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Book Name:The Landour Cookbook by Ruskin Bond and Ganesh Saili Publisher: Roli Books ISBN: 81-7436-163-4 Price: Rs. 195

Home cooking - the word is fast becoming extinct in a world of microwave ovens, instant idli-dosa mixes and eating out. Food has ceased to be important as food but has become yet another status symbol. The more expensive the meal, the more of a statement it makes and never mind if it taste awful. If there are guests over for dinner, the meal had better be catered by the most fashionable caterer in town. Perhaps it all started with the death of the oven. Cakes and microwaves require a balancing act even more delicate than the right proportions of baking soda to batter and grandmother's treasured recipes never took that into account. The recipes, however, still exist, whether scrawled in battered notebooks or stored away on yellowing pieces of paper in the depths of some drawer or the other. A pinch of this, a dash of that - some of the proportions are deliciously inexact too. Most grandmothers maintained that cooking was an inspirational art and measurements only spoiled it.

Ruskin Bond and Ganesh Saili have had the rare good fortune to dredge up a storehouse of memories from the hillside world of Landour. Curtained off from Mussoorie by its hills and the rare quality of its inhabitants, Landour is a world best known to people through Ruskin Bond's writings. A place of winding paths, spring flowers and an occasional prowling leopard. In the Cookbook, he and his friend Ganesh Saili explore that world through the jealously guarded recipes of the Landour inhabitants. The intimacy of the world that Bond described is to be found in the culinary habits of the Landour inhabitants. They share the same milkman, for instance, who goes from home to home watering the milk at specific taps, like Victor Banerjee's tap, and the milk flows into Stephen Alter's home from there. The recipes reflect the closeness of that world. Many of them were printed in the 1964 The Landour Book of International Recipes: A revised edition of the Landour Community Centre Cook Book which came out in 1930.

Tried and tested by Ganesh Saili, who has specialised in dishing up recipes for as long as Ruskin Bond has been writing about the Landour world, the range of the present Landour Cookbook covers puddings, salads, infallible cakes, roasts and every food variation in between, including entrée and tiffin dishes. Of course, both authors admit that the recipes have a distinctly American flavour to them, since Landour was the headquarters of the American missionary community for over 100 years. "They enjoyed a standard of living that was more affluent than that of the British official families."

Potatoes pop in and out of the dishes – though there’s a story to that. An empire builder of a vegetative disposition once wrote, "Seeds of the potato berries should sown in adapted places by explorers of new countries." His advice inspired an Irishman, Captain Young, who had his own links to potatoes from his homeland and who settled down in the ridge above Doon.

Apart from the potatoes, the recipes are rich in cream, chocolate and other not so humble ingredients. All those things that people ate with great relish before the dread word ‘cholesterol’ was pronounced and before anorexia and bulimia were heard of. And, despite the fact that the missionaries departed a long time ago, the tradition of exotic cookery still lingers in Landour.

The Landour Cookbook is a welcome walk through the kitchens of Mrs HE Wylie, E L Moody, Mr E C Lochlin and many others with apt quotations and a delicious whiff of nostalgia. There is a free test offer thrown in with the book – send samples of your efforts to the authors for approval and save the rest for a family feast. Bon appetit.

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