mongo_jones

here's a surprisingly good site from the indian tea board: http://64.95.196.106/ and here's a listing of the qualities of (more than just indian) teas from some company: http://www.quartermaine.com/teas/varieties...ixup=01&userID= generally, darjeeling tea is delicate and light, assam is full-bodied and dark. some people blend assam and darjeeling teas for flavor and strength. the tea from the dooars (on the assam border in north bengal) is close to assam tea--we lived in the dooars for 2 years in the early 80s and had lots of friends among the tea planters. the land there is amazingly fertile--drop something in the soil and it grows. tea-snobs will distinguish further by estate and first or second flush. here in the u.s i buy boxes of lipton green label loose-leaf from indian stores and i'm happy--i think it is a darjeeling blend. in north bengal and assam the industry is in tragic decline right now, with the brunt being borne mostly by already destitute pickers (the whole history of tea plantations in bengal and assam is pretty sordid)--a few days ago i'd posted a link to the general news forum an article about a terrible thing that happened recently in bengal. not sure how the darjeeling industry is faring--i went to boarding school in darjeeling for some years (though we served atrocious tea) and many of my classmates were children of tea-planters from assam and north bengal. in my family we mostly drink darjeeling tea, mostly in the english style (not for nothing was calcutta the capital of the empire till the 19teens)--brewed in a pot, 1 tspn tea leaves per cup--for 3-5 minutes. i take mine black with sugar, the rest of my family with milk as well. my favorite tea-preparation, however, is the strong tea (water, tea, milk, sugar boiled together) served in little clay cups that we used to get in indian trains till the early-mid 90s. not the horrible tea that was served in thermoses by the trains' dining cars but the tea from the chai-wallahs who would hop on the train, huge kettle and a stack of clay cups in hand, when it entered a station and then hop off by the time it left. the flavor i am convinced was enhanced by the clay--and when you got done, there was the pleasure of tossing the bio-degradable vessel out of the window and watching it smash on the tracks whizzing by. these days, regrettably, the vendors seem to have made the move to plastic cups. edited to add this link as well: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/EK20Df01.html and jason, what is an english tea varietal? england doesn't grow any tea--outside of botanical gardens, that is.

dark rum with cold water and ice?

ghee-slathered alu and mooli parathas with a hot lime pickle and some fresh curd

bong, as usual your recipe is very close to mine. just want to add in response to your "quick" version, that my mother has overcome my scepticism about her even quicker version (she didn't used to do it this way when we were growing up, but as she gets older she's less concerned about doing things the "right" way): take everything (plus some carrots) dump it into a pressure cooker and let it do its thing till the chicken is cooked. comes out really good. sometimes if she's feeling extra diligent she puts everything but the chicken (and the carrots and potatoes) into a blender and purees them first. in our houses (my parents' and mine) we don't cut the chicken into small pieces though--always 8-10 big pieces. mongo

this thread is inspired by a comment vikram made in another thread. to wit: and also follows from my recommendation, in various threads, of the crab butter-pepper-garlic at the restaurant swaagath in new delhi--most recently, talked about here. so, here's my questions: 1. is vikram right? do most indian recipes kill crab? 2. what are the antecedents of the butter-pepper-garlic preparation? i have an answer for question 1, and here it is: i disagree--i don't think most indian recipes kill the taste of crab. i think it is a question of how you come to what the definitive crab taste-experience is supposed to be. as someone all of whose early exposure to crab was through bengali freshwater "kankra" curries i've always been underwhelmed by the (american?) approach to crab of just steaming it and eating it with butter. crab for me is best when a recipe preserves its cool texture and aroma but places it in a seemingly antithetical spicy environment (any minute now i'm going to bust out some hegel). most of the crab i've eaten in india (and also in some korean recipes) follows this principle*. then again maybe my indian crab experience is not representative--i haven't eaten too many south indian takes on it. *i also really enjoy takes on the classic bolognese sauce substituting crab for the ground beef-pork. first saw this on iron chef, tried it at home to good effect.

i don't think of shallots as being alien to indian cuisines; certainly my kerala cookbook--written for an indian audience--has them in almost every recipe. as to whether shallot is a adequate translation of madras onion i'll leave to the experts to decide. in general, i'm with bague25 on this. i don't think there's any reason vegetables (or meats--i love me my turkey keema curries) that aren't indigenous to india can't be incorporated into indian cooking. the key may be to look at different indian cuisines. for example, i can't imagine why asparagus, or leeks for that matter, could not be incorporated into a bengali "panch mishali" tarkari. one would have to select the other 4 vegetables carefully to match, but i think it could be pretty good. in fact, i am inspired to try this this week (bong, gautam, any thoughts?). in general the bengali approach to vegetables is very light on spices so i think delicately flavored vegetables can be used--i already use zucchini for instance. can anyone think of any other indian cuisines that might be able to substitute asparagus well (as opposed to invent new recipes to accomodate it)?

it is possible then that more than one narrative is meeting in the name of this restaurant. vikram, i think the issue--at least as relates to the narratives of colonialism or raj nostalgia--is not one of everything that has that "oo" sound or that "ee" sound being now properly spelled with an "u" or "i" but that of a subset of these words that have more of these associations than others. as for chikus/chikoos i wasn't even aware that there was a standardized "english" spelling; i don't know that i've ever used a consistent spelling for them. thanks to all those who responded to this thread (on both fora). if nothing else i now have a clearer idea of everything that might be involved here and am less "suspicious" (bad word) of what's going on in the name of this restaurant.

the correct way to say cumin is to say zeera, or jeera.

I also ordered squid marinated in tamarind, red chili paste, and a mess of spices, and a prawn red curry dish...but the crab was the absolute best. You're right; I just mopped up all the sauce I could with the bread. Wow. (Which brings up a question.... If it is the sauce that makes the dish good, would it be better to order squid or prawns or something else with the sauce? Would it be just as good, or is the crab--at about four times the price of any other seafood--essential?) Bruce that's a very good question. we in fact tested it out on our trip in december--we went to swaagath twice. the first time we got it with crab (we'd been taken there by friends who were regulars and they wouldn't let us not order it). the second time it was just the two of us and we wanted to see what it would be like with squid. it was still amazing but we both felt the crab added something extra. whether it is textural or whether it is a subtle aroma imparted by the shell of the crab or both i don't know. but how is it you ate only one meal in delhi--were you just transiting through?

that's what i get for talking about things i haven't read.

That was probably the best piece of advice I've received in months. The butter-pepper-garlic crab at Swaagath was absolutely delicous. Garlic, spring onion, pepper--what's in that dish anyway? I onl had one meal in Delhi, and that was it. Definitely a good choice. Bruce glad you enjoyed it bruce! now, that's a dish you couldn't get at any delhi 5-star restaurant. as for what exactly is in that sauce--i have no idea. but it is perhaps the one crab dish i've ever eaten where i'd be fine with my companions getting most of the crab as long as i could mop up the sauce. an insane amount of chopped garlic too. what else did you eat there?

i like to roll my window down when i come to "yield" signs and holler "I YIELD TO NO ONE!!!"... and then i yield to the oncoming traffic.

we may now be ranging a little too far afield from food (hey, there's bakers and cakes in the quote!) but it wouldn't surprise me if for someone like kipling the figure of the parsi/ee evoked a particular kind of response. parsis were the most westernized of all indians in the late 19th century and anyone who's read a lot of kipling knows how he felt about westernized indians. no idea what was going on with melville though. my mother worked with a lot of parsis in our days in hyderabad/secunderabad. i regret now my teenage rebelliousness that prevented me from accompanying my parents to more meals at their friends' homes than i did.

pan: bhelpuri: to respond to pan first: while i would like to eat at the restaurant when i'm next in london the point i was trying to make is partially that this restaurant's particular reasons for their choice of spelling isn't all there is to it. i think we can talk about this even before getting their answer. in the meantime i'd point out that plenty of good people participate in exoticizing themselves or their cultures of origin (howsoever lightly or heavily) for complex reasons. and as for the prevalence of the "ghandi" spelling among malays, that may well be just a local misspelling unconnected to neo/colonial narratives elsewhere, or it might be evidence of the continuing power and reach of those narratives. bhelpuri: i take it then that as far as you know "parsee" is an archaic spelling, and that you agree too that it is probably being used to evoke the raj in some way? i'll wait to hear more takes on this from other people. and i'll pop the question to "experts" in other fora as well. in the meantime i'll say that i'm not offended or provoked by the restaurant the parsee calling itself that--i'm just wondering what's at work in that choice of spelling. is it a non-coded, non-loaded choice? if not, how might it be coded or loaded to different people? in any event i'm sure the semiotics of indian restaurant name-selection in the u.k must be quite different from that in the u.s (both because of the history of colonialism and because of the different proportions of south-asian immigrants). this would be an interesting topic in its own right: what patterns emerge in how indian restaurants in india and elsewhere name themselves. as for the general nomenclature question, i don't think zoroastrian always =parsi; whether people are known as (or call themselves) zoroastrians, parsis or iranis has to do i think with when and where they arrived. but you're probably referring to indian parsis who immigrate and then stop calling themselves parsis? that might be, though this is entirely speculation, because the word "parsi" denotes person from persia--a marker of ethnic separation from the people they arrived among. like irani for later arrivals; i'm told this distinction between "parsi" and "irani" is important to many parsis in bombay, even if the larger population thinks they're all the same. once they're no longer in india or among indians the context for calling themselves parsis may no longer exist. but again this is speculation. to stay on topic i wonder if the more newly migrated parsis who prefer the marker "zoroastrian" also call their food zoroastrian food? that would be strange indeed and a greater denial of 1000 years plus of indian history! i wonder if someone has done an analysis at length of the boom in "indian-ness" in fashionable quarters of english culture in the last 10-15 years. would be interesting to read how this gets sliced across different layers of the english-south asian experience.

i didn't mean to suggest that mentioning kipling is automatically offensive. there is much to like about kipling's fiction--though these issues can carry some freight. as someone mentioned on a different literary list i'm on, indian readers sometimes realize with a shock that the people he's exoticizing are "us"; on the other hand there are enough indians who have much happier relations with raj nostalgia than others--some of these are the indian pukka-sahibs who are a subset of those who can be seen on delhi evenings in the gymkhana club lounge or indeed in the bars/restaurants of the hotels imperial and claridge's. at this point i'm less interested in plumbing that particular restaurant owner's motives (a pointless exercise, that would be) than in trying to figure out if the parsi/parsee divide in fact has clear separated meanings for anyone. if not, my original disquiet would be moot. in this case location may also have a lot to do with--"parsi" may be the common usage in india but not a standard spelling for branches of that community in other places. in some senses, in issues like this it is not a question of the motive of the speaker (or writer) but that of the resonances it has for the hearer or reader. for example, a lot of very progressive people, including, i just noticed, a brilliantly subtle colleague of mine, use the "ghandi" spelling not because they have anything in common with smuts or churchill but because they just don't know how it resonates for a particular body of readers who they might otherwise seek to find common ground with. on the other hand, not all words or phrases carry equal amounts of baggage among different groups of people. if "parsee" does in fact signify a recognition to an english clientele that "parsi" might not it would still be playing with a kind of benevolent nostalgia (rather than re-orienting it) but it wouldn't be as offensive as, say, pronouncing or writing "negro" as "nigra". at some point, however, ignorance becomes an insufficient explanation/excuse--hindu and hindoo sound the same too, and are both adequate transliterations but using the second one doesn't just make you old-fashioned--it locates you in a particular old fashion, whether you want to be in it or not. of course, we can ask if restaurant owners or food-writers need in fact worry about challenging/re-orienting larger cultural frameworks. however, i'd suggest most "ethnic" restaurants--i'll speak here about the u.s context, which i am more familiar with than the u.k)--already play in those waters: everytime an indian restaurant here names itself some variation of "taj mahal" or "mughal", or a middle-eastern restaurant names itself some variation on "magic carpet" or "alladin" they are already invoking this kind of symbolic traffic; the very fact that they seek to profit from it suggests the power simple names (which may in other contexts be completely innocent) may have. again, none of this may apply finally to the parsee restaurant in highgate if the spellings "parsee" and "parsi" don't in fact carry the baggage that i, associatively, thought they might. the larger question though, i think, remains an interesting one regardless of what the findings may be in this particular case.

nothing like a cold raita (the indian curd based accompaniment) to cut the heat--unfortunately thai restaurants in bangkok don't seem to serve any. steamed rice can be a good antidote but for me applying anything hot to my tongue right after it has encountered extreme spice-heat only makes it worse. cold--lukewarm rice on the other hand is good too. as is a chilled lager--the brits do get some things right :-)

balmagowry, while i wouldn't disagree with the broadest contours of your post i think it is important not to also lose site of the fact that particular usages/transliterations can also have particular social histories (whether those using them are aware of them or not). thus while "gandhi" and "ghandi" might both be acceptable transliterations of that particular name you're unlikely to find any indians using the latter (it has for most indians a very colonialist implication--signifying as it does a privileging of colonial (mis)pronuncitation over "native" usage ). i'm not sure if the parsi/parsee divide, if it exists, necessarily has the same kind of connotation; hence my question. your citation of kipling is interesting in this regard since following kipling in terms of spelling etc. in the indian post/colonial context might signify something a little more than just being "old-fashioned" :-) mongo

at that level of generality there's only one other region: the occident. and the "orient" would probably beat the "occident" on the spice/heat meter. but which part of the world are you specifically thinking of? to a large number of 18th/19th century orientalists the "orient" was what we now call the near and middle east.

my morning ritual consists of catching up on egullet while dunking biscuits in a hot cup of black darjeeling tea. my biscuit of choice is an indian chocolate bourbon (made by brittania--the factory in calcutta was pretty close to my grandmother's house when i was a child and there's all kinds of sense-memory associations there). when my local indian store is out of it i make do happily enough with french toasted butter biscuits. i can't tell if it is the tea or the dunked biscuit that i enjoy more. in addition to biscuits, tea takes well to dunkings of almost burnt toast with a little bit of butter on it. another childhood favorite tea accompaniment (though not dunked) was crisp, dark toast, slathered in butter and then given a liberal sprinkling of powdered sugar. as i think about it, this may partly explain my cholesterol count.

over on the u.k forum there's a discussion going on about a restaurant called the parsee. while the restaurant itself sounds very good, and i'd like to eat there when i'm next in london, i voiced some reservations about the spelling/transliteration "parsee". now i could be wrong but i've always thought that the favored spelling/transliteration in india, as used both by the community itself and those outside it, was "parsi", and that "parsee" with two e's, like "sati", spelled "suttee" or "khichdi" spelled "kedgeree" was a leftover of colonial spelling. this would seem to be borne out by the fact that if you google the word "parsee" it returns 16,000 hits (the first being for the restaurant in question), whereas "parsi" returns 144,000. on the other hand, monica's article about parsi/parsee food seems to use the spellings interchangeably. so which is it? and am i right to wonder about the spelling "parsee" in a restaurant in england?

don't feel sorry--it would be a pretty good publicist's blurb if it had been one. tell us a little more about her.

john, i'm not accusing him of "colonialism" (unless, that is, he has placed sussex under his flag and is extracting its economic surplus). i'm wondering if the spelling "parsee", rather than "parsi" (which is far more common in india) is a concession to a colonial era spelling/transliteration of names indian which persists in england--adding two "e's" rather than an "i" to the end of a word with a long "e" sound--as also seen in the spelling "suttee" instead of "sati". does the distinction make any sense? if his clientele is largely anglo there might be a subtle invocation of a residual raj nostalgia happening in the name of the restaurant. none of which has any effect, probably, on the quality of the food served there. mongo edit to add: i could be wrong about the parsee/parsi thing, of course, and in fact i've just posted a question about it on the india forum: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=ST&f=40&t=40170 ; interested parties may wish to follow the thread as it develops.

your post reads like a publicist's blurb but i'll give the book a once-over the next time i'm in a bookstore. and cups, teaspoons and tablespoons aren't necessarily such an accurate measure either. i've been experimenting from the penguin kerala cookbook of late and i am beginning to suspect that his teaspoons are much smaller than mine.

Persih the thought! I'm a Bombayite, and will brook no contradictions. Anyway, don't get me wrong, I dont actually like Delhi. Or at least I really didn't on my annual trips to stay with relatives all through the 70's and 80's. It's only when I took my then-girlfriend there around 10 years ago that I woke up to the fact that it is a kind of real shopping wonderland (for certain things, of course). And since then, though my trips have slowed to roughly one every two years, I've kind of sussed out how to make the most of my time in the city. It does have a couple or three really outstanding restaurants, but food-wise (and everything-else-wise) I frankly can't get terribly excited about Delhi. It will give Akiko a fine seven days, and can be a very good introduction to what India has to offer, but given the choice I'd happily never go there again. -- on edit - Oh yes, I love White Mughals. Dalrymple consistently provides all us with really valuable, pretty unique, writing. Have you read this superb recent piece chiding Sir Naipaul? yes, i've read his piece on naipaul--if it is the one on outlook you're referring to. for a brilliant man naipaul is really an idiot.

bhelpuri, you and i have very different takes on delhi, but as the kids in my classes say, it's all good. mine is conditioned largely by my years there and modulated ever so often on trips home. in your shorthand biography you noted that you're a transplated mumbaikar living in jersey via europe--were you also in delhi for a while or do you go there often on business? while i don't agree with all your recommendations (i don't think for instance that foreigners should be sent principally to places that target foreigners) i have to admit you have a fairly decent knowledge of the city. our other bombayites here (vikram, to a lesser extent episure) have little time for delhi. if you liked "city of djinns" i'd also recommend dalrymple's more recent "the white mughals"--fascinating, provocative stuff about early english residents of india (before the arrival of robert clive). i can also recommend other fiction set in/about delhi if anyone's interested. mongo