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Hardly does an Indian chef write a cookbook, and rarely does a work in this genre necessitate more than a cursory look. Because it turns out to be yet another deathless listing of recipes, most of them being impossible to replicate in regular homes, with very few insights and incidents from the writer's life to make the offering worth much shelf space. Among Indian cookbook writers, I love reading Ritu Dalmia because she unfailingly combines recipes with entertaining stories from her kitchen or her travels, and more recently, I found Manish Mehrotra's Indian Accent Cookbook particularly useful.

Ranveer Brar livens up his cookbook, ‘Come Into My Kitchen' with a riveting autobiographical narrative, a lucid discussion on quirky recipes and a procession of aha food facts This is because of the light Mehrotra sheds on ingredients, especially those commonplace cereals and vegetables that are staging a comeback on our tables. Television chef Ranveer Brar's Come Into My Kitchen therefore comes along as a whiff of early morning air because of the seamless prose he employs to narrate his life story.

With a life as crowded as Brar's, the cookbook, unsurprisingly, is packed with stories narrated in a conversational style He was a Sikh boy growing up in Lucknow, falling in love with cooking at the local gurdwara's langar, and at age 17, became an apprentice to Ustad Munir Ahmed, a kebab shop owner on the lane behind Odeon cinema, to convince his parents that he was serious about pursuing a career in kitchens. Today he comes frozen in publicity shots with his chikna Punjab munda looks and toothy smile.  But Brar has hauled sacks of coal for his first ustad, topped the hotel management graduation exam nationwide, made 3,000 potato rostis in a day during a flash strike at a flight kitchen in his formative years, been a very young executive chef at The Claridges New Delhi - where I first met him in 2005 - studied at the Culinary Institute of America, and run restaurants in the US.

Brar has since become a celebrity chef - and I have had the experience of our conversation being rudely interrupted by his female fans begging him for selfies and other such juvenile favours. And his most recent show, The Great Indian Rasoi, will be remembered for presenting Lucknow's famous cooks - Munir Ustad, Mohammad Abu Bakr of Idris Ki Biryani fame and the 95-year-old khansama Mubarak Ali - with as much feeling as when he presented the story of Shanti Devi, game slot a young widow at a Bishnoi village near Jodhpur who made her livingcooking rotis for a balwadi At the age of 17 Brar became an apprentice at a kebab shop to convince his parents that he was serious about pursuing a career in kitchens With a life as crowded as Brar's, the cookbook, unsurprisingly, is packed with stories narrated in a conversational style - I can almost hear Brar's baritone in the background as I read his words.

He also engages in an intellectual exercise that not many chefs, to the best of my knowledge, have attempted anywhere in the world (and this makes Come Into My Kitchen doubly relevant for serious students of the culinary arts).