The Persians of antiquity were renowned for their lavish cuisine and their never-ceasing fascination with the exotic. These traits still find expression in the cooking of India’s rapidly dwindling Parsi population — descendants of Zoroastrians who fled Persia after the Sassanian empire fell to the invading Arabs. The first book published in the United States on Parsi food written by a Parsi, this beautiful volume includes 165 recipes and makes one of India’s most remarkable regional cuisines accessible to Westerners. In an intimate narrative rich with personal experience, the author leads readers into a world of new ideas, tastes, ingredients, and techniques, with a range of easy and seductive menus that will reassure neophytes and challenge explorers.

With pervading wit and droll sense of humour, Niloufer Ichaporia King tells us what it means to be part of the 7,000-year-old Parsi culture, and how this plays out in a crazy amalgam of India and the West.

The irresistible voice in My Bombay Kitchen, supported by black-and-white family photos and impish line drawings by King’s husband, a research biochemist at UC Berkeley, contextualizes spectacular recipes that take you on a journey whether you actually prepare them or not — but you can with King’s instructions.

She brings alive culinary traditions, passed on through generations of beloved household cooks, mothers and grandmothers.

This cooking may soon disappear. UNESCO projects that only 25,000 Parsis may exist in the world by 2020 — one more reason to grab this extraordinary book and start cooking.

Niloufer Ichaporia
My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking
University of California Press; 1 edition (June 30, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0520249607
ISBN-13: 978-0520249608