Vegetarian India

Cover image courtesy Knopf, copyright 2015

India has different traditional vegetarian cuisines distributed across the regions of the entire subcontinent, from the Himalayan peaks in the north to the tropics of the south. "This is the wonder of Indian food--its specificity to each state, each town, each community," writes Madhur Jaffrey in her latest cookbook. "It is these very regional foods that I wanted for this book, as that is where vegetarian India is at its most glorious. I am equally interested in how people in different Indian communities eat--their eating habits and their menus--as these offer true glimpses into the variety of vegetarian worlds within India."

Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking (Knopf) is out this month. Madhur has written several cookbooks--those concerning India steadily progress from the food of her hometown, Delhi, to other parts of the country. She began cooking when she was studying drama at RADA in London (acting is a second career) and missed certain foods from home: mangoes and litchis, curries, vegetable dishes, freshly made chapatis, samosas, and dals. For this book, she went beyond into areas of India she's less familiar with. "India is a vast nation, about the size of Europe, with as much variation between the cuisines of the different states as there is between the foods in the countries of Europe," she explains. From her Greenwich Village apartment, she traveled to India a few times to collect material, driving from town to town.

"My first trip was to my home region, including trips to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Bengal, as well as to Bombay [Mumbai] and the western state of Gujarat. The next two trips were to areas that I knew less well, in South India, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. This meant going right across India from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, a good 645 miles, with many productive detours along the way. Driving on the roads, with every manner of traffic, from camels to bullock-carts to overcrowded, careening buses, was always painfully slow but also generous in allowing for many delicious food stops."

Madhur wrote Vegetarian India as a response to the comments she hears most often from her readers: that Indian food takes so long to make, it's complicated, requires several steps, and has too many ingredients. Here, she includes recipes that take less time with simplified cooking techniques. She's reduced the number of spices. There are still some items that require a visit to an Indian shop, like fresh curry leaves and ground, roasted cumin seeds. 

For those who haven't cooked Indian before, there are many accessible recipes to start with. Onion fritters. Roasted cauliflower with Punjabi seasonings. Crisp okra fries dusted with chili powder, turmeric, and chickpea flour. Grilled portobello mushrooms flavored simply with green chilies, lime juice, and salt. Spinach stir-fried with garlic, cumin, and fenugreek seeds. Potatoes from Goa studded with mustard seeds and refreshed with green chilies and cilantro. "You don't have to make every dish Indian," she says. "Make just two things, or one, to serve with the rest of your meal." On a busy weeknight, she often makes a simple dal, rice, a vegetable dish, and some yogurt relish.

Bombay Sandwiches (Toasties)

"These sandwiches are a newish addition to Bombay street food," Madhur writes. "The sandwich-wallah today sits with other snack vendors, with his grilling cage held over an open fire. He is making India's version of a toasted sandwich, only it has many more ingredients: sweet peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and the all-important green chutney, which is what makes the sandwich Indian." Have them with a cup of hot tea, or for lunch with a soup or salad. Make the toasties using a panini/sandwich maker or a frying pan. Serves 2. 

Ingredients

2 waxy potatoes (about 8 oz.), freshly boiled, cooled, and peeled (do not refrigerate)

2 medium tomatoes

1/2 large green or red pepper

1 medium onion 

butter

4 large slices of your favorite bread

salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons Green Chutney (see below)

2 slices of cheese, such as cheddar

Directions

Cut each of the potatoes lengthwise into 5 ovals. Discard the rounded outer pieces. Slice the tomatoes, discarding the top and bottom slices. Cut off the top and bottom of the pepper and remove all the seeds. Cut the pepper into thin, long slices. Peel the onion and cut into fine rings.

Butter the slices of bread. Working with just two, arrange as many potato slices on them as will fit easily. Dust lightly with salt and pepper. Put as many of the tomato slices as will fit on top of the potatoes and dust lightly with salt and pepper. Top with the pepper slices and onions. Drizzle the chutney over the top. Put the cheese over the chutney. Top with the reserved bread slices and press down.

Use a sandwich maker, or set a frying pan over medium heat. When hot, melt 1 tablespoon of butter in the center, then place the two sandwiches on top of it. Keep pressing down on them with a spatula until the underside is reddish gold and the cheese has melted. Turn carefully, add a little more butter, and toast the second side. Remove the sandwiches, cut into triangles.

Green Chutney (Hari Chutney)

"This is the simplest version of the green chutney that all northern Indians eat in their homes," she writes. "It is used with snack foods and as a dip for fritters. Being a fresh chutney, this keeps for only a few days, though it can be frozen. It is hot and sour and totally unlike any preserved chutney." Makes about 1 cup. 

Ingredients

1 good-sized bunch fresh cilantro

1 tablespoon lime juice

2-3 fresh hot green chilies, sliced into fine rings

a 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and finely chopped

1 tablespoon plain yogurt

1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions

Cut off the leaf-free stalks of the cilantro. Wash and drain the remaining stalks and leaves. You should have 1 1/2 well-packed cups. Chop well.

Put the lime juice in your blender first, followed by the chilies, then the ginger, yogurt, and 4 tablespoons of water. Blend, then add the chopped cilantro. Whiz to a smooth paste. Pour the chutney into a small bowl, add the salt, and mix it in. 

Cabin Porn

Images courtesy Little, Brown and Company and Cabin Porn

Tech entrepreneur Zach Klein's Cabin Porn (Little, Brown and Company) began as a Tumblr blog created by a group of friends to inspire their own homebuilding. As they collected more photos, other builders began to submit images of their own cabins, shacks, tipis, huts, prefabs, yurts, and sheds. The site also includes pictures of structures on his own property in upstate New York's rural Sullivan County.

Arctic Ocean near Senja Island, Norway.

For the book, Klein selected more than 200 shelters located in the U.S. and around the world from Cabin Porn's archives. While many follow in pioneer traditions of one- or two-room cabins of logs, stone, or milled wood conforming to regional styles and environment, there are also contemporary and sleek residences. They share a commonality of being based on sustainable design. 

His property is called Beaver Brook, named after the tributary that runs through it. It's a 55-acre woodland preserve in Barryville, about 100 miles northwest of NYC, that's grown into a community of like-minded people intent on developing their architectural and homesteading expertise. Residents opt for a spot in the bunkhouse or camp. There's an annual design-and-build workshop offered through their school and an artist residency. 

"I needed a remote piece of land where anything was possible," Klein writes. "I'd spent six years in the city building online communities and now I wanted to build one offline. Specifically, a place for a bunch of friends to be outdoors, somewhere we could be less preoccupied by our professions and more reliant on each other as we practice new skills together. I imagined a landscape nestled with shelters we would make ourselves without any previous experience. My search began in upstate New York. I was looking for a place where the locals wouldn't mind our experiments with architecture, assembling what would surely look like a commune. The property had a dirt road cutting through a stand of shagbark hickories, leading to a simple shed-style cabin with no electricity or plumbing that sat high above a brook feeding back down to the Delaware. Along the banks of this brook, century-old eastern white pines, known as the sequoias of the East, tiled at gravity-defying angles."

Cottage on an island near Nora, Sweden.

The Sunset House in West Virginia was built by artist/designer Lilah Horwitz and photographer/builder Nick Olson using recycled windows from garage sales, restoration places, and antique markets. The lumber was repurposed from a barn on the property. The owners say their home was designed to experience the changing light throughout the day in an interior space.

Lighthouse keeper's house in the Mokohinau Islands, New Zealand.

In addition to the photographs from the archives, there are ten cabin features with stories by Steven Leckart and photography by Noah Kalina. "How to Craft an Off-Grid Bunkhouse" profiles the Deer Isle Hostel, Deer Isle, Maine. The builders imitated the gabled dormers and overhanging second story of American colonial architecture, modeled on the Boardman House. It's a sustainable homestead with a dwelling large enough to accommodate several travelers. 

Yurt along the Silk Road, China. 

For those considering building their own small retreat, Cabin Porn empowers people to create more fulfilling places, based on simple construction with the primary focus on location and setting--whether in the mountains, woods, or by the sea. 

Ship cabin on the coast of British Columbia.

The shelters are divided into chapters including: backcountry, fixer-uppers, rustic, purpose-built, treehouses, modern, earthen, salvaged, and geometric. Many of the cabins were originally built as game lookouts, ranger houses, outposts, fishing and hunting cabins, and rustic observatories.

Beaver Brook bunkhouse.

Lila

Cover image courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, copyright 2015

Marilynne Robinson's new novel, Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a companion to her earlier novels set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa--Gilead and Home--taking place in the rural Midwest of the 1950s (all freestanding and not meant to be read in any order). The books have loosely connected story lines comprising a narrow set of characters: two families are of interest in the town of Gilead, the Ameses and the Boughtons, each having generations of Protestant preachers. While the narrator of Gilead is the Reverend John Ames, and Home delineates the history of the two families from the point of view of the Boughtons, Lila continues the Gilead story from the perspective of the title character, John's wife, a former drifter.

Exploring theological questions in her writing, Marilynne often delves into the complexities of faith, grace, and doubt. Religion is interwoven with an examination of human nature and its contradictions--fear, joy, violence--essentially Lila is a love story, a fusion between the very different characters John and Lila. John has had a placid, somewhat isolated existence with deep roots in the town of Gilead as its Congregationalist preacher while Lila, neglected as a child, was rescued (or kidnapped) from her migrant household by a homeless woman named Doll, a fierce surrogate mother with the one possession of a knife. Doll and Lila fall in with a group of itinerant workers that "walk south ahead of the weather, walk north in time for the crops." After Doll disappears, Lila separates from them, and on her way to Sioux City notices an abandoned shack at the edge of Gilead and settles there. She goes from place to place in the countryside or walks into town, asking at houses for a day's work. 

Lila wanders into John's church one Sunday, and thereafter attends often even though the services are alienating for her, being nonreligious. She steals a Bible, finding that she's puzzled and disconcerted by it. "Since she is an outsider, without the assumptions that Christians bring to the text, she reads it as she might any book," says Marilynne. "At the same time, it marks the difference between herself and the world she has entered, and this intensifies her curiosity." She's converted to the faith but her skepticism of it remains. 

Gilead is a locality, but it's more of a transition point between Lila's old nomadic life with Doll and the new one with John and the close-knit community she crosses into as a stranger. She carries the knife with her: the past is always there, connected and remembered, and she prefers its transience and wildness to what she has--stability and the ordinary. Lila raises speculations about what becomes of those who live their lives outside of the sheltering and protective structures of faith and domesticity. In that way, it circles back to Housekeeping, Marilynne's first novel.

An excerpt:

     He never asked her another question about Doll, even when he gave her back that knife. The morning after she mentioned it, it was just lying there on the breakfast table between the cream pitcher and the sugar bowl, the blade closed into the handle, looking harmless enough. She'd left it there. Seemed like he might want to know where it was, until he knew her a little better. Doll had whetted the blade till it was sharp as a razor and a little worn down, the polish gone off the edge of it. When Lila was alone, she opened it. Doll's patience and her dread were all worked into that blade. Doll thinking her thoughts, working away at her knife, making it sharp as it could be. Never you mind. Then that one night she said, "Better you take it. Wash it down good, and hide it when you get a chance. Don't you never use it unless you just have to."

     It was the only thing Doll had to give her, too good to be thrown away and much too risky to keep, but what else could she do? It had a handle made of antler, shaped just enough to feel right in her hand, smooth and stained with all the hands that had held it. Doll never was the first one to own anything, and she wasn't the last, either, if she could help it. There was always something to trade for, even if it was only a favor of some kind, and everything came with a story about the woman who got it from a fellow who stole it from somebody else, which wasn't really stealing, since she never used it, and he knew she took it from a cousin's house when he was dead, and he had brothers, so she had no right to it, but he felt bad anyway, so he was selling it cheap.

     There were things you just had to respect, and that knife was one of them. Sometimes a stranger would settle himself at the fire, sitting on his heels the way folks do when they might want to move quick, and they'd study him to see what was at his back, what he carried with him, which was nothing at all and could be anything at all, like a shifting of the wind. And sometimes he had that Heck, I wouldn't harm a fly! look that made Doane glance at Arthur, and then there would be the long, careful business of sending him on his way, meaning no offense, since he looked like the kind who might want to take offense, given the slightest chance. Snakes, knives, strangers, darkening in the sky--you felt some things with your whole body. What they might mean. It could be they were on their way to do harm elsewhere and you just saw them pass by, but how could you know? Maybe twenty people had owned that knife and only one or two had done any hurt with it. A wound can't scar a knife. A knife can't weary with the use that's been made of it. Still.

***

Lila is longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize and won the 2014 NBCC Award for Fiction. Marilynne teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. 

The World on a Plate

Cover image courtesy and copyright Penguin, 2015

London food writer and Guardian Cook editor Mina Holland's first book, The World on a Plate (Penguin), is a culinary travel guide with accessible recipes from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Introductory essays to each country delve into geography and history, woven into the cuisine background. The idea is for readers to be able to sample global cuisines in their homes. Her travel memories and anecdotes place recipes in context--she's visited most of the countries she writes about, exploring cultures through their foods. The recipes themselves are those most closely associated with each country or region. "It's the intersection of geography and climate and people and culture," says Mina, speaking to what these cuisines have in common. "And it's the stories behind these recipes that really interest me. A dish feels much more charged with poignancy when you know who has cooked it and where it has come from." 

A recipe for gazpacho contributed by chef José Pizarro from his book, Seasonal Spanish Food, included in the section on Andalucía. As José comments, he always has a jug of gazpacho in the fridge: it's the perfect light, cooling meal during 104-degree summers.

2 and 1/4 pounds very ripe tomatoes

2 scallions, sliced

1/4 small cucumber

1/2 garlic clove

1 tbsp sherry vinegar

3-5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Put all the vegetables and the vinegar into a food processor. Then, with the motor running, slowly add the oil through the top. If the soup is too thick, add a little water to thin it out. Chill for 4 hours. Just before serving, add salt and pepper and adjust the vinegar balance if necessary.  

Outline

Jacket design by Strick&Williams, copyright 2014. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The narrator of Outline, Rachel Cusk's new novel (FSG), travels as one of a group of visiting writers to teach a creative writing class in Greece. Her social encounters, as she flies from London to Athens, are paraphrased mini-narratives woven together: seminars, meeting people for dinner, boat rides. The narrator herself is sketchy, a hazy outline shaped and filled in by her responses to others' retelling of stories and experiences--she rarely speaks, mostly listens, questions, and observes. We gather she's a divorced writer who lives in London with her two sons. Her name, Faye, isn't mentioned until three-quarters of the way through. Events take place over a few oppressively hot summertime days. 

She goes swimming with her seatmate aboard his boat, a Greek elderly gentleman she meets on the plane over, who she refers to as "my neighbor," the basis of the first of a series of conversations Faye has with other people which form the substance of the book. These dialogues are a contrast of life fictions, storytelling in one-sided discussions that progress through an array of colleagues, strangers, friends, acquaintances, and students. "Human beings have an amazing gift for narrative when it comes to themselves, to the story of themselves," says Rachel. "And this is something that I've listened to an awful lot as a teacher [creative writing at Kingston University, London]. So I suppose for me the sound of that--how people sound when they speak and how, in fact, formally correct they are, how artistically correct they are in the ways that they narrate their lives is something that I very much wanted to sort of replicate." 

Rachel shares basic life details with her narrator (English, novelist, divorced). The novel blurs the boundary between autobiography and fiction, incorporating the techniques of memoir and essay. "I've always kept close to my personal sources, for artistic reasons," she says. "I've wanted to serve the reality I know. For me, writing and living are the same thing, or they ought to be." Outline centers on preoccupations concerning the nature of relationships, associations between narrative and identity, point of view, truth, and reality versus illusion. 

An excerpt:

     For a while the two of us watched the family on the other boat, across the bright water. I said that when my sons were the ages of those two leaping boys, they were so intimate it would have been hard to disentangle their separate natures. They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning to the moment they closed them again. Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told that it was a sacred prop in the ongoing make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element. And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them--I can't even recall which one it was--stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist. 

     I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living. Without their shared story, the two children began to argue, and where their playing had taken them away from the world, making them unreachable sometimes for hours at a time, their arguments brought them constantly back to it. They would come to me or to their father, seeking intervention and justice; they began to set greater store by facts, by what had been done or said, and to build the case for themselves and against one another. It was hard, I said, not to see this transposition from love to factuality as the mirror of other things that were happening in our household at the time. What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy: it was as though everything that had been inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement. There seemed to be so much of it, because what had been invisible was now visible; what had been useful was now redundant. Their antagonism was in exact proportion to their former harmony, but where the harmony had been timeless and weightless, the antagonism occupied space and time. The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse. And what is astonishing is how much detail it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it. They were struggling to free themselves from one another, yet the very last thing they could do was leave one another alone. They fought over everything, disputed ownership of the most inconsequential item, were enraged by the merest nuance of speech, and when finally they were maddened by detail they erupted into physical violence, hitting and scratching one another; which of course returned them to the madness of detail again, because physical violence entails the long-drawn-out processes of justice and the law. The story of who had done what to whom had to be told, and the matters of guilt and punishment established, though this never satisfied them either; in fact it made things worse, because it seemed to promise a resolution that never came. The more its intricacies were specified, the bigger and realer their argument grew. Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right, and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them. And I realized eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth anymore, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

This Thing Called Literature

Cover image courtesy and copyright Routledge 2015

This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (Routledge) is written for people starting literary studies at college or university, or anyone who has an interest in fiction, poems, short stories, or plays. It's the third co-authored book by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, professors of English at the University of Bristol and the University of Sussex, UK, respectively. The book contains a series of chapters based on the three activities involved in studying literature--reading, thinking, and writing. The writing section includes creative writing and writing short fiction. An essay chapter goes into detail with tips on how to prepare, plan, structure, revise, and finish an academic essay. The middle section focuses on thinking critically about literature, and the reading section covers all the major literary forms.

"In a sense it's very simple: we want to teach people to read," write the authors. "To get the most out of a literary work you need some strategies, some techniques--some ways of reading, ideas about where to start, a critical vocabulary or set of terms, and a certain awareness of the rhetorical resources that writers use. It's quite a common experience for someone to enjoy reading a novel or poem, a story or a play, to find it interesting and even inspiring, but not really to know quite what to make of it, to be uncertain about how to think or talk about it, how to analyze the work in an informed and a formal way. In this book we try to help students and others get a sense of where to start with a literary text--and then where to go from there."

The book seeks to open up texts through discussion of several examples that show how to write about a poem, play, or story. It also presents the idea of creative reading, or ways of reading that are rigorous, careful, attentive to historical context--being mindful of specific denotations, connotations, and nuances of words, and so on. A kind of double reading that recognizes a work's meaning, as well as its linguistic and rhetorical features, its literary form: what the text says and how it says it. "Reading well, or creatively, entails not just noticing what other readers might be expected to notice, but also adding something of your own--taking a path or flight across the poem that involves new connections, new resonances, new possibilities."

Can't and Won't

Can't and Won't cover design: Charlotte Strick, copyright 2014. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Many of Lydia Davis's stories are brief and formally innovative. They're categorized in various ways--flash fiction, anecdotes, essays, aphorisms--and often compared to poetry with their construction, punctuation, and line breaks. "My dedication is really to prose," Lydia says. "I cross the line into poetry, but I would have had to be writing poetry from the beginning and reading mostly poetry to consider myself a poet. My lineage is with prose, fiction." Her most recent collection of short stories is Can't and Won't (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). 

Lydia teaches at SUNY Albany and is a translator of Proust and Flaubert. She's the author of one novel and seven story collections, and is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

Her short shorts are compressed into just one or two lines, "Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before," runs "Bloomington." Mundane, everyday routine details are a primary focus in the stories, taken out of their normal context and fictionalized with absurd and humorous escalations of irritations, conflicts, and slights. In "The Language of the Telephone Company" she exploits corporate copy as found text, "The trouble you reported recently / is now working properly." The most extended piece in Can't and Won't is 29 pages long. 

The 122 stories in the collection consist of observations and musings, without narrative scenes between characters, and the characters are often only pronouns caught up in minor activities and events or in contemplation and memory. Some are tagged with the word dream and are selected fragments of Lydia's "night dreams and dreamlike waking experiences," as well as those of her friends. There are stories from Flaubert, anecdotes drawn from the novelist's letters, likely encountered during her translation of Madame Bovary.

The part about the cover: 

Charlotte Strick is the designer of the Can't and Won't cover, which made The New York Times Book Review's list of best book covers of 2014. She is the co-director of Strick&Williams, a design studio focused on the arts, education, publishing, and nonprofits, the art editor of the Paris Review, and former art director of the trade paperback line at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A graduate of Parsons School of Design, she lives in Brooklyn. View more of her work on her website. 

"Can't and Won't is the fourth book by Lydia Davis that I've had the privilege of working on," says Charlotte. "I've become a bigger fan with each new title, not just because of Lydia's original way of telling a very short story (sometimes just one sentence) but also because her particular use of language offers up so many little gifts for her readers--and for this devoted book jacket designer."

Commenting on what defines a jacket design as successful, she adds, "A good cover should be visually arresting and true to the feel and content of the book; it should also, ideally, look like nothing else."

An excerpt from "I'm Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little More Comfortable."

A man is coughing during the concert.

The shower is a little too cold.

There's a long line at the shipping counter.

They're quarreling again.

I didn't get two seats to myself on the train.

My fork is too short.

She has parked her Mercedes across the end of my driveway.

The seam in the toe of my sock is twisted.

I don't look forward very much to that sandwich.

Now that the leaves are off the trees, we can see the neighbor's new deck.

The clock is ticking very loudly.