The Settler's Cookbook

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Pub Date: 5th March 2009
Price: £14.00
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‘Our family tree is puny, barren in large part. The roots don’t go down deep enough to produce a plenteous crop of ancestral stories or fruity relatives. The few memories hanging on are losing colour and juice, soon will wither and fall away. But here are the dishes that carry our collective memories and imagine our uncertain future.’

‘Full of rich delicious prose, and even more delicious recipes, this wonderful story of one Indian family, and the memories and meals they shared over generations, gives fresh meaning to the term “soul food”.’ Meera Syal

‘For many of us food is the gateway experience into other cultures and lives.
Yasmin's personal story intertwined with the foods which mean so much to her touched me deeply. And made me hungry. You can’t ask for more.’ Gavin Esler

'...this is an unexpected joy of a book.. evocative, tender, more than a collection of foodie memories. Alibhai-Brown's own migration is intimately tied in with the fate of East African Asians. ...It is a story seldom told, and Alibhai-Brown's account of it is fascinating and touching'. Sunday Times

'It is Diasporic writing at its best: unpretentious and quirky... expansive in its scope...the author displays erudition that shimmers'. Irish Times

She is gripping when it comes to their best known moment of turbulence: the expulsion from Uganda. [Ugandan Asians] thanks to this brave book are a little better recorded than before'. The Guardian

'This is a path-breaking record, but also a compelling, moving narrative: of shifting identities, survival and in the case of [her mother] jena, the strength of maternal love'. The Independent

'a book that is particularly touching, charming and elegiac'. A.A Gill, Sunday Times

'The journalist writes about her past, the Ugandan Indian Diaspora; her arrival in Great Britain in 1972; her years at Oxford, relationships, family and career. Both Elizabeth David and, more recently, Claudia Roden have made the links between food, history and geography, but this is a wonderful book that takes the connections further. There has been little written about the 'wahindi', the Indian settler's in Africa and Alibhai-Brown gives us a history of those empire builders who were expelled after Independence.' Royce Mahawatte, Times Literary Supplement

'This wonderful book .is a path breaking record, but also a compelling, moving narrative: of shifting identities, survival and maternal love'. Susan Williams The Independent

'Alibhai-Brown's response to an upbringing in a secretive community is a determination to tell all...a courageous degree of honesty for anyone, let alone a Ugandan Asian woman.a brave little book'. Jeevan Vasagar, The Guardian

This is an unexpected joy of a book. Woven around the people, places and dishes that have shaped Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's life, it follows an emotional and culinary journey from childhood in pre-independence Uganda to London in the 21st Century. It is a voyage filled with edible mementos.evocative, revealing and often tender ..it is s story seldom told'. Lucas Hollweg, The Sunday Times

'an unusual memoir-cum-cookery book which uses food as an emotional
touchstone for memory and cultural history'. Clare Allfree Metro

'A beautifully carved memoir of a brave woman.It is almost a Homeric
odyssey of a person whose life began in the periphery of the Empire in Uganda, to join the flow of the River Nile to the Thames, to the heart of Imperial Britain.she has a delightful way of telling a compelling story'. Yash Tandon, Pambazuka Website on African Affairs

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s family history is one of constant displacement and repeated relocation, in which the feeling of being settled has come not from putting down roots, but from taking up a pot and creating a feast that tastes and smells like home. The Settler’s Cookbook follows her complicated family story and brings it to life describing the food they cooked.

Yasmin’s forebears left India in the 19th century, crossing the seas to East Africa, some to build the railway, others lured by the prospect of prosperity under the imperial regime. There they flourished under British rule and thereafter in independent Uganda. In 1972, Asians were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. Yasmin, like thousands of others moved to the UK, their new home. The food she cooks combines the traditions and flavours of her family’s hybrid culinary heritage – a mouth-watering collection of recipes handed down over generations, modified and improved along the way. Here you’ll discover how Shepherd’s Pie is enhanced by sprinkling in some chilli, Victoria sponge can be enlivened by saffron and lime juice, and the addition of ketchup to a curry can be life-changing.

Through the story of Yasmin’s family, The Settler’s Cookbook traces the long journey of the East African Indians through famine, persecution and upheaval. Warm, enchanting and evocative, this is the cultural and culinary history of the people, full of recipes and stories they passed on and shared around, and which continue to feed and inspire friends and relatives to this day.

YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN is a leading commentator on race, multiculturalism and human rights, writing for the Independent and Guardian and appearing regularly on TV and Radio. She is the author of No Place Like Home (1995) and the IPPR report True Colours, on public attitudes to multiculturalism. She has recently performed on autobiographical one-woman show, commissioned and directed by the RSC, which is touring regularly.

For further information please contact Tasja Dorkofikis on 020 76051392 or e-mail Tasja@portobellobooks.com or Aidan O’Neill on aidan@portobellobooks.com

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