The Cookbook Makes Cooking Vegan Indian Food an Approachable Delight
Romy Gill’s ‘Zaika: Vegan Recipes From India’ is all about creating big flavors with simple ingredients
“For me, to write this book was very, very important,” chef and writer Romy Gill tells me over the phone from her home in the United Kingdom. The book is Zaika: Vegan Recipes from India, and it is a homage to her mother and the way she grew up eating. She tells me that the idea that everyone in India cooks with ghee, butter, and other dairy products is a Western misconception. In her family, it was oil, and that’s why it was so important to her to make this a vegan book rather than vegetarian.
What she says is common throughout the many regions of India are the spices, though not necessarily how they are used. Something that is used whole in Bengali cuisine might be ground in Punjabi cuisine, and a spice used in cooking in one place will only be used in chutneys and pickles in another. In the recipe headnotes, she calls out the origins of the various dishes, and all of the recipes are easy, approachable and adaptable to what you have available. There’s equal attention to specificity and the ways in which these recipes can be applied to what’s in your kitchen, whether it’s noodles, rice, or the right flour to make roti.