Secrets of Health from the Indian Kitchen is a new book by Ratna Rajaiah that is an ode to traditional Indian cooking that is good for you.

Did you know that the humble urad dal is an aphrodisiac or that a couple of bananas a day can lower blood pressure? Well neither did I till I read Ratna Rajaiah’s new book ‘Secrets of Health from the Indian Kitchen’ a virtual storehouse of how you can harness the power of simple ingredients in your kitchen to create healthy dishes.

Book Bytes

Incidentally, Ratna’s tryst with writing started as a Sunday column in The New Indian Express years ago. “My attempt, in this column, was to go back to our roots and so, it covered a whole host of subjects from the significance of lighting a diya to the meaning of namaskaram to the importance of knowing your mother tongue to why we need to reconnect with foods that have been grown, made and eaten locally for centuries. This caught the eye of my publisher Westland Books and they approached me to use these articles to put together a book on these foods. That is how this book was born.” The book is divided into several chapters each of which is dedicated to a separate vegetable, pulse or grain. Each chapter delves deep into the same and has been researched extensively and exhaustively and includes everything from papers published in scientific journals to books to magazines and even newspapers.

Read the full story that first appeared in The New Indian Express dated May 17, 2020 here: