On 10 October 2015 we bought two apparently new cookbooks at a garage sale, for the princely total sum of $2. They were The Food & Cooking of India and “150 Curries”, apparently too old to be worthy of mention on the web site.

Both books are nicely presented, and the recipes looked different from the Indian recipes that I have used in the past. We tried a few recipes, but gradually the limitations became clear. They're all the same! In particular, for the most part:

• Recipes use at least some whole spices.
• There's a continual use of “bay leaves”. She doesn't describe what she means by this term, but real bay leaves are not used in Indian cooking. It's likely that she means cinnamon leaves, tej patta or similar; this page gives two different spellings in one section:

  Teja Patta (indian Bay Leaves)

  Teja Pata, or Indian Bay leaves are not the same as the Laural Bay or Sweet Bay used in the west. Nor is it is also not the same as the Balinese Bay leaf (Daun Salam) or the West Indian Bay Leaf. Don’t substitute with a Laurel Bay leaf, even if the recipe says to do so. There is no similarity between the two. The best thing to do if you don’t have Teja Pata is to leave it out altogether, or add a little cassia, cinnamon or an extra clove instead.

• She uses a number of other items that are not typical of the Indian food I know. On the other hand, she doesn't use some of the typical ingredients, like curry leaves in southern Indian cooking.
• The quantities are unusual. A typical weight is 675 g, and she measures spices by volume, and many items by count. She's not alone in doing this, but it seems particularly irritating here, particularly the volumes of spices.

My conclusion is the books are written very much for the British market, and are somewhat adapted to British tastes. There's still some good stuff struggling to get out, but you need to read between the lines. I don't regret buying the books, especially at that price, but they're not as good as I had hoped.