Our cookbook of the week is Chetna’s Healthy Indian by Chetna Makan. To try a recipe from the book, check out: Paneer and cavolo nero saag, black lentils with red kidney beans and red gurnard in banana leaf.
Chetna Makan gained a devoted following during her appearance on Season 5 of The Great British Bake Off. Judge Paul Hollywood declared her “flavour queen” for the innovative bakes – cardamom, pistachio and coffee Swiss roll, fenugreek and carom (a.k.a. ajwain) crackers, and masala chai baklava – that took her all the way to the semifinals.
“I wanted to try and show a part of my personality in each bake, to use the flavours I knew and understood,” Makan told Radio Times magazine at the time. Since her stint on the wildly popular series in 2014, Makan has written three cookbooks – including her latest, Chetna’s Healthy Indian (Mitchell Beazley, 2019) – and created a YouTube channel, Food with Chetna.
Makan worked as a fashion designer in Mumbai before moving to the U.K. in 2004 and is now based in Broadstairs, a coastal town in Kent, England. When writing Chetna’s Healthy Indian, she paid special attention to accessibility of ingredients: Everything she uses in the book is available in her small town. “Even in my previous books, I’ve made sure that I don’t use ingredients that are totally impossible to find,” she says.
While in her second cookbook, Chai, Chaat & Chutney (Mitchell Beazley, 2017), Makan sought to introduce readers to the “vast variety of Indian street food” on offer in the country’s four largest cities (Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi), in Chetna’s Healthy Indian she highlights her style of home cooking in 80 wholesome, feasible and flavourful recipes.
“I’ve been sharing recipes (on YouTube) and the feedback I got was, yes, people wanted to try things that were easy. But at the same time, not full of cream and butter and ghee and things like that,” says Makan. “This is exactly how we eat at home. Lots of lentils and fresh food, and quick recipes.”
Some of the recipes in the book are adapted versions of dishes her mother made while she was growing up in Jabalpur: “I was brought up in a family where Mum cooked amazingly delicious food from scratch every day.” Others, including paneer and cavolo nero saag, and black lentils with red kidney beans, are favourites of her own children.
“I like to show people how easy it is to make good Indian food – which is really healthy – at home,” Makan writes. Most of the dishes are standalone weeknight meals, which require no accompaniments other than optional rice or chapati. (To aid in composing more elaborate meals, she offers menu plans.) Vegetables and pulses are at the forefront but she also devotes chapters to fish and chicken, and closes the book on a sweet note, which was a decision she deliberated over.
“I thought about putting in healthy cakes but that’s not something I make at all, so I have to be true to what I actually do make and cook and eat,” she says. Instead, Makan’s walnut and hazelnut laddoos, coconut barfi, date and cardamom kheer, nutty spicy chocolate bark, and mango, lime and coconut panna cotta can all be enjoyed in modest portions: “Then at least you can just eat a small bit, which is better than having a whole slice of cake.”
“I do have a very sweet tooth and I love my cakes,” she adds. “But it’s just balance; consciously or unconsciously, that’s how I cook at home. I don’t really fry things in ghee because I know that I’m going to have that beautiful pudding at the end of it.”
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