Niloufer Ichaporia King in Conversation with Sue Darlow

Niloufer Ichaporia King's My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking
Reviewed by Sue Darlow

It’s both a privilege and a pleasure to be reviewing this book, the first book about Parsi home cooking authored by a Parsi and published outside of India. I have met Niloufer a few times and I can report that her formidable reputation preceded her, with my sister, who is an old friend, often stating that Niloufer is a fabulous cook and “the most intelligent person I know.” That view is endorsed by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, who writes in her genuinely affectionate and detailed foreword that the author is “one of the great cooks I know”. And while thus far Niloufer has resisted all requests to open her own restaurant, for the last twenty years she has cooked up a storm with a wonderful Parsi New Year celebration feast at Chez Panisse.

Marghi/kid papeta ma gos

I will start off by saying that this is no ordinary cookbook but a labour of love. The hardback with a modest cover belies an elegantly written work of great erudition, which will inform, delight and encourage the most timid of cooks to start exploring unknown territory. Its more than three hundred pages are densely packed with interest, including an introduction to the Parsis in general and Niloufer’s family in particular, helpful notes on kitchen equipment and preparing masalas and other basic ingredients, around a hundred and sixty five well explained recipes, twenty five pages of glossary (Niloufer is very knowledgeable about tropical food plants), extensive menu suggestions, six pages of further reading, and a decent index. The whimsical line drawings of equipment, techniques and ingredients were provided by her husband David King. The only photographs are old black and white ones of family in the introductory chapter.

While the blurb about the author blandly states “Niloufer Ichaporia King is an independent scholar interested in tropical food plants and cuisines (who) has contributed to the Journal of Gastronomy, Fine Cooking, The Slow Food Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area, and Cultural Survival Quarterly”, you will get to know her quite a bit better through the book, which, unusually for a cookbook, has a clear, vibrant voice. The text is studded with nuggets of information - for instance I learnt about the difference between dark and light tamarind, that Sweden is the second largest market for cardamom after India, and that the Persians of antiquity believed that the first man and woman sprang out of a rhubarb plant. It seems Herodotus was already commenting about the Persians’ habit of fussing over birthdays back in his day.

The chatty text is laced with acute observations about Parsi life and times. When talking about salads she notes that in her grandmother’s day “salad meant mayonnaise and plumpness was a charming female attribute”. When giving us the recipe for Sau Badam ni Kari (One Hundred Almond Curry) she talks about how the dish was regarded as one of the great festive ones, due to the double extravagance of chicken and almonds, and then points out how it is considered inauspicious to count things out in even numbers so it had an extra almond added to it, just like when wedding gifts and suchlike have an extra rupee added to avoid an even number. Another time she writes “After some years of watching her go through cooks, a friend sent a young lad to my mother with a note that he knew just one or two things but seemed to be a quick learner. This was Andrew de Souza, and he stayed with my parents for almost twenty years, until the employment boom in the Persian Gulf states lured him and others like him away. By then he had turned into an accomplished, versatile and curious cook whom my mother’s false friends were constantly trying to hire away from her. My mother never got over what she saw as the perfidy of his departure, and to the day she left India for good, in 1998, she thought he would return, contrite and grateful to be back, with lots of new recipes.” Brilliantly observed, and so closely echoing the experience in our family. But then it turns out that Niloufer is also an anthropologist.

Nankhatai with wrappers

Her humour, too, is by turns droll - witness “I’ve cut back considerably on the traditional amount of mustard, but you can increase it bearing in mind that its bite mellows over time, as we all should”, and whimsical, with her version of the Parsi food triangle, rising out of a plinth of potato chips, tapering upwards with ginger and topped by a big head of garlic. A few times, as with Elizabeth David, the elegant prose descends to pedantry, as when she notes of green chutney “It keeps for at least a week refrigerated and can be successfully thawed. (Note, I didn’t say frozen, anything can be successfully frozen.)”

Niloufer has not chosen to call this book a Parsi Cookbook, but rather, a book about her kitchen, deeply anchored in her Parsi origins in Bombay (at a time when it was not yet officially Mumbai). She maintains that Parsi cuisine is a magpie one, and always has been, right back to the times when the Persians, living along the ancient trade routes between China, India and the rest of the known world, were ideally placed to “have a look at anything interesting moving in either direction”. She takes us on a journey with the first Zoroastrian refugees landing on the coast of Hindu Gujarat in India in the seventh century, bringing with them their lavish meat dishes, absorbing much that was local and then later moving onwards to cosmopolitan Bombay where the British encounter left its mark on the cuisine, as did the Portuguese via the Parsi fondness for Goan cooks, and on to California where Niloufer now resides, and where for example we have the benefit of a pastry recipe for the traditional Khajur ni Ghari (Date Pastries) from a former Chez Panisse chef as a further refinement. How else to understand a cuisine that includes meat cooked with dried apricots from Afghanistan, a richly spiced potage of lentils and vegetables cooked with meat and served with caramelised rice, rolls of taro leaf stuffed with a spicy chickpea filling, super rich baked egg custard, and Irish stew?

She chooses her way around the repertoire, indulging her biases, here in favour of Khajur ni Ghari and against its teatime cousin Dar ni Pori, there preferring to include her mother‘s recipe for Cardamom Caramel Custard (which she recommends served with a blood orange compote, reminiscent of Suvir Saran’s Kulfi with Citrus Jus) over the more traditional and famous Lagan nu Custer. This is partly a matter of her preference, and partly for reasons of space, opting to really get into the subject in depth than to proffer a more encyclopaedic but superficially covered collection of recipes. She really wants you to get under the skin of a Parsi cook, and guides the reader gently through the labyrinth. Despite being opinionated, she is never a snob, devoting space to a recipe for homemade tomato ketchup and letting it be known that a certain Paris Bakery in a small backstreet of Bombay has better pastries than some of the expensive patisserie outlets of the five star hotels. Hear hear! Not only that, Niloufer is, like most of us, after the “easy effect, where simplicity yields results far outweighing the effort”, and goes on to talk about a “stellar easy effect”, the basic Parsi treatment of seafood and fish which is dry rubbed with chilly powder, turmeric and salt before frying, grilling or roasting.

Cauliflower custard

As Alice Waters so rightly says in her foreword, this book will enchant culinary historians, professional cooks, home cooks, weekend dabblers, and nightstand fantasy cooks alike. It will particularly appeal to those who want to create Parsi dishes outside of India, taking trouble as it does to anticipate the limitations that might be encountered. For instance, she writes of kid or goat that “an alternative loved by Parsi cooks in the United States is stewing veal, which delivers the melting quality we love in meat” and assures us that we can make excellent patrel using chard leaves instead of the harder to procure taro leaves. So while her recipes are meticulous, she does not get too precious about them, and asks us to use our own judgement and follow our own tastes. The book will also satisfy vegetarians adequately by offering plenty of suitable items in the chapters on salad, vegetable dishes, starters, soups, chutneys, pickles and relishes, sweets and desserts, and drinks. A great salad lover herself, she manages to coax eleven recipes out of her chapter on salad, despite observing wryly that for the older generation, Russian Salad was about as close to salad as they ever wanted to come.

For the sheer joy of reading, and being entertained and informed, you will be amply rewarded, but what about the million dollar question, do the recipes really work? I would answer with a resounding yes. None of the six recipes I tried was really difficult, and you will be warned about and carefully guided through any potential hazards. Read my comments about the ones I tested.

Continue to Sue's interview with Niloufer Ichaporia King.
Discuss the review here.
Or jump to selected recipes from the book with Sue's notes.


home about contact policies submissions feature archives audio visual writing reviews forums art film & television food literature music society & culture elsewhere desilit parabaas sasialit sawnet upper stall	Niloufer Ichaporia King's My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking Reviewed by Sue Darlow It’s both a privilege and a pleasure to be reviewing this book, the first book about Parsi home cooking authored by a Parsi and published outside of India. I have met Niloufer a few times and I can report that her formidable reputation preceded her, with my sister, who is an old friend, often stating that Niloufer is a fabulous cook and “the most intelligent person I know.” That view is endorsed by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, who writes in her genuinely affectionate and detailed foreword that the author is “one of the great cooks I know”. And while thus far Niloufer has resisted all requests to open her own restaurant, for the last twenty years she has cooked up a storm with a wonderful Parsi New Year celebration feast at Chez Panisse. Marghi/kid papeta ma gos I will start off by saying that this is no ordinary cookbook but a labour of love. The hardback with a modest cover belies an elegantly written work of great erudition, which will inform, delight and encourage the most timid of cooks to start exploring unknown territory. Its more than three hundred pages are densely packed with interest, including an introduction to the Parsis in general and Niloufer’s family in particular, helpful notes on kitchen equipment and preparing masalas and other basic ingredients, around a hundred and sixty five well explained recipes, twenty five pages of glossary (Niloufer is very knowledgeable about tropical food plants), extensive menu suggestions, six pages of further reading, and a decent index. The whimsical line drawings of equipment, techniques and ingredients were provided by her husband David King. The only photographs are old black and white ones of family in the introductory chapter. While the blurb about the author blandly states “Niloufer Ichaporia King is an independent scholar interested in tropical food plants and cuisines (who) has contributed to the Journal of Gastronomy, Fine Cooking, The Slow Food Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area, and Cultural Survival Quarterly”, you will get to know her quite a bit better through the book, which, unusually for a cookbook, has a clear, vibrant voice. The text is studded with nuggets of information - for instance I learnt about the difference between dark and light tamarind, that Sweden is the second largest market for cardamom after India, and that the Persians of antiquity believed that the first man and woman sprang out of a rhubarb plant. It seems Herodotus was already commenting about the Persians’ habit of fussing over birthdays back in his day. The chatty text is laced with acute observations about Parsi life and times. When talking about salads she notes that in her grandmother’s day “salad meant mayonnaise and plumpness was a charming female attribute”. When giving us the recipe for Sau Badam ni Kari (One Hundred Almond Curry) she talks about how the dish was regarded as one of the great festive ones, due to the double extravagance of chicken and almonds, and then points out how it is considered inauspicious to count things out in even numbers so it had an extra almond added to it, just like when wedding gifts and suchlike have an extra rupee added to avoid an even number. Another time she writes “After some years of watching her go through cooks, a friend sent a young lad to my mother with a note that he knew just one or two things but seemed to be a quick learner. This was Andrew de Souza, and he stayed with my parents for almost twenty years, until the employment boom in the Persian Gulf states lured him and others like him away. By then he had turned into an accomplished, versatile and curious cook whom my mother’s false friends were constantly trying to hire away from her. My mother never got over what she saw as the perfidy of his departure, and to the day she left India for good, in 1998, she thought he would return, contrite and grateful to be back, with lots of new recipes.” Brilliantly observed, and so closely echoing the experience in our family. But then it turns out that Niloufer is also an anthropologist. Nankhatai with wrappers Her humour, too, is by turns droll - witness “I’ve cut back considerably on the traditional amount of mustard, but you can increase it bearing in mind that its bite mellows over time, as we all should”, and whimsical, with her version of the Parsi food triangle, rising out of a plinth of potato chips, tapering upwards with ginger and topped by a big head of garlic. A few times, as with Elizabeth David, the elegant prose descends to pedantry, as when she notes of green chutney “It keeps for at least a week refrigerated and can be successfully thawed. (Note, I didn’t say frozen, anything can be successfully frozen.)” Niloufer has not chosen to call this book a Parsi Cookbook, but rather, a book about her kitchen, deeply anchored in her Parsi origins in Bombay (at a time when it was not yet officially Mumbai). She maintains that Parsi cuisine is a magpie one, and always has been, right back to the times when the Persians, living along the ancient trade routes between China, India and the rest of the known world, were ideally placed to “have a look at anything interesting moving in either direction”. She takes us on a journey with the first Zoroastrian refugees landing on the coast of Hindu Gujarat in India in the seventh century, bringing with them their lavish meat dishes, absorbing much that was local and then later moving onwards to cosmopolitan Bombay where the British encounter left its mark on the cuisine, as did the Portuguese via the Parsi fondness for Goan cooks, and on to California where Niloufer now resides, and where for example we have the benefit of a pastry recipe for the traditional Khajur ni Ghari (Date Pastries) from a former Chez Panisse chef as a further refinement. How else to understand a cuisine that includes meat cooked with dried apricots from Afghanistan, a richly spiced potage of lentils and vegetables cooked with meat and served with caramelised rice, rolls of taro leaf stuffed with a spicy chickpea filling, super rich baked egg custard, and Irish stew? She chooses her way around the repertoire, indulging her biases, here in favour of Khajur ni Ghari and against its teatime cousin Dar ni Pori, there preferring to include her mother‘s recipe for Cardamom Caramel Custard (which she recommends served with a blood orange compote, reminiscent of Suvir Saran’s Kulfi with Citrus Jus) over the more traditional and famous Lagan nu Custer. This is partly a matter of her preference, and partly for reasons of space, opting to really get into the subject in depth than to proffer a more encyclopaedic but superficially covered collection of recipes. She really wants you to get under the skin of a Parsi cook, and guides the reader gently through the labyrinth. Despite being opinionated, she is never a snob, devoting space to a recipe for homemade tomato ketchup and letting it be known that a certain Paris Bakery in a small backstreet of Bombay has better pastries than some of the expensive patisserie outlets of the five star hotels. Hear hear! Not only that, Niloufer is, like most of us, after the “easy effect, where simplicity yields results far outweighing the effort”, and goes on to talk about a “stellar easy effect”, the basic Parsi treatment of seafood and fish which is dry rubbed with chilly powder, turmeric and salt before frying, grilling or roasting. Cauliflower custard As Alice Waters so rightly says in her foreword, this book will enchant culinary historians, professional cooks, home cooks, weekend dabblers, and nightstand fantasy cooks alike. It will particularly appeal to those who want to create Parsi dishes outside of India, taking trouble as it does to anticipate the limitations that might be encountered. For instance, she writes of kid or goat that “an alternative loved by Parsi cooks in the United States is stewing veal, which delivers the melting quality we love in meat” and assures us that we can make excellent patrel using chard leaves instead of the harder to procure taro leaves. So while her recipes are meticulous, she does not get too precious about them, and asks us to use our own judgement and follow our own tastes. The book will also satisfy vegetarians adequately by offering plenty of suitable items in the chapters on salad, vegetable dishes, starters, soups, chutneys, pickles and relishes, sweets and desserts, and drinks. A great salad lover herself, she manages to coax eleven recipes out of her chapter on salad, despite observing wryly that for the older generation, Russian Salad was about as close to salad as they ever wanted to come. For the sheer joy of reading, and being entertained and informed, you will be amply rewarded, but what about the million dollar question, do the recipes really work? I would answer with a resounding yes. None of the six recipes I tried was really difficult, and you will be warned about and carefully guided through any potential hazards. Read my comments about the ones I tested. Continue to Sue's interview with Niloufer Ichaporia King. Discuss the review here. Or jump to selected recipes from the book with Sue's notes.