120 ways of cooking your vegetables

Restaurateur Camellia Panjabi's new cookbook is a deep dive into the country’s vast and varied vegetarian cuisine

- Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi

(above) Banana curry from Camellia Panjabi's new cookbook.

It takes three page flips to realise that restaurateur Camellia Panjabi's latest book, Vegetables: The Indian Way (Penguin Random House), is not a mere recipe book.

The first clue lies here in the contents. The sections are divided on the basis of where vegetables grow: under the ground, under water, on the ground, on shrubs and vines, on trees.

The second lies in the introduction, where she tells us about the refugee beginnings of restaurants in India, and includes anecdotes about liquor laws, before taking us through her journey with restaurants in India and abroad. And the third is in the first chapter called Vegetables. Here Panjabi expands on her categorisation system, talking about how we often combine a root vegetable “with a sun-kissed vegetable”, getting into the sensibility and wisdom of this practice through the lens of nutrition, flavour, gut health, naturopathy, and Ayurveda.

For instance, Panjabi points out how root veggies are carbohydrate dense, and can contain minerals and amino acids. Leafy greens benefit from exposure to sunlight, and so contain folates and other vitamins. Combining vegetables from various grown environments gives us a wider spectrum of not only flavour and texture, but also nutrients. We do this intuitively across Indian cuisine, as in the case with methi aloo or as seen in Panjabi's book, sai bhaji, a Sindhi preparation.

“This unique dish has great health properties, combining leafy greens, root vegetables, and on-the-ground vegetables, together with lentils,” writes Panjabi in the book. Each of the 30 vegetables covered in the book gets an introduction by way of its health properties, the beliefs and practices around it, and even its contraindications, accompanied by lush photos.