The Indian Grocery Store Demystified : A food lover's guide to all the best ingredients in the traditional foods of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

Rating:
Summary: disappointed
Review: Although this book has a lot of information, it has one really major flaw...the way in which it is organized. Many of the items are listed in the index and in the chapters under their English name, not their Indian name. Because of this, you cannot just look up an unfamiliar word, and find it's meaning. For example... if you wanted to look up the word "jeera", which means, cumin seed, you would not find it in the index as "jeera",you would have to look under the english term, "cumin seed". To me it seems that it is the Indian terms you would want to be looking up in most cases. The index should have included both the Indian and English term, so that you can look it up EITHER WAY. Although this book has lots of information, you would honestly be better of buying a cookbook that includes a glossary of ingredients that are listed as their INDIAN name, and you would save yourself a lot of time.

Rating:
Summary: Unusual ingredients are explored and shopping tips included
Review: An excellent reference for cooks just venturing into the cuisines of different regions. Indian Grocery Store Demystified provides over 700 entries and 200 illustrations, anecdotes about ingredients and cultural and culinary backgrounds. Unusual ingredients are explored and shopping tips included. Unique in scope and presentation.

Rating:
Summary: Unusual ingredients are explored and shopping tips included
Review: An excellent reference for cooks just venturing into the cuisines of different regions. Indian Grocery Store Demystified provides over 700 entries and 200 illustrations, anecdotes about ingredients and cultural and culinary backgrounds. Unusual ingredients are explored and shopping tips included. Unique in scope and presentation.

Rating:
Summary: When you're ready to go beyond the cookbook
Review: I've been a slavishly devoted fan of Indian food since 1990, and in the process have managed to become a reasonably accomplished cook. But while there are a host of amazing cookbooks out there that have given me my repetoire, I had not been able to go 'beyond the cookbook' until I got "The Indian Grocery Store Demystified". Beforehand, my visits to the Indian market were very rewarding in that I could identify all the ingredients I needed for my recipes, but I was left with no explanation of what all that other STUFF could be used for. This book helped me to recognize all the wonderful products available, and how they could be used to leap beyond the recipe pages, and actually construct dishes and menus of my very own. Thanks to Linda Bladholm, I am less of a book-taught hobbyist working endlessly to perfect my craft, and more of an intuitive home chef creating satisfying dishes inspired by products that formerly left me puzzled and intimidated. A great resource to anyone who wants to encompass the whole of Indian home cooking, not just a handful of recipes.

Rating:
Summary: When you're ready to go beyond the cookbook
Review: I've been a slavishly devoted fan of Indian food since 1990, and in the process have managed to become a reasonably accomplished cook. But while there are a host of amazing cookbooks out there that have given me my repetoire, I had not been able to go 'beyond the cookbook' until I got "The Indian Grocery Store Demystified". Beforehand, my visits to the Indian market were very rewarding in that I could identify all the ingredients I needed for my recipes, but I was left with no explanation of what all that other STUFF could be used for. This book helped me to recognize all the wonderful products available, and how they could be used to leap beyond the recipe pages, and actually construct dishes and menus of my very own. Thanks to Linda Bladholm, I am less of a book-taught hobbyist working endlessly to perfect my craft, and more of an intuitive home chef creating satisfying dishes inspired by products that formerly left me puzzled and intimidated. A great resource to anyone who wants to encompass the whole of Indian home cooking, not just a handful of recipes.

Rating:
Summary: A Rosetta Stone for My Vindaloo
Review: Though I've enjoyed Indian cuisine for many years, my first kafkaesque foray into a local Indian grocer ended with my newly acquired rice steamer (thanks again Simon!) gathering dust in its original box for the next three months. But after arming myself with the appropriately titled "Indian Grocery Store Demystified", I feel ready to cross the Rubicon and try my hand at a Machhli Ka Bhujna. Linda Bladholm's guide is an indespensible and comprehensive culinary resource for understanding the wide variety of ingredients requisite to Indian cooking. Each ingredient is described in exacting detail, and Bladholm adds suggestions on their preparation, examples of how each ingredient is typically used in Indian cooking, and her own recommendations for particular brands. The text is peppered throughout with a bit of history and interesting facts about Indian culture. The appendix includes recommended equipment, cooking methods, and a handful of basic recipes. It boasts some nifty sketches to boot (a particularly noteworthy icon is the Gulab Jamun on p. 183, which my untrained eye at first mistook for an Egg McMuffin). Five stars for the inspiration I've been needing to get back into the kitchen with my tamarind paste and garam masala.

Rating:
Summary: A Rosetta Stone for My Vindaloo
Review: Though I've enjoyed Indian cuisine for many years, my first kafkaesque foray into a local Indian grocer ended with my newly acquired rice steamer (thanks again Simon!) gathering dust in its original box for the next three months. But after arming myself with the appropriately titled "Indian Grocery Store Demystified", I feel ready to cross the Rubicon and try my hand at a Machhli Ka Bhujna. Linda Bladholm's guide is an indespensible and comprehensive culinary resource for understanding the wide variety of ingredients requisite to Indian cooking. Each ingredient is described in exacting detail, and Bladholm adds suggestions on their preparation, examples of how each ingredient is typically used in Indian cooking, and her own recommendations for particular brands. The text is peppered throughout with a bit of history and interesting facts about Indian culture. The appendix includes recommended equipment, cooking methods, and a handful of basic recipes. It boasts some nifty sketches to boot (a particularly noteworthy icon is the Gulab Jamun on p. 183, which my untrained eye at first mistook for an Egg McMuffin). Five stars for the inspiration I've been needing to get back into the kitchen with my tamarind paste and garam masala.

Rating:
Summary: Very Good Guide to Your Local Indian Strip Mall Grocery
Review: `The Indian Grocery Store Demystified' by book designer and illustrator, Linda Bladholm is an exposition of ingredients with a very nice little twist which saves it from being a poor man's `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients'. While Cost's classic book deals with the serious culinary details of a great many basic ingredients, Ms. Bladholm's book, as suggested by her title, is much more pointedly directed at the shopper's experience in your typical strip mall Indian market.

The author adds appeal and charm to her book by opening it with a visit to her own local mom and pop run Indian grocery store. The store in question was just a bit better organized and stocked than my own favorite Filipino run store in southern New Jersey, but all the familiar staples were there, if not in all the familiar places.

The device of providing a guided tour of an Asian market is reinforced by mentioning all the major brand names for staples such as rice, noodles, sauces, oils, and spice mixes, with opinions by the author of which may be the preferred brands. While I found a few misstatements, such as describing a gluten free flour as `general purpose' (general purpose flours by definition have 10% to 12% gluten producing proteins), and I missed some possible warnings against Texmati rice as a less than useful substitute for Basmati rice, I believe the advice and information in this book is a really great supplement to other books on Asian ingredients with a more scholarly bent.

By far the biggest weakness of the book is the difference in quality between the promise of `over 400 illustrations of ingredients' and the quality of those illustrations. The illustrations in the book are all small black and white line drawings easily fitting into an inch square area with lots of the pictures giving no sense of the kind of thing they are depicting. The little picture of ginger certainly looks like the ginger with which I am familiar, but the picture of the related galangal rhizome does little to assure me that I would be able to use that picture to pick it out from bins of produce labeled in Chinese characters. These poor illustrations give the lie to the claim that this is a `Take It With You' guide, in that it is dealing with a guide to items which may all be labeled in not only a foreign language, but in a script we are simply not used to interpreting. The very clever chapter headings of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalong and Korean ideograms for food categories (with English translations) do nothing to help the situation.

Note that unlike many other books on Asian ingredients, this book has few recipes using these ingredients. This is not necessarily a weakness, as it means that almost all the space in the book is dedicated to the book's principle topic, the groceries. And, much of this space is dedicated to subjects which purely culinary books may not touch such as teas and medicinal herbs and spices. This is probably not the best book on these subjects, but treating these topics enhances the treatment of the book's primary metaphor, the Indian grocery store, as they do, in fact, appear in Indian grocery stores.

The short appendix on cooking methods and utensils is not too helpful. These will be of little value if your Asian store has a good selection of cooking utensils.

This book is great if you find yourself living within easy shopping distance of a good Indian market. The book also useful if you plan to order lots of Indian groceries over the Internet, as the recommended brands gives one some assurance they are not buying sawdust. The book is less valuable for the culinary generalist, who has no special interest in Asian or Indian cuisine, especially in that the book includes no bibliography. For those readers, Bruce Cost's book mentioned above is far superior a source.