Adventures of Novice Cooks

Graduate school was not where Indian students arrived to learn how to cook. But we quickly realized that as we fed our minds with graduate coursework and research, feeding the body needed some basic skills. 

As we stumbled through this (sometimes messy) process we had help. A group of competent cooks from the Indian Students’ Association of Greater Providence put together a cookbook named Indian Cookery. Published around 1971, this book served as a bible for many of us. Like other community-based cookbooks, it was published at a time when few cookbooks had been published for the Indian diaspora, and it predates the first well-known Indian cookbook for the American kitchen, Madhur Jaffery’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973).More than 50 years later, I was visiting my friend and erstwhile roommate Neeru (Mohan) Biswas and her husband Tridib in Toronto. Her copy of Indian Cookery had traveled from Providence to Boston to Toronto, then on to New Delhi and a few other exotic destinations before returning to Toronto. This cookbook triggered so many happy thoughts. First, the memories of all the lovely folk who put it together. Secondly, the help it provided while I was advancing from baby steps to teenage steps in the realm of cooking. Thirdly, the great love with which Neeru had hung on to the cookbook. You can tell which recipes were her favorite – in spite of some of the oil and spice spills that Adobe Acrobat helped erase from the pages

Chandrasekhar, Tridib, Neeru and Meera in Toronto, September 2024