I’m a sucker for cookery books and often enjoy them even as bedtime reads. It doesn’t matter if I don’t have the time to prepare recipes provided in the cookbooks that I have at home — it’s nevertheless fascinating to imagine all that cooking and chopping in one’s head. By that yardstick I’m thrilled with the recipes in A Guide for Gentlemen Chefs, a cookbook by Laxmi Dhaul and Gitanjali Khanna.
The former is, by the way, involved in setting up renewable power plants and reusing agricultural waste. But the star of this cookbook is clearly Mario Miranda, the cartoonist whose work one remembers from The Illustrated Weekly of India.
As far as the recipes go, the book, doesn’t quite experiment and sticks largely to basic recipes that one would have read elsewhere. Divided into different sections (for the exotic, for the dull-brained, for mama’s boy, for the blood-thirsty and so on), the book has a mix of Indian, Continental, Chinese, Thai and Italian recipes. It’s all very well but I wonder why the book — which kickstarts straightaway with Mughlai recipes, by the way — has been targeted specifically at “gentlemen” chefs.
None of the recipes seem distinctive or even simple enough to be tried by a novice man-cook! As a test, I’ll hand over the book to my kitchen-is-not-for-me husband and see if he manages even the “curried scrambled eggs” given in the book. If not, I will, for sure, end up trying some of the recipes mentioned, which even sans fancy photographs (there are no food pictures in this book) manage to hold their own. That way, I’ll be assured that this one’s not just for the gentlemen. It could well be a guide for anyone who enjoys cooking.
A GUIDE FOR GENTLEMEN CHEFS
Author: Laxmi Dhaul and Gitanjali Khanna
Publisher: Niyogi Books
Pages: 150
Price: Rs 395
