteSo, what is your water/rice ratio?
ReplyDeleteWell, it's been changing (along with the pan) but where I used to do the rice in a frypan à la pilaf I now do it in a pot. I soak 2 cups basmati for 30 minutes and then boil 2 2/3 cups of salted water, put the rice in, cover tightly and simmer for 18 minutes and then rest for 10 minutes and it's been quite successful. At last, a formula!
ReplyDeleteAnd Judy, yeah, these days I pretty much make everything except ric e by eyeballing, but when I make something that's successful I tend to write down how I did it for future reference since I always forget . . .