Rachel Gurjar's Pomegranate Chex Mix Took 12 Tries
In East to East, she bridges the cultures of New York and Mumbai.
In Rachel Gurjar’s East to East, recipes are ample and effusive, the images vibrant and inviting, all packaged with her acute expertise as a seasoned culinary professional. You’d be forgiven for flipping right to the good stuff — the achari melon salad, the crackly fried whole rava fish, a glorious malvani crab, and so much more. But that would deprive you of the richness of Gurjar’s stories in the first few pages of the book. She writes wistfully about moving to America, all the while longing for her family and her home, Mumbai. She relishes the blessings of migration and laments the cruelties and discomfort that often come with it.
Her recipes masterfully teeter on the margins of memory and moment, contemporary yet steeped in the traditions she so treasures. One that comes to mind especially is the pachi pulusu tamarind tomato cold noodle soup, a slurpy rendition of a tamarind broth from Andhra Pradesh. It’s clear Gurjar’s stunning book was forged through years of hard work, manifestation, and sheer grit. She tells us all about it below, including how she kept her eyes on the prize even on the hardest days of writing a cookbook.
