About a thousand years ago, the group of people known as Parsis emigrated from what is now Iran to India. None of their descendants have opened restaurants in St. Louis. To judge from My Bombay Kitchen, a new cookbook from Miloufer Ichaporia King, that’s a real shame. King lives in the Bay Area and has worked with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. She’s also a good story-teller, one of those things that makes a cookbook come alive. 
This is, more or less, Indian food — living in a country for a millennium certainly does influence what a subgroup eats — but it’s also slightly different. King’s recipes and ingredients lists are a little shorter. An American kitchen that stocks enough spices to handle most Indian recipes will take on nearly everything without difficulty. There are a couple of very obscure ingredients used in one masala that I couldn’t locate at Seema Enterprises or Global Market, but King acknowledges that they’re not essential.
Among the tasty goodies I’ve made from the book are cutlets, which are a sort of hamburger, creating the tastiest ground chicken I’ve ever eaten. (The recipe calls for ground turkey or chicken, or very lean beef, lamb or pork). Using cooked potato and egg as a binder, they were moist and full of the flavors of ginger, garlic, chile and coriander. Joe pointed out that they would do well with a poached egg atop them as a brunch dish. And that probably wouldn’t be deeply inauthentic; Parsis are fond of eggs and pair them up with lots of dishes.
We did try eggs with was Parisi Hash Yellow potatoes, pictured right, a platonic dish for lovers of the spicy (although like every other dish, the amount of chiles can be adjusted or deleted completely). A couple of eggs over easy and a slice of late-season tomato turned this into breakfast divine. The only unexciting recipe that I’ve tried so far is an eggplant stew.
In the attached recipe for cucumber-and-ginger salad, King talks about "the fresh clarity of salt and lime, that magic combination." I served it with some mussels I had steamed with garlic, cilantro and coconut milk, and the creamy mussel juices were absolutely divine with this sharp, crunchy salad. I also found that the salad can be made ahead of time, and one of my friends raves about how it ages well. Maybe it is magic.
I used less than the amounts she specifies below, just one half of one of those so-called English cucumbers, scrubbed but not peeled, and reduced other quantities by about half.
2 cucumbers (about 2 pounds)
juice of 1 to 2 limes
salt to taste
2 to 3 teaspoons finely chopped fresh ginger
1/4 cup shredded fresh mint leaves (optional – I skipped this)
If the cucumbers are coated with wax, peel them. Halve the cucumbers lengthwise and remove the seeds if you wish. Cut the cucumbers into thin slices. Dress the slices with lime juice and salt. Add the ginger in small increments to taste; it doesn’t take much to make an effect. Add mint just before serving, if you like. You might even want to add a drizzle of olive oil.
MY BOMBAY KITCHEN, by Niloufer Ichaporia King
University of California Press, ucpress.edu $27.50