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Memoirs to sink teeth into

Last Updated: May 3, 2003

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By now, Shoba Narayan's account of how her parents finally let her leave India to attend Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts should be familiar to readers of gourmet magazines. Her uncle challenged her to cook a vegetarian feast.

"If we like it you can go to America. If we don't, you stay here," he said.

The family thought she'd surely fail; she'd not been taught to cook. But Narayan, who had watched the women in her family cook, boldly turned to tattered family recipes and "gigantic cookbooks" and laid out a feast of basmati rice, okra stuffed with spices, tomatoes in tamarind water, a paste of spinach and almond dessert.

Her guests "fought over the last piece of okra, taste overtaking caution. In the end Nalla-pa leaned back and belched unapologetically. "I was going to America."

It's an audacious, heart-warming story. You are charmed - not only by Narayan's fluid and unselfconscious writing but by her sweet stubbornness and inventiveness in using food as a motif of her life. That's how it is, too, with her first book, "Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes." This is a memoir not to miss.

So is Calvin Trillin's current travel book, "Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties From Kansas City to Cuzco," a return to the local foods he'd always loved.

These two take you places you've never been - all the while talking about eating.

Narayan, now a New Yorker who writes for Gourmet, Food & Wine, Newsweek and other publications, spins a captivating story of growing up in a large Hindu Brahmin family of good cooks and good eaters. An outspoken, independent girl in a traditional family, Narayan recounts not only the culture-cuisine of her home but also tells of characters such as Raju, the Indian milkman who named his cows after his wives, her grandparents ("devout Hindus, they strongly believed in a Catholic education minus its religious instruction"), her father (an indulgent English professor) and her mother (a superlative cook of vegetarian dishes.)

Even her own arranged marriage - made during a trip home after a Memphis university revoked her art degree when she rearranged her final sculpture without permission - does not escape her trenchant, humorous eye.

"I had always cooked to gain something: permission to go to America, a chance to stay an extra year, for money. In Memphis I cooked for what I had lost," she writes.

There are recipes for inji curry, for yogurt rice, upma, vegetable stew among others. And yes, there's one for the famous curried okra that helped open her passage to America.

Trillin's memoir - another in a string of his memorable books on eating - may not appear as exotically pungent as Narayan's. But give it time. Allow this Kansas City-native-turned-New Yorker to take you to his worldwide haunts for fried marlin, for ceviche, let him use his humor and charm with words, and soon even the barbecue of his Midwestern boyhood begins to sound pungent.

In the end, Trillin masterfully makes you see that New York is every bit as exotic as Narayan's India.

Geeta Sharma-Jensen Archive Professor conjures up Potter prediction (6/14/03) Dante led him to join the club of writers (6/6/03) Centenary sheds light on poet (5/31/03) Homegrown classics (5/24/03) Painting a portrait of dealing with loss (5/16/03) Laureate lives her poetry (5/10/03) Memoirs to sink teeth into (5/3/03) Exercise given a new spin (4/26/03) A mystic, Islamic journey (4/18/03) Fighting the war on ignorance (4/12/03) More ... Contacting Geeta Sharma-Jensen Call Geeta Sharma-Jensen at 224-2280 or e-mail: mailto:gjensen@journalsentinel.com