Cookbook Club: Ammu: Indian Home Cooking to Nourish Your Soul

Love to eat? Love to cook? Join us for a monthly cookbook feast! Each month, the group picks recipes from a single book. Each participant chooses a recipe from the book and prepares it for the group's meeting. At our meeting, we eat the dishes we've all prepared and talk about what inspired us to make them.

In December we'll cook from Ammu: Indian Home Cooking to Nourish Your Soul by Asma Khan. 

Asma Khan is chef and restaurateur of London's acclaimed Darjeeling Express, which began as a supper club, then a pop-up, before settling in its permanent location to wide acclaim. Asma's food is homage to her royal Mughlai ancestry and the busy streets of Calcutta, where she grew up. An all-women team of housewives runs the kitchen at Darjeeling Express, which has been featured in Time Out, Harper's Bazaar, The Guardian, and numerous others. In 2015, it was named as one of the best restaurants in London by the Evening Standard. In 2017, Eater named it as one of its most impressive restaurant newcomers. Asma stars in Netflix's award-winning series Chef's Table.

Ammu is a collection of recipes from Asma Khan's childhood, her Indian family kitchen. It is a celebration of where she comes from, of home cooking, and the inextricable link between food and love. It is also a chance for Asma to honor her ammu--mother--and to share with us the recipes that made her and rooted her to home.

This book is a joyful celebration of memories of food, and its power to heal, restore, and comfort. It includes her ammu's comfort food from childhood, the recipes with which she was taught to cook, celebratory food for special occasions, and slow-cooked recipes passed through the generations of her family.

The recipes and the memories she shares all possess something that is universal: food is a way for us to have this conversation about how similar we all are--how it connects us and unites us beyond differing appearances, accents, races and backgrounds. With stunning food and family photos, this cookbook is a must-have for cooks and lovers of Indian food.

The Cookbook Club meets in the Community Room at the South Burlington Public Library on the first Tuesday of the month. Copies of the book will be available for browsing recipes at South Burlington Public Library for a month leading up to the meeting. To attend, let us know what you plan to cook by signing up at the Circulation Desk or by emailing sbplprograms@SouthBurlingtonVT.gov.

All are welcome!