Curry for Comfort

Meera Sodha was 18, at college and eating with friends at a curry house in London, one of the dozens that crowd Brick Lane in the city’s East End. She had grown up in Lincolnshire, three hours to the north, the daughter of Indians who came to Britain from Uganda in 1972, when Idi Amin ordered all Asians to leave his nation or be killed. The food she grew up eating, she told me a few weeks ago, was fresh and simple, Indian food of the sort that her ancestors cooked for hundreds of years.

Sodha is now 33. But recalling that evening in Brick Lane still causes her voice to rise a little in indignation. The food that was in front of her was a far distance from fresh and simple. ‘‘It was awful,’’ she said. ‘‘It was baby food. My brown face went ashen.’’

She went home and called her mother, asked for some recipes and started to cook. And she kept cooking, looking over the shoulders of relatives, recording for the first time recipes that had been passed down only as stories, woman to woman, for generations.

It took more than a decade to assemble, but Sodha’s ‘‘Made in India: Recipes From an Indian Family Kitchen’’ was published in Britain last year, where it sold very well. Just released in the United States, it offers a terrific introduction to the world of Sodha’s past and present cooking: dead-simple family food absolutely packed with flavor.

Take as an example the simple chicken curry that Sodha’s mother made in Lincolnshire, her ‘‘ultimate comfort food,’’ in Sodha’s words. It is marvelous accompanied by her aunt Harsha’s naan, a soft and pillowy flatbread that is the curry’s natural and best companion, with or without a mound of basmati rice on the side. The recipes are unpretentious and were immediately promoted by my family of critics into must-makes for the monthly dinner rotation, new staples for a season of chill and damp.