Hi Olunia:
This book gets a lot of use in my house. I haven’t counted whether there are literally 660 recipes in it, but it has a dazzlingly wide array of recipes from all categories: vegetables, legumes/dals, meats, paneer, rice, breads, salads, raitas, chutneys, etc. etc. There are many well-known favourites, as well as lesser known but fantastic regional dishes. There are a lot of home cooking dishes instead of just focusing on the heavy restaurant favourites as many cookbooks do. In Indian cooking there tends to be a big difference between stereotyped restaurant food (often heavy, limited repertoire, and tailored to customers’ perceptions) and home cooking (none of the above).
My DH likes to cook from this because if you follow the recipes exactly, you get good results.
I have personally cooked from it quite a few times too. I loved that the paneer makhani recipe had the fewest ingredients compared to other sources and yielded spectacular results. (However, for dal makhani I prefer Julie Sahni’s recipe for similar reasons.)
There are a few problems in the book.
One is mis-spelled Indian language common food words, I get it that Hindi/Urdu is not Iyer’s mother tongue, but he grew up in polyglot Mumbai, and shouldn’t have made these mistakes. He even made mistakes in the English spelling of Tamil (his mother tongue) words! But the spelling mistakes don’t change the recipe results and if you don’t know the original word, you won’t notice (shrug).
Another issue is that in a couple of places the cooking times are off. For e.g. in the South Indian black chickpea ‘curry’ (kadala kari), he asks you to pressure cook soaked black chickpeas for one hour - that’s absolutely not necessary. 30 minutes was ample, and even 20 minutes might have been fine.
Another slight problem is that he has a really good list of spice mixes and pastes, but no index of which recipes these are used in. If you have made a large quantity of a mix for e.g. it would have been good to know which other dishes these can be used in. Instead, when you select a recipe, you will see that it may need a particular mix, and go and make it.
660 Curries had been COTM on CH many years ago and there had been a lot of cooking and reviewing. But unless someone archived that discussion, it’s gone.
Overall however, this book is well worth it. Does your family like Indian food? If yes, you will enjoy this book a great deal and never grow tired of it.
