Food book: Dining with the Maharajas - a Thousand Years of Culinary Tradition

By Neha Prasada and Ashima Narain

This plush purple velvet-bound cookbook is, without doubt, the most beautiful one in my collection. Critics could level a charge of "coffee table cookbook" against it, but the book is also practical. Although the recipes - with photos - are given in the silver gilt-edged main book, they're also contained within a smaller, photo-less paperback copy that you're meant to take into the kitchen to cook from, keeping the hardbound volume pristine.

As you can probably guess from the title, the recipes are far more lavish and expensive than the ones most Indians eat on a daily basis. The authors write, "The life in the royal courts of India centred on entertaining. Relationships were forged, deals made and enemies vanquished over a memorable meal. Food was not limited to being a means of sustenance or celebration but also diplomacy and politics … The way to many a ruler's heart was through his stomach … The palace kitchens were allotted massive budgets to ensure superlative cuisines to please even the most exacting of gourmets …

"So competitive was the role of a cook that chefs concentrated on perfecting just one type of dish. There would be a chef who would make only kebabs or a cook who was an expert at making dals … It was from these royal kitchens that the daily bread and butter was transformed into a sophisticated work of art."

The cookbook takes us into palaces, giving their history and showing their interiors before profiling the current royal inhabitants along with photos and recipes of what they eat. Some of the dishes are easy enough to make using ingredients that are readily available in Hong Kong: deep-fried lotus chips, yogurt lamb and bati (plain wheat flour balls). For many other recipes, though, you might have to head straight for the Indian provision shops, which themselves might not have everything you need. Other recipes include melt-in-the-mouth lamb chunks; smoked green gram flavoured with mustard; stuffed lamb cutlets; mixed vegetables with rice; fish-stuffed deep-fried patties; and grilled stuffed chicken.