Reviews for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook

These reviews were forwarded by Dr Vali Jamal, Kampala, Uganda, which he received in an on-going communication with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. We thank Dr Jamal for bringing them to our notice. Please visit Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s website http://www.alibhai-brown.com/ and Dr Jamal’s blog www.vivaeastafrica.blogspot.com.

• ‘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

The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food – Yasmin Alibhai-Brown