Curried brown chickpeas. Tom McCorkle for The Washington Post; food styling by Gina Nistico for The Washington Post Years ago, I was in a used-book store when I came upon an 800-page treatise I had never seen before: “Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking.” By Yamuna Devi, the 1987 book was emblazed with a starburst announcing it as Cookbook of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP), and on one flap was a black-and-white photo of the short-haired author in a bookstore.
In quotes on the back, cookbook authors Deborah Madison, Barbara Kafka and even Julia Child praised it as “full of life,” “big and beautiful” and “gratifying.” Who was Yamuna Devi, and why had I never heard of her or what appeared to be her masterwork, a decade in the making? It turns out that she was an American-Italian woman, born Joan Campanella, who took the name Yamuna Devi when she became a disciple of an Indian swami, Srila Prabhupada, in 1967. As she writes in the book’s introduction, she “traveled the length and breadth of India” with him as his personal cook, at times becoming “the first Westerner allowed in previously restricted temple kitchens.
” Prabhupada and then Devi were Vaishnavas, practicing a form of Hinduism that held that “cooking was a spiritual experience ...
much like meditation – a means of expressing love and devotion to the Supreme Lord, Krishna,” the incarnation of the god Vishnu. The book is.
