What’s in a cookbook?

Last year, London-based restaurateur and food writer Prue Leith suggested the cookbook was way past its heyday. One of her favourite passages in Serve It Forth describes food being heated: “We watched as in a blissful dream the small fat hands moving like magic among bottles and small bowls and spoons and plates, stirring, pouring, turning the pan over the flame just so, just so, with the face bent keen and intent above.” Among the books that tell the stories of a recipe—where the writer discovered it and how she made it her own—Ponnapa ranks Marcella Hazan’s books right on top. I have cooked Marcella’s baked mackerel recipe so many times it feels like it’s my own.” Ponnapa also has a bagful of stories about how she collected her cookbooks—she bought her 27-volume set of Time-Life series Foods Of The World second-hand, “battered, bruised and much-yellowed”, from the Kitchen Arts and Letters book store in New York. Kalra and Udinia recently read Coco: 10 World-Leading Masters Choose 100 Contemporary Chefs—a recommendation by the world’s 10 best chefs, including Ferran Adrià and Alain Ducasse, on the 100 “emerging chefs” they like. Consuming quest “A cookbook is like a work of art: You don’t see all the hard work that has gone into it,” says Mumbai-based Babso Kanwar, who is co-writing a book on the history of Delhi through its food with Pushpesh Pant, a retired professor and author of India: Cookbook.