Mother Tongue: Flavours of a Second Generation by Gurdeep Loyal is published by 4th Estate on 2 March. Your gift only takes a few minutes and has a lasting impact on The Splendid Table and you'll be welcomed into The Splendid Table Co-op. Being in a country that doesn’t easily support Mexican (ahem, UK) I’ve had to get creative with my combination. The book's narrative follows life in the kitchen for Achatz and his crew, and includes more than 400 behind-the-scenes photographs by Lara Kastner.

His culinary expertise derives partly from his nearest and dearest: “Food is the central dynamic of how my family works”, he tells me. I didn’t stuff and roll the rest ’cause I would have had to grate more cheese and I wanted to eat them RIGHT AWAY!It is salt, fat, sugar-heavy, and we are a big whisky-drinking family – as lots of Punjabi people are – so big, bold flavours, unapologetic with everything, very liberal in many different ways. Inventiveness, originality and pleasure run through every page… the recipes are consistently inviting, and more than occasionally wow-out-loud thrilling… book of the month. But as soon as I dove into the actual recipes and started making things like beef tongue and whole turkeys swaddled in lard cloth, it then became a project that was so much about culture and identity and understanding the history of an island's cuisine that is fiercely underexplored. I’ve nothing against commercial curry powder, but it seems an odd ingredient in recipes where the minor differences between aniseed and fennel are deemed significant.

But a second midwestern food book, Evelyn Birkby's Up a Country Lane Cook-book, locates the shift from "scratch" meals to ones made from processed foods through the very recipes that marked that shift. Mother Tongue shows off Loyal’s adeptness at working with myriad flavours and combining them to sensational effect, including a particular penchant for combining extremes of sour and sweet, with a hint of anise and “added textural crunch”. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In his debut cookbook, Mother Tongue, Loyal makes new versions of some of the most-loved recipes of his childhood. I found the extra liquid helpful for keeping leftover filling a little more moist in the fridge for a few days.And an epigraph on the following page commemorates a request his mother Bhupinder Loyal once made in a restaurant: “Excuse me, waiter.