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Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking | 
 enlarge | Author: Yamuna Devi
Creator: David Baird
Publisher: Dutton - Penguin Putnam
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy Used: $17.97
You Save: $21.98 (55%)
New (39) Used (21) Collectible (2) from $17.97
Rating:  65 reviews
Sales Rank: 17014
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 816
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.7
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 7.7 x 2
ISBN: 0525245642
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5636
EAN: 9780525245643
ASIN: 0525245642
Publication Date: September 1, 1987
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: No Dust Cover. 1cm closed cut at the top edge of the front board. Gray marks on the fore and bottom edges. A few pages are creased, pages are unmarked.
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Product Description
Finally back in print--the definitive volume on Indian vegetarian cooking. Created by a noted author and lecturer, Lord Krishna's Cuisine features more than 500 recipes, filled with fresh produce and herbs, delicate spices, hot curries, and homemade dairy products. All recipes are based on readily available ingredients and have been scrupulously adapted for American kitchens. The recipes are enlivened by the author's anecdotes and personal reminiscences of her years in India, including stories of gathering recipes from royal families and temple cooks, which had been jealously guarded for centuries. Hailed by Gourmet as "definitive," and as "a marvelous source for vegetarians" by Bon Appetit, Devi has created the landmark work on the world's most sophisticated vegetarian cuisine. Repackaged and evocatively illustrated, Lord Krishna's Cuisine unlocks the mysteries of the most healthful and delicious recipes of the world.
* Winner of the International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook of the Year Award
"Big and beautiful."--Julia Child
"The Taj Mahal of cookbooks." --Chicago Tribune
"Monumental." --Vogue
"The food on Yamuna's table looks great! It's full of life, full of flavor, vibrant and healthy besides." --Deborah Madison, author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
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| Customer Reviews: Read 60 more reviews...
 Essential Reference For Indian Vegetarian Cuisine March 17, 2005
B. Marold (Bethlehem, PA United States)
61 out of 64 found this review helpful
`The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking' by Yamuna Devi can be placed among those great expositions in English of national cuisines such as Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking', Marcella Hazan's `Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking', Diane Kochilas' `The Glorious Food of Greece' or Mimi Sheraton's `The German Cookbook'. And, this book has an IACP Cookbook of the Year award to prove this fact. This book even exceeds the ambitions of the books by Kochilas and Sheraton in that while these authors do an excellent job of surveying the entire national cuisine from either a serving or geographical point of view, they do little to analyze their cuisines in the way Nancy Harmon Jenkins dissects and builds a picture of the Mediterranean cuisines in `The Essential Mediterranean'. Ms. Devi does this and more.
In fact, as big as this book is, it does itself and its readers a service by covering only the Hindu vegetarian cuisines, without touching on the cuisines of India which allow eating meat, primarily lamb and goat. Even more specifically, the author is specifically dedicated to that part of the Hindu religion that embraces Krishna. I will not touch on that aspect of the book except to point out that this means there are areas of Indian and Pakistani cuisines that this book does not cover. For those, the first stop is obviously the books of Madhur Jaffrey who, in her `Indian Cooking' does cover many meat dishes with lamb and goat.
Indian vegetarianism as presented by Ms. Devi in this book is relative broad in that it allows both milk and eggs. So, while `vegetarianism' allows much more than a diet of vegetables, grains, and beans, Ms. Devi treats vegetable cookery with a depth I have not seen in any book except James Peterson's book, `Vegetables'. Ms. Devi presents three basically different ways of cooking the same vegetable and suggests that these three methods may be applied to every different type of vegetable. The first method is Sauteeing and Braising Dry Vegetables (cooked entirely in oil. No water.) I believe this is what the French would call a vegetable comfit. The second method is to saute in oil followed by a braise in water based broth. This is closer to what a western cook would call a braise. The third method precooks the vegetable in water and finishes it with high heat in oil (ghee) or highly flavored sauce or broth. Pairing them up with a choice of several different seasoning mixes permutes these three methods. The author sets off with this introduction to discuss the various different types of vegetables and how the various methods can be applied to each vegetable.
Most of this is not too different from what you can get from a close reading of Marcella Hazan's books. The Indian way with milk and yogurt is an entirely different matter. The Indian traditions with milk products seem to be about 180 degrees away from the European traditions involving aged cheeses. The only point of similarity between Indian yogurt and Western European traditions are with the Italian ricotta and the Spanish queso fresca. Even contemporary American yogurt is not the same material as traditional Indian yogurt. While much western yogurt is made with skim or reconstituted dry milk, Indian yogurt is made from fresh whole milk. From yogurt, the Indians derive a fresh cheese and a curd that serves the same purpose as the Far Eastern tofu.
As with milk, the Indian approach to bread is just about as different from the western European tradition as you can imagine. It would be fascinating to read an analysis of the differences between, say Italian and Indian bread making traditions. The two biggest differences is that while the Italian tradition requires yeast and a hearth, the Indian tradition uses no yeast and does almost all baking on a griddle to produce a wide variety of flatbreads. Thus it is quite odd to find that while the Italian tradition does include a version of the French crepe, there is not a very big niche for pancakes, but the Indian cuisine seems to outdo even the wide range of American variations on the pancake / flapjack / hoecake / Johnny cake genre.
While the French may have exhausted most of what can be done with their superb, high fat Normandy butter in their rich cuisine, the Indians may just have outdone them by a bit when it comes to using butter, in the form of ghee as a cooking medium. While the French are satisfied with simply clarifying butter, the Indians take this process one step further and cook the clarified butter to a nut brown color which can be stored at room temperature. One implication of the central role of ghee in Indian cooking is that if one wishes to embrace Indian cooking fully, one needs to be prepared to embrace the use of saturated butter fats, which from a purely nutritional point of view may bring back to your diet the saturated animal fats you are avoiding by not eating meat.
The two greatest contributions to British cuisine from the Indian subcontinent are curries and chutneys. This, this book includes an entire chapter to chutneys, which may be made from either fresh or cooked ingredients. My biggest surprises were to find peanuts and cashews in chutney recipes in addition to the expected fruits and spices. In addition to chutneys, there is also a sizable chapter on related pickles, jams, sauces, and gravies. Oddly, there is no chapter on curries or even on the subject of garum masala. There is a brief article on garum masala in the superb appendix, `A-Z General Information', but no in depth discussion of Indian spice culture.
If you take on this book, it will probably be wise to find a good Indian or Pakistani grocery for some of the less common ingredients and to have someone with whom to ask advice on techniques and equipment.
 Good Vedic Vegetarian Cusine May 26, 2000
Steffan Ziegler (Seattle, WA USA)
59 out of 60 found this review helpful
As a Vedic Vegetarian book, it contains no recipes that use garlic or onions. Two vegetables that are staples in other Indian cookbooks, and suprisingly through the substitution of other spice combinations, the recipes do not lack flavor at all.
Some of the dishes are hard to take on, but all are delicious. The information included here is indispensible, not just for the recipies, but for the explaination of countless spices, techniques and ingredients that one often wonders about in other cookbooks, which will often only clarify with an "Available in Indian Groceries" annotation. This book includes a list of actual sources for the spices, should the need arise to obtain black onion seed, and no one in Boseman has it... This lexicon of information makes it possible for one to improvise endlessly from the recipes provided, which I believe, are just samples showing the possibilities.
All in all, the combination of tasty recipes and the voluminous definitions, explainations and sourcing material make this an excellent cookbook, both for the cookbook collector, and the serious home gourmet.
 Sorry for the bad review, Ms. Devi; I tried August 1, 2000
38 out of 73 found this review helpful
After reading all the 5 star reviews I was very excitd about this book, and really wanted to like it. What a Shame! The book is big however bears no resemblence to *good* authenic indian cooking, as an indian and an accomplished cook I can tell you that. The recipes are unimaginative and range between mediocre to pretty bad. If you what a good indian cookbook, I would suggest you go with one of the books by Madhur Jaffrey instead. Much better! Although this book would probable work for you if you are following vedic tradition and avoiding onion, garlic, egg etc. It would work but it wouldn't be tasty. Sorry for the bad review, Ms. Devi; I tried.
first class December 15, 1999
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
the best veggie book there is...bar none. I am american, and my husband is punjabi. He eats only desi food. my in-laws do not speak English...I cook indian food every day and have been for the last 24 years! I make fresh roti almost every night. whenever I need to check on anything as a reference....this is it....the only one. now my in-laws say I cook better than most indian woman....go figure! amazing...and so is this book. I have been waiting for it to come back into print so that i can send it to all my in-laws!-especially to the new members of the family, the younger generation do not know how to cook at all. thank you Yamuna Devi.
A wonderful, but demanding cookbook September 27, 2002
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
As the reviews here show, people either rave about the book or find it tedious. I find it fascinating reading,and if you're interested in learning about this (admittedly small) branch of Indian cooking, this is a good start. Vedic cooking does not use onins, garlic, nightshade vegetables, and has some other restrictions. In some ways, this does make for a blander product, and many of these recipes lack the initial "punch" so many of us are used to in Indian cooking. But the author makes up for it with an extremely varied, almost dizzingyly broad array of ingredients and combinations that are both very exciting and very demanding. The results, for me, have been very nice, but they come at a high price. To put a meal together out of this book is a tremendous undertaking in time and ingredients, even for an experienced Indian cook. The recipes can be extremely intricate and time consuming. The result, however, is fresh, vibrant, and really quite unlike what you may be used to in Indian food.
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