Not ‘cookery fiction’. An appreciation of Charmaine Solomon’s body of work on South Asian cuisines

    7 August 2025

    July 2015

    For years I’ve been giving recipes to friends… “Why don’t you put them in a book, they say. Well at last, it seems I have done so. It makes me happy to know that through my book many more people will be able to explore the delights of Eastern food.

    So wrote Charmaine Solomon in 1972 in the Preface to her South East Asian Cookbook. This was her first published cookbook. In it she gave recipes for dishes in Indian and Ceylonese cuisines. These two, together with Pakistani and Bangladeshi cuisines are called South Asian cuisines in this article. Over the next 21 years she published seven cookbooks which wholly or in part dealt with South Asian cuisines.

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    Paul van Reyk
    My first essay on food was in Year 10 - people seemed to like it. It took me 56 years to come back to it, so I have a lot of catching up to do. My focus is on Anglo-Saxon settler culinary ways in Australia, roughly from the first days of colonisation to the 1960s - 1970s. I particularly write about stuff that has not been written about before but is very much a part of the Anglo-Saxon Australian table. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing.