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The dinner dilemma

With few boundaries remaining between work and home, and

time expanding and contracting in unusual ways, a number of

cookbooks focus on ingenuity, intuition, and—like Chetna’s 30

Minute Indian—speed.

“I wanted to create meals that were quick and easy, but also

flavorful,” Makan says of her approach. In her book, which

comes on the heels of 2020’s Chetna’s Healthy Indian: Vegetarian,

she continues her quest to demystify

Indian cuisine for a wide audience, using

shortcuts, such as canned vegetables, to

cut hands-on preparation and cooking

time.

Sam Sifton, food editor at the New York

Times and founding editor of NYT

Cooking, speeds things up by encouraging

readers to trust their intuition in his

forthcoming New York Times Cooking

No-Recipe Recipes (Ten Speed, Mar.).

The book’s “recipes”—for such dishes

as smothered pork chops, soft-boiled

eggs with anchovy toast, and oven

s’mores—offer a list of ingredients

and brief instructions but no quanti-

ties, saving cooks time and leaving

them room to flex their culinary cre-

ativity. PW’s starred review described

T

he pandemic has dramatically changed the way
we cook. In a December 2020 study by Hunter,
a food and beverage marketing communications
firm, 54% of respondents said they are cooking
more than they were before the pandemic, and
35% say they “enjoy cooking more now than ever.” Why?
Because by cooking they save money, eat healthier, and feel
good, respondents said.
Cookbook authors and publishers
have noted these shifts and are
acting on them. When Chetna
Makan, a Great British Baking Show
semifinalist and Instagram and
YouTube personality, conceived of
her new book, Chetna’s 30 Minute
Indian (Mitchell Beazley, June), she
and her family were under strict
lockdown orders in the U.K.
“Weeks in, I noticed the enthusiasm for complicated or
elaborate meals and dishes had dissipated,” Makan says. Her
book, she hopes, will help home cooks “break away from their
stresses and make a delicious meal” and “just bring some joy into
their life.”
A raft of forthcoming cookbooks aims to do the same,
offering stressed-out, homebound, and frugal-minded readers
recipes that will meet them where they are during this ever-
stranger era.

New cookbooks focus on thrift,

speed, and other

pandemic-era values

BY POOJA MAKHIJANI