On being fed by friends

Traditionally, it’s the women who do it. Mothers, aunts, grandmothers, wives, sisters, daughters, pouring their love and their frustrations into what they put on the plate; the extra sandesh, the meal that took six hours to cook and a week to plan.

Then we grew up, and moved out, and there were no more Mashimas or Nanis to supervise our kitchens, our tables. We learned to fend for ourselves, to pick out our own clothes, professions, sexual preferences and politics. Many of us worked very hard to escape the iron tyrannies of our respective family backgrounds, grown-ups in a constant state of teenage rebellion. Some left, to have their passports stamped with an independence that was among the many foreign luxuries that didn’t make their way to India. Some stayed and carved out a schizophrenic freedom, leading ghare-baire lives: one role for the home, one for the world.

But as we graduated from cheese-tomato-sauce sandwiches to seven-course catered or flamboyantly home-cooked meals, this one thing didn’t change; in times of trouble, we fed our friends, were fed by them.

Chicken in black pepper:

What you need for this one-pot meal is lots of roughly ground black pepper and lots of boneless chicken, also salt. Not too much oil; just make sure that the one big cooking pot you have is at the right heat, which is to say very hot. Let the black pepper sizzle, releasing its aromas. Add the chicken. Saute. Add water, add more black pepper and salt; simmer till done; serve on unmatched plates with newspaper for a tablecloth. This was what you cooked when you’d outgrown Maggi noodles, couldn’t afford real cooking, but could afford real friends, good conversation. One pot, thinned with enough water, thickened with enough banter and laughter, would stretch well into the long nights and tide you over the barsati power-cuts, the water shortages, the credit card debt and the thankless gruntwork of the jobs on the first rungs of a very long ladder.

Mangoes:

In Calcutta, mixed with flattened rice (cheera, poha) that had been soaked but not cooked and allowed to steep in plain yogurt or leftover mishti doi. Cheere-doi was what you ate when khichdi was unaffordable; the next stage would be cups of tea and cigarettes because you couldn’t afford real food, not till the tuition payments or the anorexic salary cheque came in next month. The mangoes—you need pulpy, sweet-tart ones for this dish—were what transformed humble cheere-doi from the quintessential poor-man’s-fodder to something that hinted at future sumptuousness, untold wealth. Even half a mango, or the scrapings off the stone, added to cheere-doi, would make you feel rich; to have that sweetness added to the daily struggle.

In Delhi, one Alfonso could stretch to milkshake for four, in the not-rich, not-poor days. Or it could be what a friend, just back from making a difficult decision, hollowed out inside, accepted when she couldn’t accept the invitations to talk: mango, sliced, on a plate, and quietness, and the company of a few friends was needed more than sympathy and verbal sharing. In later years we could buy them by the case. But that one mango you bought to share with three other friends, that first mango of the season, it tasted so good.

Soba noodles with prawns, buckwheat noodles with beef, cucumber and chili, miso soup:

In a time of some slight sadness and personal trouble, one of those dark winters that all of us go through at some time or the other and eventually emerge from, blinking into the light, my palate craved clean flavours, and my hands needed to keep busy.
This is what I cooked, for friends and office colleagues, over and over again, quiet, unspectacular meals that promised nourishment and lightness rather than gourmet entertainment.

Miso soup, with tiny cubes of tofu, seaweed stirring in the cloudy broth and rising to the surface. Cold soba noodles, in homemade stock with a sharp cleansing lemongrass tang, lightly steamed prawns. Buckwheat noodles or green tea noodles, heaped with thinly sliced meat or shiitake mushrooms, basil, mint and cilantro adding their freshness, red bird’s-eye chillis tamed between slices of vinegary-sweet cucumber.

There was nothing original about these meals, but they served their purpose; to ferry one across a bad time, into a better time. The satisfaction in making them was not the satisfaction of skill; it was of getting the timing right, the balance of ingredients right, and now it comes to me that cooking these very easy, very ordinary dishes were just a promise of future serenity, the possibility of balance.

Pasta, three ways:

Pasta has almost replaced khichdi or sambhar-rice as our version of comfort food. Years ago, a friend newly struggling with domesticity, adjusting to her first kitchen, made gigantic bowls of pasta with Kissan’s tomato ketchup and bits of paneer. Sensing that this might not be enough, she stirred in two packets of Haldiram’s dalmoth. It was the first time she’d ever cooked and it was the first-ever adult housewarming she’d had. In later years, she’d serve the usual staples, our decade's version of aspic and Caesar salads: clever pasta salads with avocado and shrimp, perfect linguine in homemade marinara sauce, farfalle with pine nuts and chorizo.

For now, there was this: undercooked pasta, raw to the tongue and dangerous to the tooth, the metallic tang of bottled ketchup, the dalmoth miserably mixing with the paneer. We watched her beaming as she set this out on a tablecloth crocheted for her by an aunt. We dug in, and asked for second helpings. It was as horrible as we’d feared, but she was so pleased, to be a hostess in her own home for the very first time.

Men who’ve been on their own do pasta really, really well. It’s not just their “girlfriend” dish; it’s what they pull out for old, good friends when there hasn’t been enough time to do the fancy bachelor dinner or to pick up cheese-salami-Kalamata olives. And perhaps they do know this, but they never entirely understand how relaxing it feels to be treated like a guest, to lean against the kitchen counter and watch someone else chop the onions and sauté red peppers and mushrooms for a change. To be cooked for, rather than cooking for: it’s a gift. We love it when they make the effort with the Moroccan-chicken tagine or the extra-special dal-gosht their mother taught them, but we love this too: pasta, cooked al dente, the sauce simmering alongside, ready and plated in half an hour, with or without a salad and good bread alongside.

You grow up, and you get to know chefs. And some of them become friends, and some of those friends will call you over because—why? They want to cook that night. Or their kitchen’s trying out new dishes. Or they want to introduce you to someone they think you’ll enjoy meeting. And you find yourself loving the tomato-mozzarella appetizers, the scallops and the Gorgonzola-cheese tenderloin, but slowing down for the pumpkin-stuffed ravioli.

You don’t do restaurant reviews any more, but that ravioli reminds you of a time when your city was just beginning to discover its palate, and when diners faced with ravioli stared at it in blank dismay and asked for macaroni-cheese, not this flattened momo stuff. It reminds you of the reactions to Indian nouvelle cuisine—where did the butter chicken go? Or the reactions to delicate Cantonese Chinese or the introduction of lethal Sichuan peppers: this was so not the chopsuey we knew and loved. Or sashimi, even, where people shuddered at the thought of eating raw fish. And what you love about your chef friends is that so many years later, some of them famous, some of them TV superstars, this is still what it comes down to for them. The love of feeding people, of making them taste something once new, now familiar, and feel replete.

Whether it’s Madhu Menon making braised pork for a crowd, or Ritu Dalmia—on this occasion—leaning her elbow on the table, watching our expressions, our reactions as we settle into the kind of openness and comfort that only good food can bring about among strangers, this compulsion to make people happy at the table is a chef thing. I’ve had stunningly inventive meals and spectacularly memorable ones. But there’s nothing like settling down to a meal where the chef’s goal isn’t to impress you—it’s to make you happy.

The ravioli is handmade, plump, buttery, the walnuts flash-fried to crispness, an elegant restaurant dish. And yet it comes from the same family as the store pasta I’ve eaten in so many friend’s kitchens: food intended to restore and comfort, cooked with simplicity and love.

Food: Following Fish

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2010, in the food column)










The arguments against fish are many, especially in a north Indian city like Delhi. Fish is bony — often, in fact, the tastier the fish, the bonier it is. Its fragrance is persistent, and for some, too pungent to handle. Meat is relatively easy to understand; the subtleties of buying fish change from coastline to coastline and can take a lifetime to master.

I rarely order fish in Delhi, which is in keeping with my position of mild apostasy on fish — heretical in a Bengali family. While my sister ate her way through fishheads, whole gunmetal pabda and chunks of hilsa, I had to be fed fish by stealth: mashed, in a fiery mustard chutney. It was only as an adult that I realised why I didn’t like fish — the dislike stemmed from a kind of austere, demanding love.

Eating freshly caught and flash-fried bhekti in the Sunderbans on a river boat was a pleasure; I tucked into karimeen with gusto in Palakkad; tackled a tiny, grimly bony but delicious fish curry in Goa; and ate my way through the fish platter at the once-legendary Ananthashram in Bombay, demanding second helpings. It was the freshness that counted; my palate will tolerate mediocre hamburger or frozen prawns, but seems to jib at anything less than absolutely fresh, perfectly cooked fish.

For all fish apostates — or inadvertent gourmands — I have one recommendation: read Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (Penguin, Rs 250). This is not just good travel and food writing — as Samanth travels in search of hilsa in Bengal, toddy shop fish curry in Kerala, trawls through fishing communities and examines the live fish treatment for asthma in Hyderabad, he will revive your curiosity and your appetite.

Having a great fish meal requires a lack of embarrassment on the part of the diner (unless you’re eating the standard sole fillet in butter sauce, or sashimi), and while some clubs, restaurants and five-stars serve good fish, your best meals are likely to be in far more humble places. Canteens in Mumbai, shacks in Goa, toddy shops in Kerala, hole-in-the-wall outlets in Kolkata can and do offer meals that rival anything you’d find in the fine dining line.

Eating at Narayan’s in Mangalore, Samanth falls in love with the restaurant’s trademark masala, “the masala that aggregated in fried lumps on the circulating tray like spicy, red snowdrifts”. The thali is served; he works his way through the seer, sardines and ladyfish, then stands next to the kitchen — “simply sniffing at the frying masala on the tawa, deep-breathing fanatically, trying to fill my lungs with enough aroma to last the day”. Travelling in the Kanyakumari district, he meets food maven Jacob Aruni, who introduces him to fish podi, a dried fish powder used like the gunpowder podis, mixed with rice and ghee.

Aruni’s dried mackerel podi, writes Samanth, “looked like powdery jaggery, speckled white in places with coconut, and it had a deep, spicy aroma, shot through with the strong presence of fish. Tasted raw, it races to the back of your throat and proceeds to set your tonsils on fire… They were mackerel with character, bursting out of their envelope of spice like strong actors out of a crowded script.”

When he’s not learning how to eat hilsa, or searching for the perfect, elusive fish curry of childhood memory, Samanth is a wonderful guide to the changing, threatened lives of today’s fishermen, to boat-building yards and the diverse histories of the Portuguese and the Dutch in India.

Two days after reading Following Fish, I found myself in one of Delhi’s small, local markets, searching for hilsa roe and mackerel. The places where you get great fish, rather than cottony, deep-freeze fillets with all the appeal of wilted lettuce, in this city are few but worth browsing, from Andhra Bhavan to Gunpowder, Ploof to Pan Asian, Dakshin to Ai. But if you don’t find yourself drawn to the fishmarkets and then to the spice merchants, and then back to your kitchen to cook after reading Following Fish, I will undertake to travel to Hyderabad and swallow a live murrel, despite my lack of asthma.

Food: India's national dish

(Published in Outlook, January 11, 2010. I had a wonderful sparring match with a foodie friend where we both agreed that India's national dish should be dal--but that since there's no chance of agreeing on what kind of dal, I said I'd stick with the choice of the masses.)





In Looking Through Glass, Mukul Kesavan exhibited the classic cunning of the Indian intellectual. Faced with the question of naming a national dish, his narrator ducks and suggests instead a tricolour banquet, with delicacies drawn from various regions across the country.



It’s a clever and diplomatic solution, given the alternative. Scotland’s national dish, haggis, pays obeisance to that country’s sheep-rearing past, by stuffing sheep’s intestines with oatmeal, mixed meat and blood. (Scotland’s unofficial dish is technically vegetarian, but is considered culinary barbarity—Mars bars, coated in batter and deep-fried.)



Foie gras is for political and other reasons not officially part of France’s heritage, but in 2005, the country announced that goose livers, however unpalatable to the animal rights brigade, were to be considered part of its proud culinary heritage—by law. And several countries across the Middle East proudly claim credit for being the first to serve sheep’s eyeballs to (suffering) visitors. (They’re mentioned in passing in the Arabian Nights.)



If we were to follow suit, we might find ourselves ransacking the Nimat-namah and other medieval cookbooks for peacock recipes, economically combining the demand for a national dish with the presence of a national bird. There’s an ancient Rajput recipe for goat stuffed with peacock, while the ingredients for a banquet in Jahangir’s time lists the quantity of gold leaf required to coat a hundred roasted peacocks, along with helpful suggestions on how to place the feathers back on the cooked bird for maximum presentation points.



But tricolour peacock pate or biryani is destined never to grace our August 15 tables. In one sense, it fulfils all the requirements of a national dish: it’s an equal-opportunity shocker, guaranteed to offend vegetarians of all religious persuasions, environmentalists and bleeding heart liberals. Given the fragility of these sentiments, a wise writer of this sort of article would hastily remove it from her hypothetical menu, before the guardians of India’s cultural traditions start rumbling ominously.



Why do we need a national dish in the first place? It’s a good question. Given that this is a country where a tiny shift in dialect can be enough to split a state, and where arguments continue over whether clubs in the 21st century shouldn’t wake up to the fact that the British have left the building and allow its members to sport dhotis, the debate over what would be the perfect national dish is bound to be fraught. And in India, given the number of contenders from biryani-pulao to tandoori chicken to bhelpuri to dosas and parathas—and the infinite variety of regional variations—we could spark off the desi version of the Boston Tea Party: the Indian Chai and Curry Riots.



Even Wikipaedia, that unfailing source of dubious information and debatable facts, sensibly shies away from naming India’s national dish in its otherwise long list of what’s on the world’s tables—though it does, tentatively, offer chai/ lassi as our national drink. (Thereby offending, and uniting, kapi drinkers across the country, whether they take their brew French-press style or in time-honoured filter fashion.)



This should be simple enough. Given that biryani, pulao and khichdi are part of the Indian palate, and that a rough three-fifths of the world’s nations have some kind of rice dish as their national favourite, surely we can anoint some combination of rice-and-veggies or rice-and-meat? Not so. Aside from the fact that wheat-eating regions will have their sentiments damaged, there’s the tricky question of which recipe you choose. The classic, plain vanilla dal-and-rice khichdi has over 60 variations. Choosing a Lucknawi biryani over the Hyderabadi kacchi biryani over say, a classic coastal seer fish biryani is beyond my capabilities—and we haven’t even got to the pulaos yet.



The same issues crop up with almost every dish you might offer. Bhelpuri is present in most regions of the country, as is its predecessor, the humble dalmoth mixture—but Bombay claims the bhel, which makes it far too urban a dish, and it is almost absent from the further reaches of North India. The ubiquitous bread omelette seems, at first glance, to be a unifier—it’s the hostel food of necessity across the country—but it contains eggs, alienating most of sattvik and pavitra India, and is, to the best of my knowledge, unsanctified by tradition and unmentioned in the Vedas.



The samosa seems promising—but then we would have to acknowledge the possibility that it’s actually the sambusak, brought into India by marauding traders who borrowed this from their travels along the spice route. Even the khichdi is tainted by the British insistence on adding flaked fish and hard-boiled eggs to a much drier rice-dal blend, and renaming it kedgeree. It’s hard to escape the alien taint, whichever way you look.



History revisionists, and apologists for the tendency of heartland Bharat to ignore the North-East, might urge that we adopt either the momo or chowmein, both of which have travelled well around the country, and been forgiving of adaptation. Chowmein, in particular, should please the post-liberalisation generation. Instant noodles were for a brief while in the 1980s the most identifiable, and affordable, signal of a new modernity, and feminists might argue that Maggi did more to free women from the drudgery of domestic work than a thousand scholarly rants. But chowmein isn’t as ubiquitous across India as, say, the equally alien import of the pizza is in America: it fails the Railway Station test, which requires that any national dish be by and large available at most of the stations of the cross from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.



Given the complexities of the problem, why can’t we do without a national dish? The answer, in one word: curry. As generations of Indian food historians from the venerable K T Achaya onwards have pointed out, there is technically no such dish as curry. There’s a curry leaf; there are different kinds of curry powders and masalas, though these must not be confused with the post-Raj abomination known as Madras Curry Powder; and you might admit at a pinch that to curry a dish is to use a combination of specific cooking techniques.



The problem is that given our reluctance to anoint a national dish, we’re stuck with a non-existent version—the phantom Indian curry. In the popular foreign imagination, a dish of curry is pretty much the way the ambassador to Jahangir’s court, Thomas Roe, described it: a mess of spices in an inexplicable gravy. Roe redeemed himself by noting the plethora of sauces that went into the makings of different kinds of curry, but to the world at large, “curry” conveys the sense of a kind of spicy, mouth-burning hodge-podge.



The UK adds insult to injury by dubbing any Indian meat dish with a fiery, coconut-infused gravy a “vindaloo”, causing the ghosts of Portuguese seafarers past to turn in their graves. And a recent survey in the UK revealed that chicken tikka masala rivals fish n’ chips in popularity as the national dish. This might seem like the revenge of the empire, but consider this a moment: the CTM was invented by a cook in a Bangladeshi restaurant and its main ingredients include Campbell’s tomato soup. To settle for curry, conjuring up in most minds this bastardised concoction, would be to insult India’s centuries-old culinary tradition most grievously.



That leaves an insidious staple, as popular as the bread-omelette, more ubiquitous than the chowmein, found in pre-Mughal if not quite Harappan India. The dosa has crept into our lives in a quiet revolution, a stealthy and entirely bloodless coup. It can be found in dhabas in the Himalayas, stuffed with exotic ingredients in five-star restaurants—no one has yet invented the black truffle dosa, but some of us bet that this is only a matter of time. It can be stuffed with paneer, or with chicken and keema fillings for the unregenerate carnivore, but it’s the masala dosa that flies its flag across India.



And best of all, it is guaranteed to offend everyone equally north and south of the Vindhyas; the true Chettinad or Syrian Christian purist finds the masala dosa an abomination, and the North Indian culinary enthusiast is horrified at the pan-national appeal of this South Indian invention. You can even, experimenting with spinach and carrot fillings, create a suitably tricolour masala dosa, while retaining the potato stuffing that is the trademark of the true Udipi stalwart. We can continue to argue over the rest of the menu for a genuinely nationalist Indian banquet, but for the moment, the dosa gets my vote.

Apologies and a nibble: English vegetables, desi steak

(Haven't had time to update the blog for a while--my apologies. Here's a place-holder--an essay on food, written in 2003, that I thought I'd lost. Enjoy.)

Galangal and lemon grass were piled up in hillocks. The mushrooms were fresh and came in four varieties-white, dried dhingri, dried shitaake and dried, slightly dubious porcini. "Maydum," said my old faithful vegetable seller, "aur bhi fresh-fresh aaye hain." I came back with the usual urban load of fancy ghaas-phoos: borkoli, snaw piss, red peepers, aspagragrass -- and with a phrase reverberating in my head. English vegetables.

As opposed to desi veggies. My father-in-law had used it first, in appreciation of a dish of babycorn and red peppers tossed with hing, jeera and fried onions: "Aamar," he had said in Bangla, on the only visit he ever made to our house, before the cancer made travel difficult, "English vegetables khub bhalo laagey."

It was a winter evening and as I mechanically sorted, made mental menus and stashed my load of exotica away, I found myself counting the absences. The day before Diwali is when Bengali households celebrate by lighting fourteen lamps and cooking a mixture of fourteen kinds of saag. This year I'd made up the quota with the usual greens -- palak, methi, lal saag; and some less usual ones -- bok choy, watercress. (My conscience cavilled that watercress was not saag. I rejoined that I didn't have all day to shop, and that watercress was peppery, green and leafy -- ergo, close enough to saag not to make a difference.)

I slowed when I hauled out a bunch of carrots: orange, like the ones in the 'phoren' picture books for children, and tasteless, unlike the deep red, hairy, indigenous varieties that were increasingly hard to locate. Mulberries and phalsa had been equally hard to find in the summer gone by. In the fancy markets, English vegetables were easier to get than ever before; the old, desi roots-and-tubers stuff harder to come by, barring a few limited staples.


***


Ten years ago, at the Calcutta Club, I'd eavesdropped on a conversation happening two tables away. "These Phrench Phries," complained a man in a Bong-Yank accent, "they are bherry limp. Not like the ashol jinish, the real thing, at all." "It is the potatoes, Alok da," said his companion gravely. "Until India learns to grow potatoes like the Idaho variety, we cannot sample the authentic Phrench Phry." One chewed on a relatively inoffensive steak, whose authenticity had not been called into question, while the other contemplated, with solemn displeasure, the unworthy impostor on the plate. Together they managed to convey the impression that what to my untutored palate was a perfectly reasonable alu-bhaja would never make the passing grade as even third-rank Phrench Phries.

That was before the Hindutva brigade discovered that the two ingredients you need for the perfect Phrench Phry were: a) the humble potato raised to the standard set by the Idaho variety and b) distinctly unsacred but tasty beef tallow as the frying fat. Or the Phrying Phat. Either way, it was only a short while before, for McDonalds and company, the Phat was well and truly in the Phire.



***



That evening, as I chopped red peppers, cucumber and tomatoes for a last summer gazpacho before winter set in and drove me to the comfort of hot soups and plain dal-bhaat, the German laser knives someone had gifted me felt wrong in the hand, their weight suddenly awkward. Setting them aside, I came up with a chopper set on a wooden board that a friend had brought down from New York. It made swift work of the Spanish onions and the peppers, and I remembered the pride with which he'd told me that this was the very "offset serrated blade" praised by Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential.

I'd reached the tomatoes and the last of the twilight was shading into smog when the sleekly post-modern lines of my New York-imported offset serrated blade blurred into another, more familiar image. Take away the jargon, and my chopping equipment stood revealed as a boti -- the raised blade set on a rough piece of board that's ubiquitous in Bengal and most of India. The boti retails at the equivalent of $2 or less; my offset serrated Bourdain-approved blade sells for $130 in some California stores.

The kitchen stood revealed as a cross-cultural minefield. The antique Italian peppermill, a gift handed down by my mother-in-law, used by her mother in the days when the possession of such an item conveyed an aura of world citizenship on the user, is employed in our house to grind saunf and roasted jeera. The silver salad set and the silver toast rack we received as wedding presents are forlorn white elephants: there is no butler to polish them, I prefer wooden salad sets anyway, and we are a toast-averse household. Jars of dried Italian herbs sit side-by-side with various masalas, bought whole once a month, roasted at home and freshly ground. The dried Provence and other herbs taste like...crumbly green flakes. Just as we inveigh against "curry powder", there being no such beast in the Indian culinary lexicon, I imagine a brigade of forlorn Italians raising their voices to the heavens in protest against the use of tasteless flakes instead of the fresh herbs from the garden the original recipes demand.

I know that this discomfort is inherited, a family legacy. As with bloodlines and songlines, if you follow the tangled skein of foodlines far back enough, you may discover truths about yourself. Uncomfortable truths; but truths, all the same.



***



In my mother's house and my grandmother's house, meals came in two varieties: Indian and English. Indian was self-explanatory: in Didima's house, it featured the best of Bengali cuisine, with a detour down the cosmopolitan byways of a Brahmo household. In my mother's Delhi house, the delicate spicing of classic Bengali cuisine collided with the in-your-face punch of North Indian cuisine. It was one of those marriages that worked, against all reason.

In both households, however, the English meals followed the same pattern. Vegetables were boiled to within an inch of their lives, more occasionally lightly steamed with lemon butter; glorious jeera-spiked versions of white sauce alternated ominously with "bakes" distinguished by listless curls of Amul cheese. Cabbage was served up in thick, tasteless wedges that resembled steamed cotton wool, but sometimes it received the fusion blessing of coconut and mustard seeds with a dash of malt vinegar, all added Anglo-Indian style to the crisply shredded and only barely blanched vegetable. But the crowning sleight-of-hand came with the Roast: mutton roasted on coal fires, served with tasty but gluey "gravy". It was years before I realised that this wasn't even mutton dressed up as lamb: it was mutton dressed up as lamb pretending to be the forbidden meat, beef.

The sacred cow occupied a slightly ambiguous position in our household. It was perfectly all right to go out to five-star restaurants and order a steak, since it was understood that hotel steak was godless, procured from an atheist cow. This polite fiction was maintained even in the face of the knowledge that most (atheist?) steak-providing cows in Delhi were actually (agnostic?) buffaloes.

In Calcutta, conversely, beef was acceptable except if you had especially religious-minded Hindu relatives coming over for dinner, and even then occasionally passed off in extremis as innocuous mutton. If the record states that we were responsible for corrupting good Hindu souls, so be it; but add that they thoroughly enjoyed what they were eating, so long as they were allowed to do so in ignorance. The sturdy Brahmo steaks Didima cooked were seasoned with crushed pepper, fried onions, grapes, and of course, a delicious guilt.

But families change, and so did mine, eschewing red meat apparently for reasons to do with cholesterol. Once I organised an impromptu family lunch -- several decades after our five-star steaks and our Calcutta beefsteaks. The potato salad and curried mushrooms went down well, but the plate of steak -- cooked medium-rare, so that its pink juices oozed balefully out -- lay accusingly on the table while everyone politely ate the takeaway tandoori chicken we'd ordered as a backup. It was a small thing, but it pointed at a rift, indicated that at least in matters of what we were or weren't willing to put into our bodies, my family and I had gone in different directions.



***



Between these two extremes, the Indian lunches and the English dinners, lay a third path, not moderate but iconoclastic. It was provided by my Thakurma, who travelled from household to household along with her husband until she and Thakurda established a kind of metronomic movement between my father's house and his younger brother's house. There were two other brothers, but one lived in inaccessible Air Force cantonments, dots on the map of India. The other had married a practising Wiccan who convinced him that he was actually the bastard of a royal family, fostered out in my Thakurma's household. Ignoring the evidence presented by the family nose, the very distinctive protuberance that was replicated faithfully on the physiognomy of all the brothers, he elected in the interests of marital peace to disown his natural family.

Having Thakurma and Thakurda to stay was no penance: one was the source of magical stories, the other of practical wisdom. Besides, Thakurma's culinary contributions were of the subversive kind. She cooked everything forbidden by the dentist and took absolutely no notice of family preferences, convinced -- correctly -- that her skill in the kitchen would overcome all resistance.

We had an early skirmish over fish, which, in repudiation of my Bengali roots, I refused to eat. A galvanised iron tub of catfish was a permanent presence in the kitchen; I named each whiskered creature and was told that the ones missing every night had gone on a trip, and never connected the maacher jhol on my plate with the straying travellers. Aside from catfish, though, I flatly refused to eat anything else from river or sea.

Wiser than my mother, who was on the losing end of a running feud with a ten-year-old's stubbornness, my Thakurma retreated from the battlefield. When my suspicions had been lulled, she greeted me with nimkis and an addictive mashed, pickled thing that I instantly loved. It was smooth; spiced to perfection with mustard oil; had a taste that brought the sea into my mouth; I thought she'd wrought magic with the humble potato. When she confessed that I'd been eating non-catfish fish for eight days without protest, I flew into an absolute rage. It's only now that I can acknowledge her triumph: not only did she make me eat what I hated, she made me love it. In the war between my prejudices and my tastebuds, she won.

As the years went by, the two households were tossed around. My Kaka went abroad; we spent six years shifting from house to house in Delhi while my father was posted in Calcutta. In that period of collective rootlessness, my grandparents shared our refugee status. Sometimes with us, sometimes not, depending on the size of the house my resourceful mother, lumbered with three rambunctious children, could find.

All the places we stayed in then had a common feature: the pre-shrunk kitchen. Instead of the large, roomy spaces we'd grown up with, we had to accommodate ourselves to closets with a stove bunged in. Thakurma's repertoire of sweets, which ranged from malpoa to payesh, from sandesh to labango latika, from layered patishaptas with their filling of coconut and raisins to narkeler nadu, shrank in tandem.

Perhaps we noticed, perhaps we didn't. My sister and I had discovered liqueur chocolates, one of the many dazzling items that we knew of only as articles brought back from the amorphous land called Abroad. My mother walked in to find her daughters replete with chocolate, but with no signs of a liqueur hangover. "There was smelly water inside," my sister explained. "We threw it away and ate the rest." The kitchen sink reeked of assorted liqueurs for days, until our cook poured quantities of yeast down the drain. The sink continued stinking, but now in a familiar as opposed to exotic way.

I do remember, despite the lure of biscuits from Paris (they tasted disappointingly like Britannia biscuits) and then-exotic Toblerone, that Thakurma kept up the tradition in exile with a token offering. Sometimes it was alu-bhaja for tea, flaunting their swadeshi flavour in stubborn denial of conquering alien tastes—Thakurma never ate a McDonald’s French Fry in her life, and wouldn’t have felt that she’d missed out on much. More usually, she'd pull out a battered Dalda tin which contained moas -- the lightest of confections, puffed rice held together with melted jaggery. When they returned to live with us, the tin smartened up, courtesy the birth of my brother, Dalda giving way to shiny blue Lactogen.

But the habit remained; though she made patishaptas and channar-payesh once in a while, it was Thakurma's moas that flavoured those years of our childhood. They provided a rare thread of continuity in those years of evictions and constantly changing schoolbus routes, of exoduses where my mother lead the way like a new Moses, appealing to our sense of adventure as we moved yet again, me lying in a malarial haze at the back of the lumbering black Ambassador, my baby brother stolidly holding the TV aerial out of one car window like a conquering flag and my sister perched on a pile of rugs and cushions in the front passenger seat.



***



"Would you like to see our ovens?" asked the chef of a snazzy new Italian restaurant, just opening in Delhi. "They're wood-fired." I heard the pride in his voice and followed gladly into the inner reaches of the kitchen. Men and women in chef's whites, tocques clapped smartly on their heads, shaped loaves, prepared duck's breasts for roasting, checked a brace of guinea hens. The ovens were huge, industrial sized. The doors were deliberately unpainted, in a designer way meant to indicate rustic charm. They were large, and as they clanged open, twin odours of meat, from one, and bread, from the other, were released in fragrant clouds.

A beaming assistant yanked freshly baked foccaccia out of the oven and deftly assembled accompaniments of virgin olive oil, pesto and sundried tomatoes. Another platter contained zucchini, cherry tomatoes and other English vegetables in a raspberry-vinegar reduction. "For you," he said. "To taste." The bread smelled divine. And I knew that if I so much as tried to take a bite, I would vomit.

Three years ago, I had accompanied my father to the electric crematorium on Ring Road, braving the raised eyebrows of well-meaning North Indian friends who felt that women had no place in that temple to death. But the woman we were about to cremate was the first feminist I'd ever met in my life; it was because of her that my mother had become a lawyer, well into middle age, instead of remaining a housewife. It was because I'd seen her writing short stories that I was trying to earn a living with hack journalism instead of marrying some rich guy and doing ikebana arrangements around the house. The least I could do was show up to say goodbye.

The electric crematorium, with its bare stage for relatives to say a few words, do a few last rites, reminded me of the many knocked-together arenas where exiled Bengalis would gather during the Pujas to put on bad, histrionic, nostalgic plays. My grandmother's body looked very light; those who raised her bier didn't have to strain.

She had died in the sterile, impersonal space of a hospital ward, instead of in her own bed at home. She and her husband had remained eternal refugees, first from Bangladesh and then from Orissa; the small patch of land she had tried to buy and claim as her own outside Delhi was mired in an interminable legal tangle. The only space they'd had was the space they'd carved out inside our lives, and that was huge, unpartitioned, beyond all boundaries.

I joined the avalanche of mourners who'd shown up for Thakurma's funeral, realising for the first time how many lives she'd touched. From my father's colleagues, who had often sat down to chat with 'Mataji', to the vegetable seller, to my friends, to her own friends -- they were all here, in tacit tribute to a life fuller than we'd thought possible.

The furnace at the electric crematorium is built like a Dutch oven. After the final rites have been performed, the eldest son steps forward and breaks the skull of his parent with a stick. Some say this frees the spirit; a dourly realistic friend told me briskly that this prevents the skull from exploding in the intense heat of the flames. "One doesn't want," she said, "bits of one's brains going off any old where."

My Thakurma lay on the platform in front of the oven. There was a final muttered prayer, a clang, the platform slid first forward and then with surprising speed, backward as the door to the furnace opened. She went in head first, her eyes closed, and before the door swung shut again I saw her head and then her torso haloed by flames.

On the plate held out by the assistant chef, I imagined I could smell wood ashes, burning flesh, crisped bones. His smile was beginning to slip a little; the staff was beginning to look a trifle questioning. In place of the focaccia, I thought I could see my Thakurma's fair, wrinkled, only slightly mottled flesh, beginning to sear. The door of the restaurant’s brand-new, state-of-the-art wood-fired oven clanged again, as someone pulled out the duck breast au jus.

I took a deep breath and inhaled scents from the past: the talcum-and-damp-newsprint smell of old age, incense, the harsingar flowers Thakurma used for her daily puja, the faint aroma from the John Exshaw brandy she drank in ladylike quantities, that last whiff of burning hair and flesh.

"Thank you," I said, tearing a chunk off the Italian bread. I dipped it in olive oil and ate, not knowing quite what I was devouring -- flesh, flour, a memory, the present. Whatever it was, it stayed down.

Food: Table for one

(Published in the Business Standard, November 2009)

“In the same way that you should get massages and take naps or meditate, you should, everyone should, make a point to eat out by yourself from time to time,” wrote Amanda Hesser in her wonderful Cooking for Mr Latte. “You should be kind enough to yourself to lavish your appetite with good food without the interruptions of company.”

And yet, most of the frequent flyers, conference junkies and global nomads I know would rather don mime makeup for a day than eat alone. One friend admits that a long-anticipated trip to Italy was ruined by her disinclination for the solitary table: she ordered room service, only daring once to eat a slice of pizza on the street, eschewing the baroque delights of the Roman table through shyness.

Another frequent traveller, otherwise a man-of-the-world, suffers mild anxiety attacks every time he has to eat alone; another will buy sandwiches and eat them in his room rather than go through what he sees as the admission of social failure involved in asking for a table for one. One friend has solved the problem at considerable cost to his liver; he finds it less threatening to nibble on bar snacks than to eat in a restaurant when on his own, but since he feels obliged to order drinks alongside, he says this is not always the best solution.

I feel for them; I, too, used to be a reluctant solitary eater. Travelling around India, often on my own, there seemed to be too much risk involved in seeking out the table for one, especially in North India where a woman on her own is automatically assumed to be in need of the attentions of (usually) hirsute, burping, half-drunk men. And eating out in fancy restaurants can be ordeal, starting with the maître d’s thinly veiled pity as he escorts the lone diner to a table, tucked behind a pillar, viewless, where s/he is destined to be bumped into by harried waiters and ignored by the busboys. If you’re at all self-conscious, it is hard to overcome the sense that the rest of the restaurant’s patrons are wondering why you have no friends—and it is often hard for a lone diner to get anything like good service.

The essence of the single diner experience, though, is a kind of enjoyment that you can’t have when you’re with a group. Lose the crutches: the book, carried along, the iPod in the ears. The problem with these accessories is that while they allow you to block out the world, they also detract from the meal—it’s fine to comfort yourself with Ruth Reichl at a Gurgaon food court or a McAnywhere, but at a truly excellent restaurant, it would be like draping tussore curtains over a Kandinsky.

For many of us, it can take just one experimental trip to change your habits. I began to love eating out on separate trips to Malaysia and in Edinburgh—I was free to choose my preferred cuisine, to eat deep-fried Mars bars or order three helpings of tom yam soup without embarrassment, and to ask idiot questions: “What is that exotic, rare herb you’re sprinkling over the laksa?” “That would be mint, ma’am.”

Buy Patrick McFarlin and Deborah Madison’s What We Eat When We Eat Alone, or read MFK Fisher on the private joys of solitary eating. Madison has recipes for those who cook alone—they range from the elaborate to the simplicity of tomatoes-and-cheese on toast, but the bottomline is simple: treat yourself the way you would treat a guest. Fisher speaks of the “peace and nostalgia” of eating on your own; Hesser sees a kind of liberation in the ability to pay full attention not just to your meal, but to your palate and your appetites.

A few small details can go a long way towards the creation of a great, solitary meal. At restaurants, be polite, but insist on a good table—point out one by the window or in a comfortable space where you can see the other diners—and book ahead if necessary. If your waiter isn’t harried, and s/he shouldn’t be at a good restaurant, give him or her a sense of your tastes and ask for recommendations.

Eat well; eat with pleasure; pay attention to your plate and your senses; eat without worrying about butter on your chin or whether it’s polite to take a second helping. For those of us who spend much time in the company of other foodies and friends, eating alone can be a blessed reminder of the pleasures of your own company, and of the secret, childish joy of satisfying your own appetites.

Book review: Eat My Globe

Eat My Globe
One Man’s Search for the Best Food in the World
Simon Majumdar
Hachette, Rs 295, 278 pages

“I may not be the first person to have eaten rat in China, elk in Finland, barbecue in Texas, crickets in Manila or cod sperm sushi in Kyoto, but there are not too many people out there who can claim to have done so in little over a year.”

As he turned forty, Simon Majumdar dealt with the obligatory midlife crisis with flair. Instead of buying a sports car, shagging a fading starlet or discovering his inner navel in the outer Himalayas, this half-Welsh, half-Indian, wholly insane man chucked up his job and decided to eat his way across the globe.

Majumdar would be the first to admit that he has boldly gone where no one but Anthony Bourdain and a score of globetrotting chefs-turned-TV stars have gone before. But taking the trip vicariously in his company turns out to be an unexpected pleasure. Majumdar represents the best of the breed of the amateur foodie—not the food tourist, wearily moving from one Michelin-starred experience to another, but the genuine food-lover, armed with a curiosity about the world and a desire to taste everything, no matter how unusual.

That might be, even in this jaded age, very odd indeed. Majumdar’s “I ate it so you don’t have to” list includes rotten shark meat in Iceland and deep-fried banana in Ireland, in addition to the stir-fried rat and braised dog previously mentioned. What makes this book work, though, are his opinions—freely offered and stubbornly defended, as in his description of pizza (even the best available in Chicago and Rome) as “snot on toast”.

The list of things the “Great Majumdar” loved eating as he made his way across 90 countries on a budget slimmer than a bulimic model’s waist is vast and endearing. Instead of an endless list of fabulous gourmet meals that few of us would be able to afford, he proffers comforting classics: roti canai in Malaysia, Mrs King’s pork pie from Melton Mowbray in England, pho in Vietnam, breakfast ribs in Kansas. In India, he visits Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Goa, and instead of rating restaurants, offers a more nuanced overview of the local specialties.

Eat My Globe may lack the inimitable style of MFK Fisher’s writings, or the unique experiences at the heart of Bill Buford’s Heat, but Majumdar’s energy and enthusiasm are contagious. He romps across the world not just for himself, but for all those of us who harbour a similar desire to eat our way across the globe and who will probably stop at twenty or less countries. We don’t have to, because the Great Majumdar made the journey for us.

(For Outlook Traveller, June 2009)

Literary orgies

(Published in the Business Standard, April 9, 2007, Speaking Volumes)



It is a lowering thought, but until last week, I had spent over a decade in Delhi without receiving a single invitation to a literary orgy. There have been, admittedly, literary evenings where authors, critics and editors have variously been carved up as the main course, but those were inadvertent.

So when Ritu Dalmia, proprietor of the iconic Italian restaurant Diva in Delhi, suggested that I might want to drop in at an evening of readings and gourmand indulgence based on Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite, I accepted with alacrity. The only problem was the lack of orgy-appropriate clothes—the wardrobe of a literary hack-turned editor doesn’t run to velvet gowns or black leather outfits as a rule, but when I got there, it was a relief to discover that other guests had dressed for the literary, rather than the orgy, part of the evening too.

Allende’s book concentrates on the sensual rather than the exotic. “We do not offer any supernatural potions, for this is a practical book and we know how difficult it is to find paws of koala, eye of salamander, and urine of virgin—three species on the endangered list.” Instead, she (and Ritu) focus on more easily accessible, and distinctly more palatable, pleasures.

Several of us are invited to read for our supper—short selections from Aphrodite selected by Ritu follow the presentation of different courses. The first is a platter of little amusements for the palate—stuffed prunes wrapped in bacon, prawns, figs. There is bread, and one of Ritu’s guests reads out: “The raw dough swelled with secret sighs, moved softly, pulsed like a woman’s body in the surrender of love…”

Somewhere between the porcini mushroom soup (the recipe suggests that truffle oil, dabbed behind the ears, is an excellent perfume) and the Empress’s Omelet (including eggs, smoked salmon and beluga caviar), I relax into the food, and the book. I have often thought of Allende’s gentle reminder to the chef who sees the cooking of omelets as an invitation to show off his skills: “These gyrations are pure exhibitionism, because when you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique.”

By the end of the meal, which includes saffron prawns, duck in peach sauce, a wickedly sensuous chocolate mousse, most of us will go home feeling pampered, soothed rather than aroused. This, given the august professions of some of Ritu’s guests is probably a good thing, or perhaps it’s just that she was careful to omit Panchita’s Soup for Orgies (designed to feed 10 bacchants).

But when I get back home and pick up Allende’s Aphrodite again, I discover that it is very different from my memories of it. It is not about aphrodisiacs, though it is about eroticism; it is, however, about creativity, abundance and celebration. In the middle of a week that has more than the usual share of trials and sadness, being at this reading and rediscovering Aphrodite through Ritu’s cooking is balm for the soul.

Allende began to write Aphrodite three years after her daughter, Paula, died tragically young, years “filled with the sensation that the world had lost its colour”... she writes. “When my dreams about food began, I knew that I was reaching the end of a long tunnel of mourning and finally coming out the other end, into the light, with a tremendous desire to eat and cuddle once again.”

The day after the feast at Diva, I hear that Michael Dibdin has died at the age of 60. Some of my friends read his detective stories, featuring the battered Aurelio Zen as chief protagonist, for the crime. Some of us, though, read Dibdin and followed Aurelio Zen across Italy strictly for the food. Only a careful crime writer, and a serious foodie, would have noted that a Parmesan cheese knife, as opposed to the ordinary kind, makes an excellent murder weapon. In The Long Finish, solving murders is almost secondary to preventing a dark plot from destabilizing the Piemontese wine industry.

It was thanks to Aurelio Zen, for instance, that I discovered that the finest orange juice is obtained by putting blood oranges-hard to find in India, sadly—through a brass juicer to extract the pulp. Or that the best way to eat baklava, usually too sticky and too sweet for my taste, is for breakfast, chased down with a double espresso. Or how to comport yourself during a pub-crawl in Iceland.

There are some who disapprove of mixing crime and cooking, or who think Allende’s sort of food-and-sex writing is overdone. I’m not of their company. Murder and orgies are both far more palatable on a full stomach.

The Big Oyster: review

(Outlook Traveller, October 23, 2006)

The Big Oyster
Mark Kurlansky
Jonathan Cape, distributed by Rupa & co,
POUNDS 7.75, 307 pages

If you have a sense of curiosity and a palate, you can't have read Mark Kurlansky's Cod and Salt, or his anthology of food writing, Choice Cuts, without joining his brigade of fans. Kurlansky is the best kind of foodie—passionate about food history, cooking ingredients, chefs and cooks, prodigiously well-informed in many areas and fascinated by the few where his knowledge runs out.

This book has an ominously long two-colon subtitle, though: The Big Oyster: New York in The World: A Molluscular History. Kurlansky's trying to do either too much or too little here, by providing a glimpse of New York's early history through the city's fascination with oysters, which only died when polluted waters killed off the oyster beds.

Oyster neophytes complain that the mollusks have the taste and texture of cold snot. Gourmets share Kurlansky's perspective: "It is hard to explain to those who don't do it by what strange impulse humans take these primitive creatures with their tiny hearts pounding and slide them down their throats. It certainly has been something New Yorkers did with passion. The best explanation is that a fresh oyster from a clean sea fills the palate with the taste of all the excitement and beauty—the essence—of the ocean."

In 1609, New York's oysters were already famous to explorers like Henry Hudson, who traded tools for oysters with the Lenape Indians. A few decades later, the Dutch reported 12-inch oysters, and some of their still lives of the mollusks show a corresponding increase in size. An American cookbook published in 1796 took the cheapness of oysters for granted—one recipe calls for chicken to be stuffed with oysters and then smothered with a "pint of stewed oysters"—a prodigal dish in today's terms, when a mere dozen oysters is an extravagance at most restaurant tables.

In a later age, Thackeray took issue with the incredible size of the average New York oyster—it was, he said, like eating a baby. Dickens, like the Scottish songwriter Charles Mackay, grew fascinated with the city’s oyster saloons, oyster bars and oyster cellars, which ranged from the very sophisticated to the desperately seedy. Many observers recorded that oyster-eating seemed to go particularly well with drink and prostitution. But by the 1900s, New York had grown beyond all reckoning, and it had the same relationship with its estuary that Delhi does with its river—these water bodies were either ignored, or treated as dumping grounds for sewage and worse, industrial sludge. The increasedpollution effectively killed off New York’s oysters, and the trade has never quite recovered.

Kurlansky hits every mark, with recipes from old cookbooks alternating with accounts of Dickens’ triumphal speaking tour across America, and descriptions of oyster cellars juxtaposed with an analysis of environmental damage. But unlike Salt, where every page was marked by Kurlansky’s passionate involvement with the subject, The Big Oyster is diligent and painstaking, but rarely more than that. For the New York historian, or the shellfish enthusiast, this will remain a useful curiosity. For the rest of us, it’s like the tinned oysters often served as fancy snacks at parties—however smoothly the book slides down your throat, this is flabby, insipid Kurlansky on the half-shell.