BackLounge Loves |The Landour Cookbook
This reprint of an old cookbook takes you back in time to when baked beans and marshmallows were made from scratch
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A slice of hillside history
Some cookbooks beg for curry stains and oil splotches, and a frenzied flipping of the pages while the frying pan heats. The Landour Cookbook is not one of them. It merits gentler treatment.
This edition, edited by Ruskin Bond and Ganesh Saili, both residents of Landour, Uttarakhand, was released by Roli just over a month ago. It’s a cookbook that has been put together by the missionary expatriate housewives, mostly from the US, England and New Zealand, who flocked to the hill station in the early 1920s. They would meet at the community centre at Landour, not far from Woodstock School, and share recipes which used ingredients that were easily available, swap housekeeping tips (to kill the mutton taste in mutton, add two peeled apples), and, most importantly, suggestions on how to adapt their baking methods for altitudes of over 7,000ft. Saili explains on the phone that an ordinary cake recipe would yield a flat, failed result in Landour—sugar, flour, eggs and baking temperature all need to be adjusted. The recipes in the book are presented with tried-and-tested tweaks.
The Landour Cookbook is more of a memento for your bookshelf than an everyday go-to guide that belongs on your kitchen counter. Home chefs will be frustrated that there’s no glossary to help them find that recipe they flipped past, and there’s nary a photo or illustration to compare the final product of their efforts to. The instructions are to the point, and directed at an experienced hand in the kitchen; novices will probably need a little more guidance.
A prettier, but less comprehensive pick for the shelf is an older book, Icing on the Landour Cake, also published by Roli. For this little treasure, Saili has sifted out his favourite cake recipes from the old community centre cookbook—we’ve bookmarked the simple Three-egg Butter Cake, and the Swedish Orange Cake to try, as neither needs adjusting for altitudes. But the highlights are the full-page sepia photographs that Saili has dug out from the Landour archives, spanning 1860-1930.
The Landour Cookbook: Over Hundred Years of Hillside Cooking, Roli Books, 256 pages, ₹ 195; and Icing on the Landour Cake, Roli Books, 64 pages, ₹ 150.
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