Magpie in the Chez Panisse Kitchen

a book, a cook, a tradition

Book review by Cheryl Angelina Koehler

Right: Niloufer Ichaporia King (left) and Amy Dencler don their Parsi New Year garlands as they finish preparing the 2025 Parsi New Year dinner at Chez Panisse. Photo by Rashmi Munot. Left: The photo of King’s book, My Bombay Kitchen, is by Clara Rice

Back when the Internet was but an apple in a tech bro’s eye, many of us indulged in frequent bouts of vicarious travel simply by heaving the household encyclopedia or dictionary onto the dining room table and losing ourselves in a fascinating universe of information. In the fine print of an etymology, one could watch a word migrate across continents and imagine daily life in an ancient time when some idea first needed a precise utterance.

Like a word, a recipe almost always has a deep story, a lineage that carries across traditions and foodsheds as it connects one cook to another. When an able cookbook author crafts a good collection of such stories, a reader can be kept up into the wee hours with the bed lamp burning. Accordingly, it was several days before I put down Niloufer Ichaporia King’s James Beard Award–winning My Bombay Kitchen. Published in 2007, it had been sitting on the shelf near my old print dictionary awaiting rediscovery.

The warp and weft of this extraordinary book—with its tapestry of stories, recipes, and handmade illustrations by the author’s husband, David King—grounds readers with a history of Parsi migrations from Persia to the Gujarat coast of western India (around 936 CE) and then brings them into several generations of Ichaporia family kitchens, all enlivened by Niloufer’s wit and style.

The author first came to the Bay Area in the 1970s to study design at UC Berkeley (later earning a PhD in cultural anthropology) and eventually found herself moving among luminaries of the Bay Area’s groundbreaking food community. Her home kitchen in San Francisco was a lively place, even more so with the arrival of her mother from India after her father passed away. King became friends with Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters and extended an invitation to the family’s annual Parsi New Year dinner. After attending, Waters asked for the dinner to become a Chez Panisse event, an idea that did not captivate King at first. “She wore me down,” says King of the entreaties, and now the Parsi New Year dinner has been held on the evening of many a spring equinox since 1997 at Berkeley’s iconic destination restaurant.

King’s recipe for Seafood Salad with Sauce Créole will not be found in My Bombay Kitchen. It’s a version of a dish that the author invented in concert with Chez Panisse Restaurant Chef Amy Dencler for the 2025 Parsi New Year dinner. Such evolution of a dish is in keeping with how King describes her “magpie cuisine,” one that adopts and adapts through various guests and occasions and across continents. Read King’s recipe and the story behind it here. ♦