The 5pm Dining blog is not entirely sure how we’ve missed this so far but Monir Mohammed has a book out.

Simply called Mother India at Home, it features many of the recipes which have made his Mother India restaurants in Glasgow and Edinburgh so popular.

What makes Mother India at Home stand out is how Monir, along with co-author and photographer Martin Gray, puts the recipes in context.

It is not just a recipe for spicy salmon. It’s the spicy salmon that Monir’s mother Hajra Bibi cooked him as a child. It’s not just a recipe for slow chicken curry. It’s his wife Smeena’s slow chicken curry.

Together the recipes chart the evolution of Monir’s individual cooking style, intertwined with his experience as a second-generation migrant growing up in a big city.

Authentic cooking

The book follows his culinary evolution from a deep-fried pizza eating boy in a tenement in the east end through his crash course in authentic cooking at the family farm in the Punjab.

It tells how Monir began peeling onions in his brother’s restaurant in Bathgate aged 14, opened his own restaurants, lost them, then built them up again.

As well as Monir’s own life story, the book examines how Indian dishes and restaurants became part of the cultural fabric of Glasgow.

It is the story of how Indian restaurants became one of the most popular sectors of Glasgow’s dining out scene.

Modernise and refresh

Monir helped refresh and modernise Glasgow’s Indian restaurants. The 5pm Dining blog won’t hear a bad word said about old school curries like rogan josh, madras and dopiaza.

But we also remember when that’s all there was. When Monir first opened in 1990, he helped open the city’s eyes to the idea that Indian cooking could be so much more.

Monir was also ahead of the game when it came to spicing up classic dishes from other culinary traditions. Was he the first to add his own spicy twist to Cullen skink, omelette Arnold Bennet and chicken pie?

Mother India at Home: Recipes Pictures Stories is published by Preface Publishing. Martin Gray took the book’s lush photographs.