book report by m-c

author:	Ruta Kahate
title:	5 Spices, 50 Dishes:
	Simple Indian Recipes Using Five Common Spices
publisher:	Chronicle Books, 2007
illustrations:	photography by Susie Cushner
design:	Benjamin Shaykin
length:	132 pages
page size:	medium (8" wide, 8 ¾" high)

Have you ever been to a wine tasting? The patron selects a small number of bottles around a theme, say, one region in Australia or one kind of purple grape, and then picks five or six bottles that play around with that theme. You taste all six, write notes, and learn, learn, learn. I stopped going to wine tastings precisely because they are so effective; I didn't want to school my palate beyond my pocketbook.

Figuring out a comparable regimen for food is harder. It's not practical to make tiny amounts of five or six versions of the same dish on one night. Inviting thirty friends to supper for full-sized versions would be impractical for me; my house would overflow. I suppose I could make the same dish five or six days in a row, but I'm pretty sure I would be so sick of it by day four that I wouldn't be able to tell whether the later versions were any good or not.

No, to educate your food palate you need a different kind of scheme. Choose a small set of flavors and examine them in depth, singly, combined, in many different kinds of foods.

Ruta Kahate -- pronounced HRROO-tah Ka-HAH-tay, but with those very short Ts that Americans can't say. Ruta Kahate -- http://www.eatseeindia.com/. Ruta Kahate teaches Indian cooking in the San Francisco Bay area and leads foodie tours to India.

Her first book, 5 Spices, 50 Dishes, is intended for people who find Indian cooking, with its thirty and forty spices per dish, intimidating and off-putting. People think, I'd have to buy fifty little bottles of this and that, and what if I didn't like it in the end? Nope, let's have Italian once again.

To such cooks Kahate says, Relax. Start with five spices, several of which you might already have on your shelves: cayenne and turmeric, ground; whole coriander seeds, cumin seeds, and mustard seeds. Then work your way through fifty recipes that are almost all easy to execute and mostly fast. Don't feel you need to serve an all-Indian meal. One dish with rice or store-bought bread plus a green salad makes supper, no big deal. Get in the habit of cooking the dishes full-size so as to have leftovers; Indian food is supremely good the next day or later in the week. When you have company, make two full-sized dishes; you've already cooked cooked them at that scale, so there are no surprises.

The recipes have that immaculate sheen of lessons from a teacher with long years of experience. They've been worked by class after class, the learners, bless their hearts, making every conceivable error for you in advance. Listen to Ruta on the Masala Omelet:

Check after 2 minutes; if the bottom of the omelet is set, flip it over. Brown on the other side, uncovered, over medium heat. Indian omelets are best when browned. This is tricky to achieve without overcooking the eggs -- that's why the omelets are made quickly over medium to high heat.

Not just what, but why.

Just looking at the table of contents for the book makes me grin. The very first section is called "You eat like this every day?" and there follow sections called "My promise to you" and, my favorite, "Before you pick up that pan." Even before we read a single paragraph, we know we're in the hands of a considerate, mindful, ever so slightly sassy teacher.

There follow nine chapters, seven of them setting forth the promised fifty dishes:

1. vegetables	recipes 1-12
2. bean dishes	recipes 13-16
3. beef and lamb	recipes 17-23
4. chicken and eggs	recipes 24-27
5. seafood	recipes 28-34
6. salads and yogurt dishes	recipes 35-43
7. rice and bread	recipes 44-50

And then there are two bonus chapters, one on sweets, one on spiced tea, and based on the two sweets I've tried so far, these chapters are a generous gift indeed.

Roughly half of the recipes are illustrated with Susie Cushner's vivacious photographs. If I ever lose my appetite -- not likely -- all I'll have to do is glance at her photograph of corn with mustard seeds (page 33) to revive myself.

Every recipe begins with an English-language title. Then a short headnote gives information about the dish, what would go with it, what place it has in Ruta's own life. The personal notes are the hardest thing in the world to write, and I often wish authors would give up on them. But then I read Ruta's and I forgive all the other authors for attempting what she does gracefully. To me it's truly interesting that the beef dish on pages 48-49 is the first meat that she, a Hindu Brahmin by birth, ever ate. It's kind of People magazine, but it sure inspired me to cook the dish.

I'm surprised that Ruta, with her keen sense of how long lists of spices pressure home cooks, doesn't always generalize the insight to other ingredients. Black-eyed Peas in a Spicy Goan Curry (pages 40-41) has a list of 16 ingredients with no subdivisions. Vegetables with a Minty Lamb and Rice Stuffinf (pages 52-53), on the other hand, seems much more approachable, even though it has more ingredients, because they're subdivided into stuffing, vegetables, and dressing.

I've been cooking Indian food for nearly half a century, so I thought, rather snobbishly, when I first looked at this book, Oh, this will be fine for somebody just starting out; it's a good primer. Wrong. The lightness of touch, the intelligent adaptations, the sophisticated combinations of flavors are all Ruta's own, culled and refined from a lifetime of careful eating and cooking and imparted in an exacting but gentle voice.

For me, the best thing about the book has been the palate tutoring. I certainly thought I knew those five spices well.

Cayenne is my go-to spice when I want a little hit of hotness without the vinegar taste of hot sauce.

Cumin is the frontmost flavor in both curry powder and chili powder.

Coriander seeds are an essential element in the spiced cider I drink all winter long. (I'm sipping it even as we speak.)

Mustard seeds I use often in Indian cooking but I hadn't singled them out.

And turmeric? I was amazed at Ruta's including turmeric in her chosen five. Isn't turmeric there just for the color?

Well, no, Mary-Claire, turmeric is there for the flavor, and once you disentangle that flavor from the others in curry powder you have a new string to your bow that was there all along, you just didn't notice it.

Take mustard seeds, for instance.

In the recipe for a Simple Cabbage Stir-Fry (page 21), the mustard seeds are whole and used in a tadka at the beginning of the cooking. Ruta heats oil and when it begins to smoke she adds the mustard seeds; after the seeds have stopped popping like tiny popcorn she adds the cabbage and other flavorings.

In the recipe for Squash Raita with Ground Mustard (page 96), the mustard seeds are not popped in oil but instead crushed and added to the yogurt without cooking.

The crushed raw mustard seeds taste different from the fried popped ones. Taste the one, taste the other, learn learn learn.

In other words, 5 Spices, 50 Dishes has begun to provide me with precisely the sort of education that works for food flavors. The process is longer and subtler than sitting down and drinking a flight of mid-range Bordeauxs, but I'm proof that the right method can teach an old dog some good new tricks.

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