Shoba Narayan's refreshing honesty gives this aromatic <i >bouquet garni</i> an aroma that is mouth-watering.
Enter the heavy hand of a course in creative writing at a US university and an editor who demands that customs and cooking styles be annotated for an American audience. This occasionally damages the freshness of her stories, turning them into something like a tin of canned memory. But there are some delightful ones—her thrifty family, horrified at the waste of mangoes, spend the Thanksgiving weekend in Florida (when the rest of the country is rolling out satisfied apres-turkey burps) in a frenzy of collecting and pickling the fruit. Her father’s special way of making coffee and her mother’s child-like delight at baking an eggless cake—for these alone, the book deserves to be read.