mongo_jones

i made reference to the penguin kerala cookbook a few days ago. my first experiment with a fish recipe from it was an unqualified success. now, i'm thinking of branching out into chicken-land. the recipes in the book all seem to call for boneless chicken--is this a common phenomenon in malayali home-cooking? if so, is stock added at some point--the recipes in the book don't indicate this step. now, most restaurants in north india that serve malayali food also use boneless chicken but i've taken this as being a restaurant phenomenon; this may be due to the fact that bengalis rarely, if ever, use boneless chicken in curries--and all right thinking punj restaurants in delhi also offer a bone-in/boneless option with butter chicken. since this cookbook series seems to be aimed at an indian, not western audience, i doubt it is pandering to squeamishness about bones. can anyone offer any informd insight? or failing that, any wild speculation?

most indian homes cook goat and chicken curries in the pressure cooker--not to mention rajma (red beans) and certain intractable dals (kali-urad, channa). and while things may have perhaps changed in the last 10 years--though it doesn't seem so in my trips back home--most indian pressure cookers are technologically very basic: dump your stuff in, adjust the heat, wait for however many whistles at that heat it takes for whatever you put in to get done, wait for the pressure to dissipate, open. if too liquidy, simmer it down. while meat curries are usually cooked entirely in the pressure cooker, dals are usually begun there to cook them quickly and the tadka is added as per normal, slow cooking. i could post recipes for indian pressure cooking but i suspect that's not what you're looking for. (plus, with my stone-age pressure cooker i don't know if the instructions would translate for those more fancily-schmancily equipped).

"Authenticity" is a sticky issue and really resides in the heart and soul of the person preparing the food. As with any art form (cooking is one of them, of course!), you need to learn the fundamentals/classics before you can riff with confidence to invent something new. This grounding is essential. andrea, this is a good case of selective quoting--the complete sentence right before the one you quote says the following: "i think people should strive to be aware of how things are eaten in the culture of origin, give it a whirl but finally eat the way they enjoy it best. " as you can see i'm not advocating a complete free-for-all in the name of freedom from the trap of "authenticity". the problem with your own formulation is that it suggests that there is such a thing as an original, "authentic" pho in vietnam, when posts here already indicated that it varies regionally there too. so i don't think, based on the information so far, that it is a tenable position to say that "authentic" pho is one that no sauce goes into, and it is okay to stray from this if you know that fact. that "fact" itself is already one that people in the south seem to have a different take on than people in the north. why privilege one regional variation over the other and call it the "authentic" or "fundamental" or "classic" one? mongo

again, speaking only from my observation of bengali family practices i am not aware of chhana in the home ever being made with vinegar as an agent (or yogurt for that matter)--only lime or lemon. commercial methods may vary.

mongo_jones, Yes, it is a Prestige (brand) pressure cooker. i have one of those--my wife and friends are all terrified by it. me, i'm scared of the new-fangled ones.

unless there are other communities that have something called "chenna" this would seem to be a bad transliteration of the bengali chhana. chhana and paneer are cousins--one is not a form of the other. paneer is usually "formed" or molded in some way after milk is "broken"--thus dishes involving crumbled paneer often involve crumbling paneer that has first been "blocked". in bengali chhana refers to both the broken milk solids (with the water--people with indigestion or stomach ailments often eat chhana with its water) and to shaped forms of it. also as far as i know chhana is usually made by breaking the milk with citrus--not sure about paneer. well, that's to the best of my knowledge anyway--i could be wrong.

you're not talking about the bengali chhana, are you?

pan, given that deliad's recipe calls for pressure cooking i'd imagine just using a regular saucepan would mean cooking for much, much longer. deliad, are my eyes deceiving me or is that a prestige pressure cooker?

what is chenna?

While coconut products are certainly not fat free, they ARE cholesterol free...that is a product of animal tissue.. yes. however, the problem is not so much with cholesterol content of foods (the large majority of cholesterol is produced by the liver) but their saturated fat content. as someone with elevated cholesterol (i've managed to bring it down through diet and exercise to just a little over the old standard of "normal") i have to watch out for foods high in saturated fat. edit to add: coconut is very high in saturated fat. palm and coconut oil in particular are really bad but coconut milk is no slouch either. strange as it is a nut.

the trick, i have found in both los angeles and denver, is to shop at asian groceries as much as you can. fruit and vegetables are usually better and cheaper, and they also have a much more interesting, and again, cheaper selection of fish and seafood. we did our fortnightly run to komart in aurora (a suburb of denver) this weekend--i was staggered by how cheap shiitake and oyster mushrooms were, as also monkfish, mackerel and even frozen oysters.

i'm thinking of starting a business selling colostomy bags to healthy people and putting a sign above my door that asks "why poop?"

Off hand, I can't think of a Chinese restaurant in NY that isn't very bright. it is certainly not a phenomenon i've noted anywhere outside india--and as i think about it might even be dying out as an aesthetic in india. it wouldn't surprise me if in india it arose because originally dining out was not something you did with your family--the restaurant as destination idea didn't really explode in india till the 90s (we didn't have much of a consumer culture before then). since chinese restaurants were probably the first popular eat-out destinations (and the first "foreign" food sources in india) they might have been where businessmen went to do shady things. (though it wasn't just businessmen who patronized chinese restaurants: when i was growing up going to eat at a restaurant meant going to eat chinese 8 times out of 10 --and usually at a restaurant named either golden dragon or kowloon; for many indians it still does.) the aesthetic may have just lingered even as customer profiles changed.

miner's helmets anyone? could be the next big food-accessory.

there are chinese restaurants in india that are literally pitch black. well, almost. strangely this principle only seems to apply to chinese restaurants (and not all of them).

i'm down for the suppression of cholesterol formation--i take a dimmer view of the whole appetite suppressing part; i like to eat. seriously, i wonder if anyone has done a population study of lipid-profiles in coastal areas of kerala. almost every fish recipe in this book calls for cambodge. i assume, by the way, that given the close relation between cambodge and kokum that the chemical properties are similar. (edit to fix spelling)

(perhaps this belongs in the rare ingredients thread. then again it might not be rare to anyone other than me) tonight i dipped into my penguin "kerala cookbook" for the first time and made a country style fish "curry". it called for cambodge which is not available here. however, the writer indicates that kokum (which he says is related to and often confused with cambodge but is not) is a good substitute and i remembered seeing kokum in the local indian grocery (which as i've said stocks more southie than north-indian stuff). so i hied me to the store only to discover that they have packets of both black and white kokum. i recalled my friendly store-manager's exhortations to "ask if you have questions" and asked her what the difference was. first she hit me with, "this one is black, and this one is white"; seeing the expression on my face she then added, "i think the white one is the dried one and the other one is the wet one". i decided to make a judgement call and bought the "wet" black kokum. the recipe called for soaking the cambodge and so i decided to soak the black kokum too. i don't know if this was the right kokum or whether it needed to be soaked but the resultant dish was excellent. we ended up eating a pan-indian dinner (indian fusion if you will): a fish curry from kerala, punjabi style kali urad dal, and bengali style alu-gobi. it all went together quite well. i'm going to start experimenting with more of the recipes--probably stick mostly to the coconut-free ones (did someone say "elevated cholesterol"?). has anyone else tried anything from this entry from the penguin series?

i guess i'm a southerner and didn't even know it

i agree--i never had any pho in koreatown that i liked. even the stock at that pho bunc hyanh (spelling?) chain--or at least the branch in west-la--tasted better to me.

Yeah but the funny thing about that is that you know that brand in the white/green/red can? It's got a red silhouette of tomato on it, with the words San Marzano on it? I looked last week: product of the USA. I guess the brand name is separate from the description or something? maybe the can is imported? or the label?

How do Bhodroloks incorporate 'bhairer-mai' in this ritual ? not that my family is terribly bhodro but it was a bou-bhaat like any other. down to the bou being clad in a bengali silk sari, serving all the family elders their food, and then eating her own food with her hands. as i recall she ate 3 begun bhajas.

since i am far removed now from the orbit of bengali wedding banquets--though the author will be pleased to hear that at my wife's recent bou-bhaat in calcutta delectable begun-bhajas were in full evidence--i want to weigh in on this just a slight bit: i think to view the advent of the vegetable chop and the alleged decline of the begun-bhaja (i find this idea dubious but see caveat above) only in a mournful mode or a by-product of a move toward convenience is to miss that this change can be variously coded. it wouldn't surprise me if the phenomenon of the "pan-indian" menu at the catered banquet is associated more with signifying a mark of modernization in a public forum (while at home the begun-bhaja and its ilk rein supreme). it would also be to miss that the vegetable chop is as traditionally a bengali food as the begun-bhaja (if not of equally old or high lineage), and not "un-indian" as govindu implies.

somehow i don't think there was a lot of fact-checking involved in either the writing or judging process.

interestingly every korean run pho place i've been to in koreatown in l.a has served only cilantro and not basil. the debate on what the "purist" way would be even in vietnam seems to still be open. but even if it turns out that every vietnamese person in vietnam does not add any sauce to the broth i enjoy my pho so much that way that it would be unlikely to deter me. it is interesting though to note how not just food but also ways of eating it travel. i think people should strive to be aware of how things are eaten in the culture of origin, give it a whirl but finally eat the way they enjoy it best. the same goes for cooking. in both cases it is important, however, not to make claims of "authenticity" for hybridized practices--especially since the "authentic" anything is usually quite hard to find. on a related note: my wife, when eating bengali food, has the terrible american habit--as i referred to it--of piling all the different things onto her plate at once. i used to give her a lot of grief about this until a malayali friend of mine came to visit us for a couple of weeks from home and at the first meal i cooked proceeded to not only pile everything onto his plate at once but to also mix it up. i've since then backed off the idea of there being any one "authentic" way of eating anything. my wife has also stopped giving me grief for eating things she cooks in a bengali way (adding a lot of sauce to rice and mixing things with the rice); in fact she's started cooking like a bengali--much more sauce in most of her dishes than there used to be.

thanks for the info andrea. i guess i've been eating it wrong all these years (as has my vietnamese ex-colleague). the thing is i've got so used to it now with sriracha and hoisin in the broth i don't know if i'll be able to bring myself to change. i do always taste the broth before adding anything to it (if only to gauge how sweet it is)--perhaps i've just never encountered a broth good enough to not want to add anything to it. doubtful though--i've had a bad teacher and now i'm marred for life. so in vietnam it would be completely unheard of to add either sauce to the broth?