4.0
Monsoon Diary
ByPublisher Description
Shoba Narayan’s Monsoon Diary weaves a fascinating food narrative that combines delectable Indian recipes with tales from her life, stories of her delightfully eccentric family, and musings about Indian culture.
Narayan recounts her childhood in South India, her college days in America, her arranged marriage, and visits from her parents and in-laws to her home in New York City. Monsoon Diary is populated with characters like Raju, the milkman who named his cows after his wives; the iron-man who daily set up shop in Narayan’s front yard, picking up red-hot coals with his bare hands; her mercurial grandparents and inventive parents. Narayan illumines Indian customs while commenting on American culture from the vantage point of the sympathetic outsider. Her characters, like Narayan herself, have a thing or two to say about cooking and about life.
In this creative and intimate work, Narayan’s considerable vegetarian cooking talents are matched by stories as varied as Indian spices—at times pungent, mellow, piquant, and sweet. Tantalizing recipes for potato masala, dosa, and coconut chutney, among others, emerge from Narayan’s absorbing tales about food and the solemn and quirky customs that surround it.
Narayan recounts her childhood in South India, her college days in America, her arranged marriage, and visits from her parents and in-laws to her home in New York City. Monsoon Diary is populated with characters like Raju, the milkman who named his cows after his wives; the iron-man who daily set up shop in Narayan’s front yard, picking up red-hot coals with his bare hands; her mercurial grandparents and inventive parents. Narayan illumines Indian customs while commenting on American culture from the vantage point of the sympathetic outsider. Her characters, like Narayan herself, have a thing or two to say about cooking and about life.
In this creative and intimate work, Narayan’s considerable vegetarian cooking talents are matched by stories as varied as Indian spices—at times pungent, mellow, piquant, and sweet. Tantalizing recipes for potato masala, dosa, and coconut chutney, among others, emerge from Narayan’s absorbing tales about food and the solemn and quirky customs that surround it.
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4.0
“Monsoon Diary is a food-centric memoir about growing up in South India and then coming to the US for college. I have had this book on my shelf for awhile and finally got around to reading it this summer. It made for a good summer/beach read because it was light and had touches of humor PLUS (big plus for me) it had a lot about food in it. There was a recipe with each chapter.”
About Shoba Narayan
SHOBA NARAYAN has written for Travel & Leisure, Gourmet, Saveur, Food & Wine, Newsweek, House Beautiful, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She is a regular guest on NPR’s All Things Considered Weekend and a recipient of the M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing, given by the James Beard Foundation. Narayan graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, which awarded her a Pulitzer Fellowship. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children. Her website is www.shobanarayan.com.
Other books by Shoba Narayan
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