PBA Galleries

First and only edition. Original cloth. Frontispiece illustration of the author. 5 x 7.5”, 60pp.+ publishers ads. Rare.

Probably the first "Hindu" Indian recipes published in America.

 According to “Gastronomica” (2004) this book “on the Hindu philosophy of life and food”, is a rare (“few copies…extant”) and “unusual early Hindu culinary contribution”. Its 10-page chapter on "Preparations and Recipes" is probably the first book appearance in America on Indian cooking. No complete Indian cookbook written for American readers was published until 1973, though an equally rare “missing link” between the two – see next entry in this catalogue – by a San Francisco German-born artist, appeared in 1924

Dr. K.eshava Deva Shastri, who came to the US in 1913, became a popular lecturer who railed against Indian forced child marriage and actively supported Indian independence from British colonial domination. Also a devotee of the occult doctrine of Theosophy, he was once arrested for fraudulently claiming he could cure the insane wife of an American businessman by hypnotism. He later married the Norwegian adopted daughter of an Omaha Jewish millionaire; in 1924, he and his wife returned to India, where they disappeared, his father-in-law fearing they had been victims of a "popular uprising".