Recently, I described Western dating to an uncle in India who is trying to arrange mar­riages for his two daughters. After sharing his own troubles finding suitable young men, he ruefully concluded, “Getting married here is one type of hell, but getting married there is another.”

Anita Jain has suffered the worst of both worlds. Fed up with the “emotionally excruciating uphill battle” of dating in New York City, Jain, a ­world-­traveled financial journalist, returned to the country of her parents’ upbringing and her own birth. 

 chronicles her search for a husband when she moved to Delhi at the age of ­32.

Jain, who grew up in the United States, figured that focusing her search for a year in In­dia, where she believed men were more ­marriage ­oriented, would improve her odds of finding a husband. Besides meeting potential husbands in flashy Delhi bars and on Indian dating websites, Jain took a second stab at arranging a marriage through an ad her father placed in 

 article about the first attempt, which failed but left her more appreciative of the traditional Indian way of finding a mate, who is selected by one’s family.)

Unfortunately, Jain seems more interested in stringing together amusing dating anecdotes than in making a sincere attempt at ­cross-­cultural understanding. Many of the people she encounters in America and India read like caricatures. British journalists are “rapacious conversationalists”; men from Ohio are too earnest. Indian mothers care only about marrying off their daughters, while every unattached female New York professional spends her evenings poring over the “disturbing minutiae” of ­dating.

Jain’s sharply trained reporter’s eye is best used when she describes the rapid changes juxtaposed with the traditionalism encrusting Indian cities. She had been to Delhi before, but when she returned in 2005, “it was different.” Young, educated, ­tech-­savvy professionals were transforming the ancient city through their demand for Western luxuries. Upscale coffee shops, Italian restaurants, nightclubs, and malls abutted ­cen­turies-­old forts and ­open-­air ­bazaars.

Searching for an apartment, Jain was shocked to find that many Delhi landlords didn’t like renting to single women, fearing they might be prostitutes or at least would entertain males. She finally moved into a renovated flat with a view of the city’s ancient landmarks, and herself became another dissonant element of the landscape. “I now marvel at the incongruities and ironies that abound in this country each day,” she writes. “I’m able to install ­Wi-­Fi, allowing me to check e-mail from bed, but my cook, ­Amma—­a small dumpling of a 70-year-old woman—who prepares fresh 

, and rice each day, extracts the utterly baffling third world rate of $18.20 a month.” Cheap labor makes cooks and cleaners commonplace even in India’s ­lower-­middle-­class ­households.

It’s too bad the insight Jain exhibits when describing modern India falters when she focuses inward. Often, she blames her romantic failures on the overused emigrant’s complaint of neither fitting in here nor ­there—­too liberated for Indian men, but not free enough for American ones. To Western ears, she says, her urge to settle down sounds “atavistic in nature, a throwback to a time when women couldn’t financially support themselves.” Yet her own view of partnership is pretty dismal: She looks down on female friends who married right after college and disdains women who choose marriage over a career.

Jain decided to leave New York for Delhi after attending a Central Park picnic at which she was the only person not part of a couple. Fleeing in tears, she vowed not to become “that proverbial single ­thirty­something female propped up at the bar waiting for her ship to come in.” But then she landed in India, only to find that the ­“razzle-­dazzle” new country had created waves of the “young cads” she had hoped to escape. Same bar, different ­scenery.

 is a Washington, D.C.-based writer. Her work has appeared in

 Condé Nast Portfolio, INC Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, 

Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India

 by Anita Jain, Bloomsbury, 307 pp, 2008.

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eviewer Remuka Rayasam finds Anita Jain "more interested in stringing together amusing anecdotes than in making a sincere attempt at cross-cultural understanding" in her account of her hunt for a suitable husband.

Spouse Hunt

Even in high school, I was a cooking show devotee. My brother and I spent our summer vacations in a state of delicious torture, watching programs such as 

, salivating over decadent desserts we never made ourselves. Today, flipping through the pantheon of cable television offerings, I have more choices than ever to satisfy my appetite. And judging from Kathleen Collins’s 

, I am not the only one mesmerized by chefs who dice and sauté. Few cooking show enthusiasts prepare the meals they watch being made, Collins writes, but “these shows prevail because everyone eats, knows something about food, and can relate to the endeavor.”

Television cooking shows have their roots in earlier, widely distributed radio programs in which actresses playing homemaker personalities such as Betty Crocker disseminated recipes and kitchen tips. The advent of television in the 1940s, which allowed for glorious visuals of what was prepared, brought food shows new popularity. Revered cookbook author James Beard hosted the first pro­gram, 

, which began airing in 1946, but Julia Child dominated the art form from her debut in 1962 with 

 series. For decades she was a fixture on public television, cheerfully educating viewers about French cooking.

Now food shows run all day long on their own cable channel, the Food Network, which claims to reach 98 million homes. The shows themselves have evolved beyond simple recipe instruction to cooking competitions, travel programs, and other ­mouth­watering forms of entertainment. The reality television show 

takes viewers behind the scenes of a Baltimore bakery, and 

 features a vivacious host who demonstrates how to translate restaurant dishes into home-cooked recipes.

Collins, reared on food television and edu­cated in library science, brings to the table a wealth of personal experience and research. She mined television and print archives to uncover fascinating gems about television cooking-show pioneers. On the set, Beard invented modern elements of food styling still common in food photography, using ink to emphasize the veins in Roquefort cheese and substituting mashed potatoes for ice cream. The producer of 

, which first aired in 1969, was host Graham Kerr’s wife, Treena. Completely uninter­ested in food, she jazzed up the standard recipe-instruction format, adding a live audience and sometimes ­booby-­trapping the set.

Unfortunately, there is little to bind the ingredients of this book, which lurches from food show descriptions to interviews with producers, hosts, and cultural critics, to distracting personal anecdotes. Collins can’t seem to decide whether she’s writing a scholarly work or a personal ode to food culture. For example, in noting the rise of cooking as a leisure activity—a topic that warrants a book of its own—she suggests that, in the ­post–­Betty Friedan world, women came to see their activity in the kitchen as a form of ­self-­expression. Rather than develop this idea, she simply quotes the tag line from a Burger King ad, “Have it your way.”

Collins’s ultimate goal is to explain why we watch food television even if we don’t make the recipes the hosts theatrically whip up. It’s a good question, but she never hits upon a satisfactory answer. Her devotion to the form leads her to argue that it’s because food television is unique in its ability to keep pace with decades of social trends. But as someone who also whiles away hours watching chefs sous-vide beef and fill ravioli dough, I think the reason may be simpler: We watch food shows because, like all good tele­vision, whether house makeovers or sitcoms, they tell a story. In the case of food programs, the drama is in the transformation of raw sundries into edible creations.

Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows

 by Kathleen Collins, Continuum 278 pp, 2010.

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Television cooking shows, and how they're changing the way America eats.

Renuka Rayasam