The Spice Box

Twelve Indian curries cooked from scratch, taught to someone who has never made one: ten spices, five moves, and a photo of what each stage should look like.

Curry cookbooks lose beginners in two places. The recipes want a long list of spices you will use once, and they tell you what to do but not what it should look like. This book is built around fixing both.

Who it is for

Anyone who likes Indian food and has never cooked it, or has tried and ended up with a curry that tasted flat, bitter or of raw spice. It assumes you know nothing: it explains what each spice is, why each step happens, and how to tell when it is done. Everything is cooked on an ordinary stove; no pressure cooker needed.

What makes it different

• One box of ten spices. Every curry uses spices from the same ten jars: cumin seeds, black mustard seeds, ground turmeric, ground coriander, ground cumin, Kashmiri chili powder, garam masala, green cardamom, cinnamon and bay. Each is shown in a real photograph with what it tastes like, when it goes in, what to buy if you cannot find it, and what not to confuse it with (American chili powder is not the same thing).
• Five moves. Nearly every curry is cooked in the same five moves: sizzle whole spices, cook the onions, add garlic and ginger, cook the spices and base until the oil shows, then simmer and finish. Part 2 explains each one with photographs of the stages that matter most (the sizzle, the four onion stages, the spice paste before and after it is ready), and every recipe step is colored by its move.
• Your first curry, photo by photo. One chicken curry walked through over five pages, with what you should see, hear and smell at each step.
• Taste it, then fix it. A table of what to do when a curry is flat, bitter, raw-tasting, too hot, too salty, too thin or too thick, and why it happened.
• Make it with what you have. A curry map of all twelve recipes on one page, and simmering times for swapping chicken, lamb, beef, shrimp, fish, paneer, eggs, vegetables or beans into any sauce.

The recipes

Everyday chicken curry · Butter chicken · Chicken korma · Chickpea curry (chana masala) · Red lentil dal with a sizzle · Spinach and paneer · Potato and cauliflower (aloo gobi) · Slow lamb curry · Spiced ground meat and peas (keema matar) · Coconut shrimp curry · Egg curry · Kidney bean curry (rajma). On the side: basmati rice, cumin rice, cucumber raita, a crunchy salad and skillet flatbreads.

Every recipe serves 4. Four are vegan and two more vegetarian; the heat of each is marked, and the book shows how to make any of them milder or hotter.

Also inside

A plan for a curry night with everything hot at the same time, menus that go together, cooking ahead, leftovers and freezing, cooking for 2 or for 8, a diets and allergens table, and the whole method on one page.

What you download

• The Spice Box (58 pages, PDF, US Letter, color, with bookmarks)
• The Spice Box Kitchen Cards (18 pages, PDF): every recipe on one printable page each, plus the shopping list and the five moves

Good to know

• Measures are US cups and spoons with grams and milliliters; temperatures in °F with °C; British names are given (cilantro is fresh coriander, shrimp are prawns).
• A food thermometer is useful for chicken. Food-safety times and temperatures follow USDA guidance; rice-storage advice follows the UK Food Standards Agency.
• The pages are US Letter size; on A4 paper, print with "fit to page".
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.