Not quite what you are looking for, but many of the America’s test kitchen cook books have long write ups before most recipes with that they tried and why some things didn’t work as well for ingredients. I find that many libraries have them available to borrow.

They don’t have an Indian cookbook though, I’m watching this thread for any Indian cookbook recommendations. (I don’t have any good Asian cookbook except “Let’s make ramen” and I’m hit or miss on Urvashi Pitre’s ‘Indian instant pot cookbook’ possibly from user error)

I found “The Indian Cookery Course” by author Monisha Bharadwaj.

The synopsis sounds like what you’re looking for.

I haven’t read it nor heard about it before, just found it using a quick google, so can’t comment on it’s content I’m afraid.

I have always heard good things about Madhur Jaffrey and her works.

While I personally don’t own any, perhaps something like this is what you’re after?

I am not aware of a good equivalent for Indian cooking (and would love one) but I’ll always recommend J Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab. Each chapter is dedicated to a different kind of cooking with a large introduction on the fundamental concepts, tools, and tips for ingredient shopping.

And while he doesn’t always ramp up the complexity of each recipe there is a lot of compounding. Like, he’ll have a recipe on how to make GOOD chicken stock, Then a recipe on how to speed through zhushing up some store bought. And then he’ll have a few recipes that actually use that stock.

Kenji’s The Wok also does that for Chinese(-ish) cooking but assumes a lot more foundational skills.

And while he is a d-bag and a recipe thief, Andrew Rea’s Basics with Babish is a book I buy for every relative/friend who is just learning to cook. Most recipes have a blog post at the start that explains a lot of the ideas and concepts. And it was from before he had a brand of white label pans and knives so the shopping tips are actually pretty good. AND you’ll even recognize a lot of recipes from some of your other favorite cookbooks (including The Food Lab…).

But yeah. Would love a similar book for Indian cuisine. A lot of the fundamentals ARE the same but I know I always have trouble figuring out what spices to blend or having an instinctual knowledge of what to do to fix a dish.

I’ve seen cookbooks that have some indication of the difficulty of making the dish, like easy, medium, and difficult. That might work for a self guided way to increase difficulty.

Been a while so I’m not sure which ones they were, but searching based on recipe difficulty might work for finding one.

The closest I have found is Tim Ferriss’ 4-hour chef. It’s pretty cool cause it builds on skills rather than cuisines, and to be fair it’s more a book about learning to learn instead of being purely focused on cooking. But its pretty cool, give it a shot.

I have this book, and while it is about learning to learn, it does also gradually teach you a number of important skills and techniques in a logical progression.

Anjum anand produced some great cookbooks that cover the basics and she made a tv series in the uk, i learnt to cook indian food from these books.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat does this. It begins by introducing the eponymous 4 elements at length then provides a decision tree to help you work through the recipes at the back according to the gaps in your experience.

It’s not specifically focused on Indian food but does contrast flavour profiles from different countries. For British Indian Restaurant Curry I’d recommend Dan Toombs “The Curry Guy”. It’s not written like a textbook but I’ve learned loads of tricks from it (e.g. base curry sauce/ freezing fried paneer for later, yoghurt marinades etc).

Check out “Made in India” by Meera Sodha - it has sections organized by skill level and techniques that build on eachother, plus she explains the “why” behind traditional methods which is super helpfull for learning.