Bee Wilson writes:

In The Settler’s Cookbook the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown describes her life from the sour mangoes dipped in chilli powder she eats as a child in Uganda in the 1950s to the potato parathas she cooks to soothe marital disputes in 21st-century London. But she is different from the others in that she eats the airline food. On a flight from Kampala to Heathrow in March 1972, fleeing Idi Amin’s Uganda, she accepts and even consumes a tray of airline food, ‘grey cubes of indeterminate meat in grey gravy, with greying potatoes and a sort of custard which isn’t grey but tastes like it could be’.

(LRB 25 June 2009)

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s food memoir begins in Uganda before independence, and interlaces reminiscences and ruminations on the life of the migrant with mouth-watering recipes, many of them her mother’s. Each stage of her journey is marked by food and cooking. From the Depression years, when her family was suddenly plunged into debt, comes a recipe for Fish Masala – ‘Fish was cheap; they ate a lot of it. My mother cooked fish better than anyone in the whole world, even way back then.’ From her school years comes ‘My Malodorous Packed Lunch’, a delicious stuffed roti which the school authorities attempted to ban, and to mark the expulsion of Asians from Uganda there is a recipe for Exeter Stew, allegedly Idi Amin’s favourite dish.

Portobello | hardback 439 pp. |ISBN: 9781846270833