Product 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #349337 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-13
• Released on: 2004-04-13
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Narayan, who grew up in Chennai, India, writes in humorous, tender prose about her family and their love of food. Rituals surrounding food are central to every aspect of life, such as the choru-unnal ceremony of a child's first meal of rice and ghee. When her mother is pregnant with her brother and the women gather to feed her and chew betel, Narayan writes, "As they chewed and their lips and tongue became stained red, their jokes became more risque, their gossip more personal, their bodies more horizontal." Food is intimacy and comfort, and Narayan's book neatly transitions between descriptions of her family's life and the meals that punctuated it. Recipes for staples such as rasam (a bean and rice comfort food) a wonderful recipe for upma (a semolina vegetable stew)-which she serves to a grumpy group of Americans-complement more festive recipes for snacks and meals such as inji curry (a pickle with ginger and tamarind). When Narayan comes to America for a year at Mount Holyoke, she misses her native food but, in a hilarious sequence of events involving two dead goldfish, chances upon a taxi driver from Kerala whose wife feeds her olan, made with pumpkin, black-eyed peas and coconut milk. Narayan's sparkling, insightful narrative makes for a delightful cultural and culinary read.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Weaving together stories from her remarkable life with tasty Indian vegetarian recipes, Narayan offers insights into Hindu culture and custom and contrasts her upbringing with life in her adopted America. Born and raised near Madras as a Brahmin in caste-conscious south India, she was part of an extended family of wonderful eccentrics. Her portraits of small-town life include the "iron man": no body builder, he went from house to house ironing clothes with the aid of a coal-fired iron. Shunning bottled milk, Narayan drank hers squirted straight from the udder to her mouth. Food and the enjoyment of it were central to her family, so when Narayan won a fellowship to study in America, the only way the family would let her travel was for her to prepare a proper banquet for them. Reaching New England, she immersed herself in American life without giving up her vegetarianism. Following tradition, her family arranged for their daughter to marry an appropriate mate, and to her surprise, her family chose well. This is a delightful, stereotype-shattering memoir. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
'Narayan's sparkling insightful narritave makes for a delightful cultural and culinary read' --Publisher's Weekly

Customer Reviews

Delicious Read
Never mind where you were when you experienced the 'big events' of your life, instead, can you remember what were you eating?

Shoba Nayaran remembers, and delivers those landmark flavors in print. From the comforting memories of her childhood, to the abuse suffered under her first graduate program, to her wedding and subsequent adjustment to married life, Shoba Narayn writes about each significant life event with an even hand, a light sense of humor, and perfectly chosen recipes to accompany every part of her story.

This isn't your traditional cookbook, nor is it a plodding, self-aggrandizing autobiography. It is instead a book that moves along at a fast pace, giving us glimpses of intensely personal moments, but then quickly, breezily moving along to the next topic, the next recipe, the next memory. The reader is never bogged down in this parsimonious trip down memory lane. Instead, we receive exactly what is promised: a memoir with food. (and succulent food at that!)

An excellent read, a fast read, a delicious read.

monsoon diary
Before reading this book I knew little about Indian culture. I feel like this book was very well writeen, though the description was dull at some parts. Shoba Narayan touched on every aspect of Indian culture, from train rides (one of my favorite parts of the book) to summers spent with grandparents, to the marketplace, family names and importance, traditions, and a special emphasis on food. This book was delicious to read and made me wish I had tasted the food Shoba describes so scrumptiously. I would recommend this book to someone interested in light, informative reading, with an empty stomach.

A Memoir with Recipies
Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipies is a well written book that not only involves your mind, but it also taps into your sense of taste, touch and smell. I was never that interested in the Indian culture, but after reading Shoba Narayan's book, and having my mind and senses traped in the detailed writing, I couldnt help but become fascinated with the culture I formally knew nothing about.
Narayan is a gifted writer with the talent of detail. Every chapter was written in order to make the reader feel like they were experiencing first hand the life she was describing. Whether is was the description of her childhood, surroundings, education or traditional meals- which at the end of every chapter offered up a DIY recipie guide- the author makes the reader beg for more insight on a culture they may or may not have known about prior to reading the book. Narayan's relation of food to everyday life is a different take on story telling that does a good job of involving the reader more into the story. Also the authors' take on cultural differences between South Asia and the United States is an insightful comparison of a culture we know all so well, and one we might not know about.
Monsoon Diary is a well written and consuming book filled with entertaining stories and helpful recipies.