The 13 Best Indian Food Books, Ranked Like a Meal

Collingham is a historian, and she treats the biryani, the vindaloo and the tandoori chicken as evidence rather than as heritage. The book moves from Mughal kitchens to Portuguese Goa to British clubs to railway station canteens to the curry houses of Birmingham, and every chapter shows a dish being assembled out of somebody's trade route or somebody's homesickness. It appeared in Britain a year before this edition under a different title, Curry: A Biography. Reading it feels like walking through your own kitchen with a stranger who keeps relabelling the jars.

Sen begins at the Indus Valley and does not stop until modern urban India, taking in Vedic sacrifice, the vegetarianism that grew out of Buddhism and Jainism, temple kitchens, Mughal courts, Portuguese and British arrivals, and the way a growing middle class rebuilt its own idea of a proper meal. It is written for a general reader, so the scholarship sits under the prose instead of on top of it. The chapters are short enough to take one a night, which is exactly how I got through it.

Achaya was a food scientist who spent his later years reconstructing what Indians actually ate, from the grains named in old Tamil poetry to the arrival of the potato. The first half runs chronologically. The second half is an A to Z of ingredients, dishes and terms, and that is where the pleasure hides, because you look up one entry and lose an hour to the entries around it. This is an Oxford academic book, priced and written like one, and it is still the foundation under most of this list.

Ashok is a Chennai engineer who took the rules every Indian kitchen runs on and asked which ones are physics and which are inherited superstition. He explains why spices go into hot fat, what a pressure cooker is really doing to a dal, why the order of onion, ginger and garlic matters, and why your fridge ruins some things while saving others. The tone is a friend showing off, in a good way, and the jokes land more often than they miss. There are recipes, but the method underneath them is the point.

Reshii spent decades reviewing restaurants before she wrote this, and it shows in how confidently she separates a spice's reputation from its job. She travels to where the things grow, sits with the people who grow them, and comes back with the economics and the taste in the same chapter. Kashmir, which is her own home, gets the best pages. Recipes run through the book, and they are the kind you actually attempt, because by the time you reach them you understand what the spice is for.

Subramanian travels the coast from Bengal round to Gujarat, and fish is the thread rather than the subject. He watches the Hyderabad ritual where a live fish is swallowed as an asthma cure, sits in Kerala toddy shops, chases the perfect hilsa in Bengal, and spends time with men who still build boats by hand. The reporting is patient, the writer keeps himself out of the way, and the sentences are the best on this list, which is how I justified rereading it twice and calling it research.

Banerji left Kolkata for America and returned as a traveller in her own country, which gives this book its odd and useful double vision. She moves through Bengal, Kashmir, Goa, Kerala and Delhi, eating in homes far more often than in restaurants, and keeps circling one question: what does a food tell you about the people who guard it. She keeps circling back to who is permitted to eat what, and in whose kitchen, and that thread holds the book together better than the itinerary does.

O'Brien is Australian, has spent years in India, and set out to record what people eat region by region rather than what restaurants sell them. Each section gives you the staples, the history behind them, the festival food, and notes on where to find the real version. It runs past five hundred pages, so nobody reads it front to back. You read the chapter for the state you are about to visit, then two more, because the neighbouring cuisine turns out to be a cousin.

Before she became the woman who taught the English-speaking world to cook Indian food, Madhur Jaffrey was a girl in a Delhi house full of relatives, eating mangoes pulled straight off the tree and whatever came up from the family kitchen. The memoir runs from that childhood through school, through the year Delhi came apart, to her leaving for drama school in London. Food is the lens and not the plot, which is why it works as a memoir first. Recipes for the dishes she remembers sit at the end.

King grew up in Bombay and trained as an anthropologist, and this is what happens when a person with that training writes down her own community's cooking before it thins out. Dhansak, patra ni machhi, the wedding food, the ordinary weekday food, all of it sits under headnotes explaining who cooked it, when, and what it meant to the family that ate it. You can cook from this book. You can also read it in bed like a set of essays, which is what I did for a week before making a single dish.

Panjabi spent her career in Indian hospitality and then in Indian restaurants in London, and she opens this book with sixty-odd pages explaining what a curry is made of: the sequence of the onion, the job of the souring agent, why a Kashmiri gravy behaves nothing like a Chettinad one. Then come the recipes, which are solid and heavily photographed. Most people buy it for those recipes and find the essay by accident. I would do it the other way around.

Jaffrey wrote this for Americans in the early seventies who believed Indian food came out of a single yellow tin. The recipes are careful and slow, but the writing is why it belongs here: the introduction and the notes above each dish are opinionated, funny, occasionally imperious, and full of a young woman explaining her home to readers who had decided in advance that it was exotic. Half a century later the tone still has teeth, and the food knowledge holds up better than the kitchen it assumes.

Sanghvi wrote about food for Indian newspapers for years, and this gathers the columns: how five-star hotels invented most of what the country now calls restaurant Indian food, why the chefs you have heard of became famous, what is wrong with the wine list, what is wrong with you for ordering that. He is opinionated to the point of being annoying and he is right often enough that you keep reading. No argument holds the book together, only appetite and confidence.