Nina Mukerjee Furstenau

Green Chili and Other Impostors by Nina Mukerjee Furstenau is a lovely book that can be utilised in so many ways. You can read it as a history book exploring Bengali cuisine and culture, you can read it as a cooking book with many recipes pulling from Bengali cuisine, Jewish Bengali cuisine, Chinese Indian cuisine, Armenian Bengali cuisine and more, you can read it as an autobiography of one person's journey through their heritage, or a book of curiosities, learning about the 6,000 varieties of rice, or how much the Silver Tips Imperial tea from the Makaibari Tea Estate in Kurseong sold for in 2014.

Nina is a wonderfully generous author. She's warm with her suggestion of substitutions, aware that there are some ingredients that may be difficult or even impossible to get depending on where you are in the world, but she also describes the ingredients used with such love that you'll want to make a real effort to get your hands on items you've never cooked with before. As a cookbook (and this book is so much more than a cookbook), the recipes are straight-forward and well-described.

I enjoyed how thoughtful each chapter was, often focusing on a different food, or cuisine, tracing the movements of potatoes or rice or even tea, and talking openly about colonialisation and racism and appropriation and generosity and politics in ways that feel delicate and eye-opening, and inspire curiosity and learning. There are subjects here that absolutely need to be brought up, but I feel like Nina seasons her writing the way she may her food, with attention and love.

I had to take my time with this. Each chapter does introduce you to amazing threads of information, and sometimes I found myself stopping reading to explore a subject further on Wikipedia. Nina dances from subject to subject, but by the end of a chapter you may find yourself realising that you've learned about 20 different things - cultures, foods, trades, curiosities - and be left reeling with how big the world can be, only to realise you have many more chapters to go! Sometimes it feels like it almost loses focus, but it reminds me of how it can feel to travel somewhere else at times, your senses can't quite keep track, but get to ground back into food again - as you do at the end of most of the chapters with the shared recipes.

I really liked getting to sink my teeth into this review copy. And it does feel like a richly meaty book. You can flit into it for the recipes, or you can go really deep into the chapters, and it's going to be rewarding no matter how you read it. I'd recommend this to so many different readers, obviously people who enjoy cooking Bengali cuisine or want to know more about it, but also people who want to learn more about food heritage, food culture, cultural melting pots and the food stories that come out of them, and anyone who has ever struggled with a heritage that derives from two or more countries, wondering where home is for them, and what home means. This book is its own homecoming, even as it explores the idea of home in the foods we eat and love.… (plus d'informations)

From Northern India to small town Kansas--a culinary memoir that’s a joy to read

Biting Through the Skin combines graceful, almost poetic writing with recipes--mainly from India--and an account of growing up Indian in small town Kansas that is both entertaining and fascinating. When Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s parents first moved their young family from Bengal to the United States they settled in Chicago, but within a year had decided that a small Midwestern town with its close connections was more like home than a multicultural but anonymous big city. While growing up the author longed for a greater association with the land of her birth, which she partially achieved rifling through her mother’s silk saris, and eavesdropping on a visiting guru but her most consistent connection was through food. Living a part American, part Indian life puts the author in a good position to compare the two cultures, and her reflective, deeply thought out musings about their differences make this “food memoir” stand out by encompassing philosophy, religion, linguistics, and even science, along with cuisine.… (plus d'informations)