Every once in a while, we come across a cook book that makes us want to take it home and scour through its pages. Chandra Padmanabhan's Southern Flavours, however, posed an unstated challenge, which we were more than happy to take up. A first-time cook recounts her experience

The earliest memory I have of the kitchen is of a bubbling cauldron of tomato rasam and my father hovering over it ladle in hand. Dipping a tiny spoon into the pot, he blew on the rasam and offered a taste to my mother. It would have been good -- the rasam in our house is legendary among relatives, and I have personally witnessed feuding members leave their issues outside the door with their sandals, when invited for lunch at home.

Lunch, as in any South Indian household that takes such things seriously, is a feast, several courses long. There's rice served with a thin dal to begin the meal, followed by a course of rice and rasam, followed by rice and sambar, interspersed with a glass of mor, broken with the crunch of a papadam, and a sundakai every now and then, and topped with cold thairsadam accompanied by a sweet mango, or lime pickle. If there are guests over, then a kuttu, a mor kuzhambu, payasam, and if they're really dear, an avial would be added too. It goes without saying, our dining tables were long, and lunching at the parents home was a langurous affair.

Cut to a single's life in Mumbai. There are no dining tables, and lunches are eaten before a screen, often in the middle of typing or reading. So when we came across Chandra Padmanabhan's book Southern Flavours: The Best of South Indian Cuisine, we saw the chance of a home run. What better than to flip through its pages to make rasam and see if it tastes as good as it does back home?

Ingredients were bought, friends were informed, the relatively non-traditional, yet customary component of such cooking nights, beer, was bought too. Cooking rasam had never been such fun. Padmanabhan's book is fairly straightforward, with the Tamil names of ingredients and dishes, translated. The book offers recipes of the six mainstays of South Indian cooking, including rasam, sambar, and rice preparations (yes, there are several types of rasam, and rasam-vada isn't one of them), besides basic recipes of the masalas that go into and chutneys that accompany these dishes. The index also offers information on where the dish is from (South India, you can almost hear Padmanabhan say, isn't one state).u00a0
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Back home in Mumbai, the stove looked like a dal bomb had exploded and a prediliction for pepper corns ensured sips of water between slurps of rasam, but the dish was, as my aunt would stick her thumb up and say, "a good effort". It may not have inspired the same look it did on my mum's face in my memory, but it helped a first-time cook like me feel less scared ofu00a0 South Indian cuisine. Rasam done. Next?

Southern Flavours The Best of South Indian Cuisine by Chandra Padmanabhan. Rs 599. Published by Westland

Tomato Rasam from Tamil Nadu
Serves: 4-6
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes

This delicious rasam is made with my mother's recipe. It is the South Indian version of the tomato soup. She normally made it on a rainy day or when we were under the weather. Truly, this tomato rasam is food for the soul!