'Amrikan' cookbook adapts Indian recipes and flavors for American palates and pantries

When people who moved from India to the U.S. want to make food from back home, they often have to improvise with available American ingredients. On the other hand, they often infuse traditional American recipes with Indian species and other ingredients.

The marrying of American and Indian flavors is the focus of food writer Khushbu Shah’s new cookbook, "Amrikan: 125 Recipes from the Indian American Diaspora.”

Her parents immigrated from India, and Shah remembers her mother using Bisquick not to make pancakes, but in the dough for gulab jamun. Shah says that improvisation has trickled into her own life, using peanut butter to make chutneys.

“I also grew up eating very globally. My pantry is very global, like just as much as curry leaves have a home, so does gochujang, so does Sriracha, so does soy sauce, so does cream cheese,” Shah says. “I've adapted a lot of Indian dishes to include ingredients that I always have on hand.”

By Khushbu Shah

Excerpted from “Amrikan: 125 Recipes from the Indian American Diaspora." Copyright © 2024 by Khushbu Shah. Photographs © 2024 by Aubrie Pick. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.