Read Around the World: First Stop- India

Okay, so I’m not travelling to India.  The only trip I’m going on this summer is to Minnesota, which doesn’t quite compare!  However, in honour of that well-known Winnipeg multicultural extravaganza known as Folklorama, let’s ‘visit’ India!  Why not celebrate a country you love, or learn about a country you know little about by seeing what materials the library has to offer.  Let’s start our trip to India and join me as we discover great food, movies, novels and music.  

What would a visit to a new country be without the food? India is known for exotic spices, curries and delectable desserts.  Want to be able to cook your own scrumptious Indian feast?  (Just be sure to invite me over for dinner!).  The library has a great selection of materials on international cooking, and you won’t be disappointed with what the library has to offer on Indian cooking.  Check out How to Cook Indian: More than 500 Classic Recipes for the Modern Kitchen  by Chef Kapoor to learn how to cook traditional Indian dishes such as butter chicken, palak paneer and samosas.  The Big Book of Curries: 365 Mouthwatering Recipes from Around the World contains curry recipes for every taste.  If you’re concerned with healthy eating, Bal Arneson’s Quick and Healthy Indian is the book for you.  And if you want to come home at the end of the day to a mouthwatering meal (like dal or gobi aloo) made with little fuss, check out Anupy Singla’s The Indian Slow Cooker: 50 Healthy, Easy, Authentic Recipes. 

Some of my favorite foreign movies are Indian movies and the following titles won’t disappoint.  The Apu trilogy is a coming of age story about a Bengali boy named Apu and includes Song of the Road, The Unvanquished and The World of Apu.  These films continually make it onto ‘best film’ lists and have influenced many directors worldwide.  Monsoon Wedding is another great Indian movie, directed by Mira Nair, about a family getting ready for the arranged marriage of the daughter.   This movie has drama, dancing, laughter, tears and is one I have watched over and over.  Slumdog Millionaire was made by a British director but was shot in India with Indian cast and crew and is an abolute must-see movie that won several Academy awards including best picture.  Based on the novel Q & A, this is the tale of a young Mumbai boy who is accused of cheating when he knows all the answers on an Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  It’s a thoroughly engaging movie and well worth seeing! 

Some of my favorite Indian movies are bollywood films, which is the term used to describe the Hindi film industry in Mumbai.  The word bollywood merges Bombay (Mumbai’s former name) with Hollywood.  Bride and Prejudice is a fun bollywood remake of Jane Austen’s Pride and Predjudice in which a mother wants to marry off her 4 daughters.    Deepa Mehta is an Indian born Canadian director who has directed many films, including Bollywood Hollywood which is about a Hindi man living in Ontario whose Caucasian girlfriend dies in a freak accident, urging his mother to ask him to find a Hindi wife.  

If you find you really enjoy bollywood movies then you might be interested in learning how to dance bollywood style by checking out the DVD Bollywood Dancing: For Beginners and Advanced.   For bollywood music, check out the sound recordings Bollywood: An Anthology of Songs from Popular Indian Cinema and the Rough Guide to Bollywood.  If you’re more into traditional Indian music, then Traditional Songs and Dances of India or Ravi Shankar’s Spirit of India would be well worth checking out.   

There are many great Indian authors as well.  Vikram Seth’s novels have won him numerous awards and recognition.  An Equal Music is the story of the love affair between a violinist and a pianist, a love affair that resumes even when one of them is married with a child.  Rohinston Mistry’s A Fine Balance is set in Mumbai during a period of unrest and explores the bond between characters of different backgrounds.  This book won the Giller prize and was also an Oprah book pick.  The God of Small Things is the debut novel by Arundhati Roy and took 4 years to write.  It deals with the devastating experiences of fraternal twins and won the Booker prize. 

If you ever decide to travel to India, the library has many great travel books to choose from to help make your trip a success!  There’s a 2011 Eyewitness travel book on India, a Frommer’s India  travel book and Fodor’s Essential India, among others. 

 If you want to learn more about India or ‘travel’ to another country, remember to explore all the materials the library has to offer.  And remember that library staff are always happy to help you in your search!

Theresa

Summertime and the cookin’ is easy

There’s nothing like the mouth-watering aroma of food cooking outdoors. No doubt, barbecuing is one of the best parts of summer. Whether you’re using gas, charcoal or wood, there are recipes and techniques galore to ensure that whatever you’re cooking will taste great.

Ever since humans discovered fire, the debate over the best way to cook has raged. If you’re looking for a good overall approach to grilling, Weber’s Way to Grill: the Step by Step Guide to Expert Grilling by Jamie Purviance is an excellent choice. It covers both gas and charcoal grilling, and has great photographs and advice for both the beginner and more seasoned chef. This book has a wide range of cooking tips and recipes, from smoking a turkey to making the perfect burger.

Barbecuing doesn’t always have to mean meat, and a copy of The New Vegetarian Grill by Andrea Chesman means that the vegetarians at the table won’t be eating only the side dishes. Delicious recipes like Vegetarian Fajitas with Chipotle Sour Cream or Tandoori-Style Vegetable Kabobs will win over even the most dedicated carnivore.

With recipes such as Puerto Rican Pork Shoulder and Australian Lamb on a Shovel you can add some spice to your life and take your taste buds on a trip around the world with Steven Raichlen’s Planet Barbeque!  Using Steven as your guide, experience barbecue from more than 60 countries without leaving your own back yard.

When you want to venture further into the great outdoors, try  Camp Cooking: The Black Feather guide to eating well in the wild by Mark Scriver, Wendy Grater and Joanna Baker. This handy guide not only tells you how to cook, it lists the equipment you will need, and suggests what to bring depending on what type of trip you’re taking, whether it’s canoeing or hiking.

Chef in Your Backpack: Gourmet Cooking in the Great Outdoors by Nicole Bassett is another great choice for outdoor enthusiasts, with many useful tips and tricks to make creative cooking over the campfire easy and fun. And to lighten the weight in your backpack, this title is also available as an ebook that you can download.

For festive al fresco eating, try Katie Brown’s Outdoor Entertaining: Taking the Party Outside. This book does have some recipes for barbecuing, but the main focus is on planning the perfect outdoor party, with many suggestions for themes and decorations.

No matter what you like to eat, there’s a way to grill it. These books will give you a taste of what barbecue has to offer, so dust off those patio lanterns, head on outside, and get grilling!

Lori

Edible Books

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested,” according to Francis Bacon, the English writer and philosopher. Food for thought. A good book like a good meal satisfies an appetite, leaves you nourished and feeds the spirit.
Certainly an author whose books need to be chewed and digested are those of Marcel Proust; his masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past is stuffed with delicious descriptions of food, its preparation by Françoise, the family cook, and sumptuous meals in French restaurants. So much so that a cookbook was published that detailed the foods in Proust’s work about the Belle Epoque. Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker article, Cooked Books, stews on the “presence and propriety of recipes” in literature. He takes his topic seriously and literally, simmering Gunter Grass’ Flounder with capers and white wine, and commenting: “Eating Günter Grass’s flounder was actually like reading one of his novels: nutritious, but a little pale and starchy.”

Characters can be eaten quite literally, like Jonah in the whale, but can also be consumed on a metaphorical level. Marian, the central character in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, moves from the consumer to the consumed in a book stuffed with images of food that sometimes leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Sample the 64 stories set around the daily act of eating in Jim Crace’s Devil’s Larder. Crace’s writing is not for the white bread crowd. In one story a game of strip fondue ends badly with a “gasp of pain. The whiff of sizzling flesh and hair and cheese.” Not too appetizing but a great read.

John Lanchester’s Debt to Pleasure is more to the taste of connoisseurs of fine food and writing. The novel takes the form of a series of seasonal menus that reveal the life story of its narrator Tarquin Winot, a sinister, snobbish gastronome and food critic, launched on  a mysterious journey through France.

 Less filling and easier to digest is the Inspector Maigret series by Georges Simenon which describe the many wonderful classic French dishes prepared for the Inspector by his wife, Mme. Maigret. British author Michael Bond has at least 15 mystery novels featuring undercover French restaurant critic and gourmand, Monsieur Pamplemousse (French for grapefruit) and his dog Pommes Frites.

The addition of recipes to books has proliferated in current times especially after the popularity of Mexican author Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate-perhaps the mother of what I like to call gastro-fiction. Esquivel whips together the exotic flavours of magical realism and Mexican cooking to create a bittersweet story complete with recipes for dishes and home remedies.

Many mystery writers have whipped up successful series characters who switch chef’s hats for sleuth’s caps and serve up a smorgasbord of titles with scrumptious recipes and tantalizing clues. Sample from the menu of some of the reigning queens of the culinary mystery: Diane Mott Davidson’s Tough Cookie ; Joanne Harris’ food trilogy beginning with Chocolat or Lou JaneTemple’s culinary historical, Death du Jour.  

If you have an appetite for foreign food and a bit of spice (no, not that kind!) in your reading, feast  on Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran; included are recipes for some Iranian specialties: stuffed grape leaves, elephant ear pastries, and the title’s pomegranate soup. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ Vietnamese chef reveals a fascinating story in Monique T. D. Truong’s literary repast The Book of Salt. Each chapter in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s aromatic Mistress of Spices is also the story of a spice. Tilo, trained as the mistress of the title, evokes the ancient magical powers of spices to help the customers who visit her spice shop. The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones will appeal to the taste of anyone interested in Chinese cooking, especially ancient cuisine, combining mystery with a dash of history as food writer Maggie McElroy covers a young American-born Jewish Chinese chef opening a restaurant dedicated to cuisine from his grandfather’s memoir about cooking in the Imperial court. If you feel like Italian, order Anthony Capella’s Food of Love for some mouth watering descriptions of native dishes seasoned with a hint of romance and humour or enjoy a leisurely Venetian meal with Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti.
- Tannis
 
 Eat any good books lately?  On April 9,Winnipeg Public Library and the Winnipeg Public Library Board present an event that gives new meaning to the phrases “voracious reader” and “food for thought.” Books2Eat is a festival combining the creative and culinary talents of book lovers, amateur cooks, book artists, culinary students and librarians.