Back to basics: How traditional Indian recipes can help beat soaring vegetable prices

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Yamuna Devi’s Lord Krishna’s Cuisine is a great Indian cookbook. It explains the basics, but without either simplifying or exoticising. There are useful line drawings and background information, like an analysis of the different regional garam masalas.

There are personal anecdotes too, but the focus is on the food, through which she makes you want to prepare it, while feeling that you can — exactly what a cookbook should do. It is so engrossing that it can be a while before you notice the recipes don’t use onions or garlic. While ranging across India, they are essentially Vaishnav, as might be expected from a follower of Srila Prabhupada of ISKCON.

You don’t have to follow the practice, but it is a reminder that a whole style of delicious Indian cooking eschews alliums, in favour of substitutes like asafoetida. This is particularly worth noting given the news that onions will follow tomatoes in shooting up in price. In all the handwringing about tomato scarcity, the strange part is knowing this widespread Indian use of them is a recent development.

In Samaithu Paar, S Meenakshi Ammal’s iconic Tamil Brahmin cookbook from 1951, tomatoes only infrequently feature as alternatives. “When tomato is used, decrease the quantity of tamarind accordingly,” she writes in her recipe for rasam. The main causes of soaring vegetable prices are poor agricultural planning combined with erratic weather (which may increasingly become the norm).