Where to Start with Meera Sodha
Meera Sodha is a British-Indian cook, food writer, and Guardian columnist who has become one of the most popular voices in modern Indian and plant-based cooking. Born to a Gujarati family in Lincolnshire, she grew up watching her mother and grandmother cook and began collecting family recipes as a teenager. Her debut cookbook, Made in India (2014), was named a book of the year by the Times and the Financial Times. She followed it with Fresh India (2016), a vegetarian companion, and East (2019), which expanded her scope to the wider continent. Her weekly “New Vegan” column in the Guardian has introduced thousands of readers to plant-forward cooking rooted in Asian traditions. She won the Observer Food Monthly Best New Cookbook Award in 2017 and was named Fortnum and Mason Cookery Writer of the Year in 2018.
Start here
Made in India
Meera Sodha · 320 pages · 2014 · Easy
Themes: Indian home cooking, family recipes, curry, accessible ingredients
Meera Sodha’s debut cookbook and the perfect entry point into her work. Made in India collects over 130 recipes from three generations of her family, covering everything from quick street food snacks to slow weekend curries and celebratory feasts.
Why Start Here
Made in India is the foundation for everything Sodha has written since. It introduces her approach to cooking: family-tested recipes, honest flavors, clear instructions, and a refusal to make Indian food seem harder than it is. Her later books, Fresh India and East, expand into vegetarian and pan-Asian cooking, but this is where her voice and philosophy come through most clearly.
The book works especially well for beginners because Sodha writes from the perspective of someone who learned to cook in an English kitchen with English supermarket ingredients. She never assumes you have a specialist spice shop nearby. The recipes are practical, the portions are realistic, and the results consistently deliver on the promise of the headnotes.
What to Expect
A 320-page hardcover with photography by David Loftus. Over 130 recipes organized by meal type: snacks and street food, quick suppers, slow cooking, sides, and desserts. The difficulty ranges from simple raitas and chutneys to more involved dishes like lamb biryani, but the majority sit comfortably in the easy-to-moderate range. Named a book of the year by the Times and the Financial Times.