The Settler's Cookbook: Press reviews

‘Full of rich delicious prose, and even more delicious recipes, this wonderful story of one Indian family, and the memories and meals they shared over generations, gives fresh meaning to the term “soul food”.’

Meera Syal

'I’m reading a book that’s particularly touching, charming and elegiac. It’s The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food, by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. It is about the table of Ugandan-Asians, which was brought originally from India to East Africa, then had to pick up its bag and move again to England. Refugees find particular comfort in food: it is often the only thing they can carry with them. It is a taste of home, but a home that is a moveable feast. Home is always more than terroir, more than the mud the house stands on. I particularly liked a recipe for roast red spicy spuds: simple and basic, a collection of cultures. Best, Yasmin says, served with white bread and a fried egg. So English.'

AA Gill

‘For many of us food is the gateway experience into other cultures and lives.
Yasmin's personal story intertwined with the foods which mean so much to her touched me deeply. And made me hungry. You can’t ask for more.’

Gavin Essler

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 … This is, though, more than a collection of foodie memories. Alibhai-Brown's own migration is intimately bound up with the fate of other East African Asians … It is a story seldom told, and Alibhai-Brown's account of it is fascinating and touching.’

Sunday Times

‘More than a hundred recipes pepper The Settler's Cookbook, but readers with scant interest in cookery should not be deterred from this wonderful book. If the recipes were stripped away, a memoir of real substance would remain … This is a path-breaking record, but also a compelling, moving narrative: of shifting identities, survival and … the strength of maternal love.’

Independent

‘Alibhai-Brown paints a lively picture of a community that stayed trapped in old ways until it was too late to change … she is gripping when it comes to their best-known moment of turbulence: the expulsion from Uganda … the people of the Ugandan Asian diaspora lead less sharply privileged, more anonymous lives these days … They are also, thanks to this brave book, a little better recorded than they were before.’

Guardian

‘Alibhai-Brown’s story of acculturation, and her own success as a sharp-minded, at times sharp-tongued, commentator on race, multiculturalism and human rights, is as lively as her journalism.’

The Times

‘In a touching and frank account, she captures an image of a private Asian community who owned most of Uganda’s wealth by the time Idi Amin came to power … Alibhai-Brown moves form African and British politics to the pain of divorce and existential loss, while introducing cookery in an original, seamless and dramatic way, using food not only to inform us about the different culinary cultures she has experienced and interpreted, but also top enhance the stories that she tells.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘It is diasporic writing at its best; unpretentious and quirky in its multicultural perspective, expansive in its scope. … The memoir’s subtitle could not be more succinct; love and food, two forms of human sustenance, interconnected by migration, lend a poignant emotional and intellectual momentum to the book … the author displays erudition that shimmers.’

Irish Times

‘A rare contribution to the cookery book meets family history genre.’

New Humanist

‘From Gogol to Bulgakov, Russian literature has long deployed surrealism as a means of confronting the absurdity of Russia's governments ... Oschner paints a vibrant portrait of a community with featherweight beauty and gentle humour.’

Metro

‘It’s beautifully written, as you would expect, and utterly fascinating. There are some wonderful dishes here too.’

Tribune

'Delightfully spicy (in the culinary sense) memoir from the columnist and leading commentator on race and human rights.’

Bookseller

‘Unusual memoir-cum-cookery book which uses food as an emotional touchstone for memory and cultural history.’

Metro

‘Interlaces reminiscences and ruminations on the life of the migrant with mouth-watering recipes.'

London Review of Books

‘[An] admirable, highly personal endeavour pack with some evocative recipes.'

Time Out

‘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.’

Bee Wilson, London Review of Books

‘…moving and uplifting’

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