On the Curry Trail: Chasing the Flavor That Seduced the World (Raghavan Iyer)

This is a great book. It starts by being pleasing to the eye, with lovely bright colours and graphics.
It is very informative too, thanks to a round the world tour of everything curry. The book covers the various regions of the world and looks at how culture and history have shaped these countries’ relation to curry and all its variations. It is really fascinating to see how spices have travelled around the world and combined with the culinary and social cultures to create local curry influenced dishes. I learned a lot and appreciated the research that has clearly gone into writing this story of the curry diaspora.
There is also a wealth of information about spices and ingredients, which will be handy for those who have access to all these spices, but also for those for whom this might be more difficult.
And of course, the recipes! For each country the author is taking us to, there is one or more recipe. The recipes are very well explained, and accessible to anyone who wants to try the experience of cooking curries. I really liked recipes of particular curry powders like the Madras curry powder, the curry pastes and the Ethiopian spiced clarified butter. It is also nice to have bread, rice and pulses recipes. On the top of my list are the Prawn Curry with Darkened Cinnamon from Sri Lanka, the Chicken curry with lemongrass and curry leaves from Malaysia, the Red lentils with ginger from Ethiopia and the Slow cooked chickpeas from Morocco, but there are many more I will cook from this book..On top of that, we are offered lots of tips that make the whole book feel almost like a masterclass in curry cooking.
I could virtually smell the fragrant spices and mixes as I was reading and although there are no pictures of the dishes, I realised I did not miss them because the explanations were excellent.
This book will definitely be in my kitchen!

You can listen to the author talk about the book in this podcast.