Mangoes & Curry Leaves is one of my favorite cookbooks and I have scores of Indian cookbooks, as I'm sort of a gourmet chef. I wrote a cooking column for a sailing magazine for a couple years and one of my favorite articles was my "Two Ways to Tandoori" which you can read in one of my "Amazon So You'd Like to Guides," if you want. Tandoori chicken is just delicious. Anyway, while I was making the guide, I listed fifty cookbooks from my collection. I have more. I know, I know, one would think a couple books would be enough, but it's sort of an obsession with me, making food taste great and I just love to see how others have done it.

While I was doing the guide, I pulled out all my Indian Cookbooks, had them all stacked around me. Then I decided to pull out all the ones I didn't think I could live without. It came to an even dozen and Mangoes & Curry Leaves was one of the books. The recipes are just divine. I've never been to India, been a lot of places, but never there. Delhi, Bombay, Ganges, names that just ring with adventure. I imagine I'm there every time I cook up something Indian. I can feel the smells as they wrap their delicious flavors all around the kitchen, or galley, if I'm cooking on board the sailboat my husband Dub and I live on half the year. You won't go wrong with this book. Check it out. Check out my other eleven too. Cook up something from India tonight, taste the adventure.

Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne

I cannot imagine anyone writing anything negative about this book...my family and I come from Bangladesh and India and I have tons of Pakistani friends. The depth that the authors have gone into understanding ingredients and the cooking is remarkable. I cannot imagine how they came to know some of those details. Like my neighbor in PA who had written a negative review, I have also Jaffrey's books which i love but Alford and Duguid got into the very essence of real home cooking of the subcontinent. Other authors sometimes focus on party foods while this book advises the readers on what people really eat on a daily basis. The other travel advice is interesting and the photographs gorgeous although i understand the concerns of the Bethlehem, PA reviewer of pictures that are hard to interpret. Just let it go. They still do an even better job with this book than Hot Sour Salty Sweet. The book is great. I'm glad amazon offers it for a lower price than bookstores.

I am a novice American learning to cook Indian style. I have studied enough books to know that sticking curry powder in a melange of stewing vegetables is not really "getting it" in terms of creating an authentic Indian meal. In my search for authenticity, I think Alford & Duguid go a long way in presenting just that, scouring the villages & cities of India.
What a remarkable book! It's terribly interesting, and it has left so many impressions on me! I haven't made all the recipes, but what I've made have been delicious!!!
There is one paneer recipe that calls for 1/2 cup of garlic, minced or crushed (think it's Kashmiri Paneer). I was wondering why I chose it. It was utterly delicious. (I only cook for myself, so I made half a recipe. Another shortcut is to add cubed pre-fried paneer from the local Indian market, if you can get it!) It would break my heart to hear anybody complain about this book, probably, because I gather the authors took pains to put this baby together. One thing:
I think if you make dosas, you really should ferment that batter overnight. What I did when I made dosas was left the bowl sitting on top of my stove; I have a range-light that added a little heat. My batter was appropriately sour the next day, I think!!! Thanks, Naomi and Jeffrey