Favourite food remains rice at grandmother's kitchen in India: Padma Lakshmi in memoir

Indian-American supermodel turned chef Padma Lakshmi's memoir of food and family, survival and triumph is scheduled for launch in India on April 15 this year, publishers said in a statement today.

Lakshmi's book "Love, Loss And What We Ate," by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins "traces the arc of her unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera." 

In her book, Lakshmi, a global style icon and the first internationally successful Indian supermodel, Lakshmi recounts how even as she shuttled between continents as a child her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother's kitchen in South India.

Padma Lakshmi/Facebook

The memoir of the 45-year-old actress, model and television host of the reality cooking TV series "Top Chef" chronicles the fierce devotion of people who shaped her along the way.

It includes mention of her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally, publishers said.

Padma Lakshmi with her daughter at the Hindu Temple Society of North America; Image source: Facebook

The book has "rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external." 

The New York based author, who was once married to celebrated author Salman Rushdie has previously authored two cookbooks -- "Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet" in 2007 and "Easy Exotic: A Model's Low Fat Recipes From Around the World" in 1999.