Cinnamon Club Cookbook

Professional chefs don't buy cookery books to filch recipes. They're looking for ideas. Iqbal Wahhab and Vivek Singh's Cinnamon Club Cookbook can offer plenty. They are respectively the founder and chef of the London restaurant, and their book opens unfamiliar doors on ingredients, techniques and spice combinations from the subcontinent. From sandalwood, sangri beans, kokum berries and kasundi mustard to smoked cloves and tempered oils, it's packed with unfamiliar details.

Four pages on "Basics" hold the key to their East-meets-West style. They cover a series of pastes used as marinades: garlic, ginger, fried and boiled cashew, boiled onion and Rajasthani. Applied to fish and meat they act as an undercoat, drawing off moisture and adding back a base flavour. This preparation allows the chef to paint his own personalised spice combination on top in the form of a second marinade or powder.

In practice, this can involve several linked steps. For soola, spiced lamb fillet, Singh rubs lamb fillet with two pastes, sears the meat, coats it in yogurt mixed with a different paste, rests it and finally grills it. Simple in theory, it's a versatile technique that opens up endless taste combinations.

Singh learnt his craft working for the Oberoi hotel chain. The starting point of many of his dishes are classic recipes from Prashad, the catering textbook, equivalent in India to Ceserani and Kinton's Practical Cookery. But he moves the recipes into the 21st century, reworks their presentation and puts his own distinctive stamp on the spicing.

Wahhab adds knowledgeable blurbs about their provenance. In his introduction he also sets out his restaurant's mission statement: to free himself of the stereotyped curry and poppadum mindset. He describes the help given to him by the Capital hotel's Eric Chavot, who travelled round the subcontinent with him during the planning stages.

Western style
Food photography proves his claim to have introduced a modern Western style to his presentation. Some of the pictures, though, match the dishes cooked at the Cinnamon Club rather than the recipes as they appear on the page.

Apart from starters, main courses and several vegetable sections, which have an immediate appeal to chefs, there are some simple-but-effective desserts - carrot toffee pudding, semolina fritters - a creative section on breakfasts, and some colourful cocktails. Wine suggestions, given throughout the book, show that customers don't have to drink Cobra when eating an Indian.

Michael Raffael, food writer

Cinnamon Club Cookbook
Iqbal Wahhab and Vivek Singh
Absolute Press, £20
ISBN: 1-904573-01-0