When recipes mingle with family history

Blame it on Like Water for chocolate, the food memoir that triggered a wave of books that blended memory with recipes. The best of this micro-genre were probably Isabel Allende&rsquos Aphrodite, which steamed up both bedroom and kitchen, and Shoba Narayan&rsquos Monsoon Diary, where the recipes were tied with care to each chapter&rsquos exploration of vegetarian South Indian cuisine.

The Settler&rsquos Cookbook unravels Yasmin Alibhai-Brown&rsquos complex family history, which takes her from India to Uganda to the contemporary United Kingdom. &ldquoOpinions come out of me like eggs from well-fed chickens,&rdquo Alibhai-Brown observes, and hers pepper these pages with a greater frequency than is perhaps wise.

The problem with the book is not the history it explores, which is of genuine interest. She is illuminating on the internal politics that governed the lives of Asians in East Africa. &ldquoIn the homes of the big people, with the curtains drawn, the feasts were getting more outrageous, food absurdly richer, as if they were living through the last days of a hedonistic civilization &mdash which in some ways they were. They had to eat up their wealth before the blackies got to it.&rdquo

But as we reach Yasmin Alibhai-Brown&rsquos own life, the memoir becomes intensely personal &mdash her student loneliness, her abortion, her views on racial discrimination, fights with friends and lovers, columns written. All of this is remembered with great zest, which is fine if you&rsquore as interested in the life of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown clearly is. The larger history of the time and place is eroded in the telling, though, and the recipes become more and more arbitrary. A plain vanilla cookbook would have been welcome a recipe-less memoir would have done the job. The two together make an awkward, if sometimes flavoursome, combination.