30 vegetables and 120 ways to cook them by Camellia Panjabi
The ace London restaurateur and author's new cookbook ‘Vegetables: The Indian Way’ is a deep dive into the country's vast and varied vegetarian cuisine featuring recipes from ‘gobi pulao’ to beetroot ‘halwa’
It takes three page flips to realise that restaurateur Camellia Panjabi’s latest book, Vegetables: The Indian Way (Penguin Random House), is not a mere recipe book. The first clue lies here in the contents. The sections are divided on the basis of where vegetables grow: under the ground, under water, on the ground, on shrubs and vines, on trees.
The second lies in the introduction, where she tells us about the refugee beginnings of restaurants in India, and includes anecdotes about liquor laws, before taking us through her journey with restaurants in India and abroad. And the third is in the first chapter called ‘Vegetables’. Here Panjabi expands on her categorisation system, talking about how we often combine a root vegetable “with a sun-kissed vegetable", getting into the sensibility and wisdom of this practice through the lens of nutrition, flavour, gut health, naturopathy, and Ayurveda.
For instance, Panjabi points out how root veggies are carbohydrate dense, and can contain minerals and amino acids. Leafy greens benefit from exposure to sunlight, and so contain folates and other vitamins. Combining vegetables from various grown environments gives us a wider spectrum of not only flavour and texture, but also nutrients. We do this intuitively across Indian cuisine, as in the case with methi aloo or as seen in Panjabi’s book, sai bhaji, a Sindhi preparation.
“This unique dish has great health properties, combining leafy greens, root vegetables, and on-the-ground vegetables, together with lentils," writes Panjabi in the book. Each of the 30 vegetables covered in the book gets an introduction by way of its health properties, the beliefs and practices around it, and even its contraindications, accompanied by lush photos.
“Our elders used to be more curious about how a variety of foods were served at a meal, including pickles and fresh chutneys," says Panjabi, who is in her 80s. “They each had a purpose. Modern Indians relying on takeaway or part-time cooks don’t consider these aspects."
Camellia Panjabi, who joined the Taj Group in the 1970s and worked with them for three decades, brought Golden Dragon and street food (among many other concepts) to The Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. She changed the way we look at and eat Chinese food, indeed, eating out in general. If we have Chindian street stalls, and burgeoning pan-Asian QSRs, we have Panjabi to thank. In her second home, London, she is known as the restaurateur famous for popularising Indian cuisines through her brands such as Chutney Mary, Veeraswamy and Bombay Brasserie (she recently sold her restaurant group MW Eat to Canadian financial firm Fairfax). Vegetables is her second cookbook, and it comes 30 years after her first one, 50 Great Curries of India.
Vegetables contains 120 recipes, collected over decades. Panjabi first listed all the produce she wanted to cover, then narrowed down to the regions of the country she’d had their tastiest interpretations, as well as the best traditional recipes for classics such as black dal or palak saag. She got chef friends to test each of the recipes, to arrive at the final selection.
“It took many years," she says on the phone from her home in London. It’s an eclectic collection from across the country and its many kitchens. Beetroot goes from raita to halwa, potato preparations come from Maharashtra, Bengal and Tamil Nadu, turnips get caramelised and curried. There is a makhana kheer and a kaju makhana curry. There is also a cauliflower bhaji cooked with its tender leaves. “When was the last time that we considered cauliflower to be a stunning main course?," she says. “Like a gobi pulao? Or a Manchurian? (Both recipes are in the book.) Or a shalgam (turnip) curry or suran (yam) curry? Or even the stunning chillies in a Bhutanese cheese curry? We need to look at vegetables, chillies and unripe fruit dishes differently."
The book is precise, specific, informed and approachable. The Phool Gobhi aur Gobhi Patta for instance, starts like this: If we are able to buy cauliflower with leaves, it’s such a pity to throw the leaves away. They can be cooked together to make a really nice healthy dish. This recipe looks more difficult than it really is—it’s just a question of cooking in two pans simultaneously. Cauliflower is a stubborn vegetable to cook, so it takes a bit of time, but you will be happy with the result.
“Reasons have to be given to the reader on why these recipes work. I want people to become aware… medically, nutritionally aware, when they read the book. They must know why, for instance, India’s largest cooking oil is mustard, and yet it is banned across Europe and America for commercial reasons. Or why the Tamil people eat tamarind every day in the summer," says Panjabi.
In recent years, there has been a huge uptick in the number of vegetarian cookbooks by Indian-origin authors across the world. There is a reason for this, she says. Apart from triggers of income and health (“chicken and fish is expensive, red meat gives you cancer, mums are trying to make better lunch boxes, there has been a general movement towards vegetarianism"), the generation learning to cook for themselves today has not grown up with grandmothers at home, and so they didn’t quite learn how to cook vegetables.
“When I talk to my TamBram friends, for instance, they have (a repertoire of) five dishes," she says. “They don’t really have any knowledge. My Gujju friends are eating everything besan: gatta, sev tameta nu shaak , papad nu shaak. There is a lack of knowledge on how to handle veggies. Indians by and large don’t know their food actually because it is too large a subcontinent to say ‘I know the food of India’."
This is where Vegetables offers hand-holding for novice cooks. Each recipe not only works but also hits the spot.
So much of Indian cooking’s andaaz se (guesstimating) philosophy comes from spending time in the kitchen, and this practice is what helps cooks develop an instinctual grasp of flavour in the first place. “I believe recipes are a blueprint," says Panjabi. “For those who are cooking for the first time, it may be advisable to follow a recipe. After that I think people can adapt it to their taste."
Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi writes on food, travel, and design. She posts as @roshnibajajsanghvi on Instagram, and @roshnibajaj on X.
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