The Turmeric Trail : Recipes and Memories from an Indian Childhood

Rating:
Summary: Warm memories
Review: As another south indian settled in USA the book brought back very vivid and warm memories of southern india and mumbai. While the recipes are as standard and perhaps lacking in detail in some ways, the stories and memories associated with them are very real and common across many south indian households. The introduction with the grandmother's story brought tears to my eyes - and i also loved the flowing and somewhat natural way of relating food to people (the sindhi lady, sardari vendor) and the strong familial ties to his sister and family that are expressed through food.
That said - indian lifestyle, however, is fraught with tradition and rigid, lot of times oppressive beliefs that are not obvious and very hard to come to terms with, especially if you are a woman. I dont' believe it is within the scope of this book to address those issues but i do believe in some places the author tends to paint life as pinker than it is (arranged marriage, life with in laws, caste/community related issues).

Rating:
Summary: Trite and contrived
Review: Sorry, I hated this. I actually tried out some recipes and they did not turn out well. I am an Indian and cook quite a bit of Indian food. So I was dissapointed. I felt the recipes slanted heavily towards "street food" rather than a good range of Indian cuisine.

I couldnt stand the text - it reads more like one of those travelogues that gives the "foreigners" a romanticised view of India. Blah, blah, blah ... I found the prose heavy-handed and annoying.