Which is the meatiest Indian cookbook?
Something like Moti Mahal’s Tandoori Trail might be good, or any cookbook with an emphasis on tandoori or kebab dishes. You could also look for something that focuses not so much on ‘Indian’ but northern provincial (Kashmiri, Punjabi, Peshawari etc.) cooking, or even Afghan recipes, where you get a synthesis of south Asian, central Asian and middle Eastern influences. (Here’s a butter chicken recipe, from a site dedicated to Pakistani recipes.
There are certain regions of India where people eat more meat based diets. Some regions of Indian cookbooks you should look out for are Kerala and Goa. Both have large populations of Christians and in general eat more meat than other areas. Hyderabadi and Anglo-Indian cookery might also be interesting. I found Mrs. K. M. Mathews’ book on Keralite cooking wonderful. Don’t remember exactly what it was called.
In the UK there is a lot of Indian restaurant food which is just sauce and meat. There are quite a lot of variants of flavour and heat, much more so than often found in US Indian restaurant food. It’s quite common to, essentially, pick your meat and pick your sauce from the menu, and receive the combination of the two. I recommend The Curry House as a resource for cooking UK-style Indian restaurant food. It features a fair number of free recipes, but also has a “book” section where you can spend UKP 7 and get access to PDF files for more, and a forum for discussion. It’s a really impressive project, thanks to the founder who has spent years working out how to reproduce the restaurants’ food in the home. The site has been around since at least 1997 which may attest to its popularity.
