Vikram

I'm assuming some minimum knowledge of Bombay, otherwise you'll have to ask for some directions! Ananatashram - From Churchgate drive down Marine Lines till you're about to come to Charni Road station (coming the other way, drive via Opera House). Take the right (coming from Churchgate) at Charni Road station bridge onto the road that leads to Central Plaza cinema hall. There's a pay and park here you better use since up ahead parking will be impossible. Walk to Central Plaza, cross the road and turn right. One of the lanes on the left will be for Khotachiwadi. Just go down that and (beyond a small grotto) you'll see Anantashram on your left. Be warned they only cook small amounts and once its over, its over. Saayba - that's easy, just drive to Bandra and once you cross the main Bandra-Mahim junction with the big flyover (keep going straight) just keeping looking on your left and after a big petrol pump and then a small lane, you'll see it on the main road. Gajalee - OK, this is the tough one. To be honest, I usually get lost getting here and almost always have to ask for directions. Just drive to Vile Parle east (you'll have to take the service road if you're driving on the highway) and ask for the Hanuman Mandir road. Once you're there, ask for Gajalee, sorry, that's the way it is. Sindhudurg - from Prabhadevi drive towards Dadar station and at Portuguese Church (that modernist, nuclear reactor like structure) take the main road to Bandra. You'll come to Shiv Sena Bhavan on your right, take that right road and I think Sindhudurg is the second road on your right. Hope this helps and BTW, jjread, did you come to Bombay in the end? Never heard from you. Vikram

Sorry, didn't read your post carefully enough so thought you and your lucky class was actually going to Cairo. But even if you can't you should definitely try making some of the dishes. Kushari should be simple, if you can take all the carbs - its basically rice and noodles and lentils cooked together and served with lots of fried onions and a spicy tomato sauce. The best desserts in my opinion were the varities of baklava, which would be hard to get, but there were simpler semolina puddings or even Om-Ali shouldn't be hard to make and I'm sure you'll find recipes online. Or why not get your hands on Colette Rossant's lovely memoir of growing up in Cairo, Apricots On the Nile, I think its called. Its got some excellent recipes, Vikram

Indigo is eclectic, but I think Rahul Akerkar's cooking is grounded in a classic, meaning French tradition and if he wants he can pull off French dishes very well. No place is perfect, but I think Indigo has maintained its standards much higher and longer than any other fine dining (horrible phrase, but haute cuisine sounds too pretentious) place I know, and that includes the five star places. I have had to spend plenty there at times, but I have never regretted it. Olive in Bandra is OK, but more Mediterranean than French. Five, a small place in Khar started by a breakaway bunch from Indigo is sweet and affordable and can occasionally be pretty good. And if you want French in the old restaurant style meaning rich and heavy and occasionally good, then Gallops at the race course can sometimes do it. But what am I saying, forget these other places, just go to Indigo. Vikram

I lived in Cairo for three weeks some years back and don't have particularly uplifting memories of Egyptian food. It wasn't that it was that bad, it just wasn't particularly interesting - as Zora said it was like Lebanese, but without the zing. My Indian tastes didn't mind the carb loading, but what was hard to take was the blandness. Many of the things Egyptians went on about as great specialties often seemed to be rather overrated - grilled pigeons, for example, or Om-Ali, a milk pudding. Kushari was interesting, as a mutation of the Indian lentils and rice dish called khichri (which the Brits added fish to and made into kedgeree), but not exactly something to go to town about. Mulukhiya was, I'm sorry, just vile. Snacks like falafal were cheap and good. Hummus, which I love, was oddly hard to find - I guess most people make their own, so it wasn't commercially sold. A pity, because I could have easily survived on just that and eish, the flatbread that widely sold and absurdly cheap - heavily subsidised as part of the benevolent dictatorship policy of the Egyptian government. You'd see big stacks of it on trays on the roadside which people could just help themselves too and leave money on an honour system. But if the finished dishes weren't inspiring, what was WONDERFUL were just the fresh ingredients. It must be that hoariest of tourish cliche's, the gift of the Nile, that fruits and veg grown in the Delta were just better looking and more bursting with flavour than I can remember almost anywhere else. And the milk... I can close my eyes and still remember a creamy and mildy sour milk drink called rayab. I have never found anything like it even here in India, a country that fetishises milk products. So try and all this out and when you and your friends get sick of the Egyptian foodm options, run quickly to Maison Thomas which I hope still has wonderful sandwiches and deli stuff, or El Fornaio Etam near the American University for wonderful croissants, the best thing to round up an early morning walk on the Nile corniche. Even if the food left something to be desired, I loved Cairo and the Egyptians and I'm sure you will too, Vikram

Sorry to sound so rude about Strand, its just a long standing peeve of mine. And you're right that other places have their drawbacks too - the New & Secondhand people really do have a rather baffling attitude to selling their books. But you can find the cookbooks quite easily since they are in and under the main counter in the shop - just check to the left hand side. I think there were a few Time-Life books left. If you're ever in Bangalore ask Mr.Murthy at Select Books, just off Brigade road, for them. Fort Book Depot has an office that's impossible to find in the depths of Bazaargate, but in case it doesn't really sell through there, but through the sales they have at regular intervals around the city. Just look out for signs saying 'FBD Sale' or small ads they take out in Mid-Day or Bombay Times. I am very interested in vanilla beans. You want to swap a bottle of East Indian bottle masala for some? Vikram

The Taj is running a great chefs of the world series where every quarter they're bringing down top chefs from around the world to interact with their own chefs and cook special meals which will include cooking demos along with the meals. They're promising heavyweights - Jean-George Vongerichten in September and Hemant Oberoi, the exec chef confessed that he's also aiming for Alain Ducasse next year. Starting the series though is a chef I hadn't heard of - Michel Nischan who started and ran the Heartbeat restaurant in NYC and whose big thing is healthy food. I went for a demo for the media yesterday and he seemed like a nice guy and did the cookery demo part with aplomb and then retired to the kitchen to cook lunch for us all. It was pretty good to OK. A starter or pea and pear juice soup with braised paneer was somewhere in between nice and 'interesting'. A shrimp and scallop starter, and grilled lamb chops as main course were OK (but the veg option for the main course, whatever it was described as, was just a paneer pakoda). But what was really outstanding was the dessert and the reason this mail is attached to this thread is because jaggery played an important role in it. Nischan was enthusiastic about most Indian ingredients he had encountered, but he repeatedly went into raptures over jaggery. It was the sweetness of sugar, he said, but much more interesting and healthier too. So the dessert he made was ripe figs quartered and quartered again, but not right through so they were just opened up. The figs were roasted by blowtorching them (I forget if before or after quartering) just slightly then a small dollop of sitaphal (custard apple) ice cream was placed in the centre and then the whole was bathed in jaggery syrup and placed on cardamom butter biscuits. Bliss! I was almost tempted to run out and buy a blowtorch for myself! Vikram PS: the chefs for the other two quarters this year - apart from J-G V - are Mark Miller of Red Sage in DC and Mori Moto of the eponymous restaurant in Philadelphia - I quote from the Taj's press literature, does anyone have other knowledge/opinions about these guys?

One of the best rasams I've had is rasam with crab served as a Chettiar speciality at Raintree in Madras. These were small crabs, really too fiddly to eat by themselves, but in the rasam they infused a wonderful taste to the liquid. Beyong that I'm not overfond of rasam which always seems to me like sambhar that hasn't quite made it. But I do like mulligatawny soup in all its virulent yellow, creamy and throat catchingly spiciness, as best served in those old clubs that haven't given up on the Raj dishes. Vikram

Oddly enough I was talking about Garwhali food with a friend the other day and she mentioned the same thing. Some similarities could be explained simply because of having the same ingredients - besan and yoghurt are common across the country so I can see a kadhi like dish coming up, with local variants, in different places. This patra/aduvadi/patyud similarity does suggest links of a different kind and her theory was this it was the Brahmins. Historically there were two reasons for travel within India - trade and religion, the latter being mostly pilgrimmages, but weren't there several cases of Brahmins travelling to other religious centres to officiate for particular ceremonies. For example, isn't it the Badrinath temple in the north that's run by Namboodiri Brahmins from Kerala? And don't Saraswats - who cook the aduvadi dish Rushina mentions - claim that they came from the hills? I think there are many Brahmin links with Nepal too. It all suggests ways in which these dishes could have travelled, especially since as Brahmins they would not have likely to eat the local food easily for fear of contamination, so they would stick on to their old recipes much as Orthodox Jews have. And while they might not have cooked local dishes, the locals would be likely to pick up dishes from the Brahmins. Now that I think about it, there's also the phenomenon of Brahmin cooks. Does anyone else have thoughts on the role of Brahmins as vectors for recipes across India? Vikram

This conversation is making me ill. The owner of Strand is an unctuous old humbug, who goes on and on about how he only cares for books, doesn't believe in making a profit, doesn't care for honours, doesn't bother with competition, while in the other breath bitching non-stop about other bookshops and doing his damndest to make sure he gets every bit of credit he can get his hands on. Which is fine, I guess, more power to him and I wouldn't care if (a) his prices really were that good and (b) he had the books. He doesn't have either really because please understand, Strand is a remaindered bookshop, not a proper bookshop which means you don't get the latest stuff, only what they've managed to pick up from remaindering agents abroad so its always going to be hit or miss, and also the margins will be pretty big, so his so called discounts are not as much as he could give. If you want real discounts try Fort Book Depot (FBD) sales, good stuff, good prices and without Strand's hype. Or New & Secondhand at Dhobi Talao where I recently picked up a whole bunch of the Time Life Foods of the World books for about Rs100/- each and a wonderful old (from the 50s, forget the edition) copy of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking for Rs150. Or at the other end of the scale there's Lotus in Bandra which gets the latest stuff, including many of the food books (you can also order them), though unfortunately its all at full price. (Crosswords sadly is not that good now and Oxford was always a nice cafe with a silly bookshop attached). Buy from Strand now and then by all means, I do too, but there's life beyond it too. Discover it! Vikram

As far as I know the Raspberry drink still exists, produced in small quantities by the Dukes factory (now owned by Pepsi) almost entirely for the Parsi wedding market. If you've been to one of them you'll know that the eating is the main event (bride, what bride, we came here for the sass-ni-machi), for which you have to queue up for 'sittings' - to at least, or the family isn't popular. And when you sit down at the long tables, covered by long rolls of cheap paper to save on tablecloth washing costs, before the food arrives you'll get a guy who offers you any of four drinks, all made by Dukes and help by their necks in one hand - Raspberry, Mangola, Ice Cream Soda and something else I forget, maybe a ginger drink. The Raspberry is, as you'll remember, violently red coloured and violently flavoured, but somehow its chemical sweet taste goes very well with the jardaloo sali boti or fada ni ghosht - maybe the chemicals cut through the richness and the sweetness matches the sweetness in the recipe from all the dried fruits. Ideal Corner has gone to the dogs completely, they might as well just put it out of its misery and put in the ATM or Barista that, no doubt, the owners are dying to do. Meanwhile you'll get Raspberry, along with good Parsi wedding food at Jimmy Boy's in Fort. The owners are wedding caterers so it'll be good. Only one word of warning - the set menu whcih replicates a wedding feast is very good value, but so much so that you better split one, I don't know anyone who can finish a single one by themself. Vikram

This lack of vanilla beans is really weird and annoying because now they are being grown in India. There are all these articles about how farmers in Kerala are finding them a useful cash crop because they can grow the orchids that produce the beans on existing coffee or rubber trees or something like that. My sister tells me she's seen them being sold on the roadside in Wynaad, dirt cheap since no one there knows what to do with them locally. Presumably they think this interest is general, since I cannot find them at all in Bombay - where is all the vanilla vanishing to? Archie comics are the little acknowledged but probably pretty major influence on the view that most of us who grew up in India have of the US and its food. I think many of us would first have heard of these stranger things called burgers, chocolate malteds and ice cream sodas in their pages. And as you point out there were the Hostess Twinkies which came in the ads that went along with the comics. Oh, and the spreads for some strange event called Thanksgiving. What I'd like to know is whether Archie comics played the same role anywhere else in the world outside the US. And did kids read them too - and do they still? And any other food items first encountered in the pages of Archie? Vikram

The best Bengali book on food - and a strong contender as the best one on any kind of Indian food - is Chitrita Banerji's "Life & Food in Bengal". Its a really excellent book that paints a picture of the whole context in which Bengali food is eaten, the influence of seasons, social customs and history. Its done in two parts - there's a central section which follows Bengali food season by season, which is an excellent way to write on Indian food given the continued importance, thank god, of seasonality in our cooking. And sandwiching this section are two fictional accounts of a girl growing up in a Bengali family and then years later, when she's a married and then divorced woman living in the US, the story of her return to Calcutta. It seems to be a lightly fictionalised version of Banerji's own life - she was married to a Bangladeshi and lived there for a while which gave her knowledge to East Bengali ingredients and ways of cooking. It all works very well, the memoir-cum-essays framing the recipes that she gives along the way. The book used to be available in a rather uninspiring reprint from, I think, Orient Longman, but I haven't seen it in a while (and I've been looking since some horrible person seems to have taken my copy). What is available is Banerji's more recent book called 'The Hour of the Goddess', no recipes this time, but a collection of essays on the role of food and cooking in the lives of Bengali women. This includes her essay on the Bengali bonti, the fixed floor knife, which came in Gastronomica (and is available on its website). She writes really well so its a very good book - my only crib is I wanted more! Its available at Strand, the book shop, and maybe at the sale though I didn't see it the one time I went there this year. (I find the sale somewhat overrated - its not that cheap for all the owner's talk, just remember these are remaindered books) I bought the Chinese Pantry book that's a companion to the Indian Pantry book you mentioned in another thread. It seems quite as good as that one - which I've lauded on this forum in the past - though somewhat more eccentric. The writer seems to have strong opinions which he doesn't mind conveying in quite a blunt way. It adds to the enjoyment of the book, of course. Vikram

Am I the only person in the world who finds Biriani a somewhat overrated dish? Of course, I realise that this is partly because its so badly prepared so often. Its such a standard big occasion dish - I shudder to think how many birthday parties and impromptu drinking sessions I went through in my youth where the only food item was usually a big pot of entirely indifferent biriani - that every restaurant will make a version and make it badly. Further antagonism was probably bred at innumerable press lunches and media dinners which, as a journalist, I have been fated to attend. There is a particularly gruesome line-up at these events - paneer makhani, kala dhal, vegetable jalfarezi, and so on, with a bulky tray of biriani glowering in one corner. Possibly these commercial birianis are bad is because there's too much temptation to skimp on ingredients by reusing whatever's lying around. I am always suspicious of these big messy throw everything into the pot dishes - you're given a salespitch of 'hearty and warming', in practice its usually 'stale and reused'. But even when this isn't the case, when the biriani has been made from scratch by a good cook, too often I find the result greasy, messy and, my real complaint - monotonous. There is little real play of flavour and too much damn rice. I actually like plain rice, I love the delicate flavour of real aged basmati. But you don't get it here, its all overwhelmed by the spices, and yet there's too much rice to give it the interest of a main course. Perhaps there are lesser known birianis that are better. Madhur Jaffrey describes a really delicious sounding one in her latest book that's made with raw meat from the start. I can remember a misty morning on the road up the Yercaud hills where we relished packets of vegetable biriani picked up a few hours back in Salem town below. And the birianis I almost like the most are the delicate birianis of Hyderabad as eaten in old restaurants near Charminar. They have an understated, dry elegance that almost wins me over to birianis, but never quite. What do others feel? Do they really like it or are they just pretending? vikram

I don't know about spice mixture, it seems to me that Goa sausages use mainly a fairly hot chilli powder and lots of vinegar (a fairly robust vinegar, in Goa it would be toddy vinegar, but any strong and not too chemical tasting one should do). Between the chilli powder and vinegar, most other tastes are pretty much blown away, Vikram

If you're in Bombay bottle masala is quite easy to get. Its sold in packets in lots of places - Bandra obviously (try Jude's at Pali Naka), but any decent butcher should have it. Farm Products in Colaba does. Its also possible to get the original packaging beer bottle version in shops in Bandra. There's also a guy called Vivian who can be called on at any time of the day or night in case there's a bottle masala emergency. Have his number somewhere, message me directly if you want it, Vikram PS: And triphal is NOT Sichuan peppers as far as I'm aware

Bottle masala is great stuff, it gives a flavour that is savoury without being too spicy or too bland. All East Indian families (I have already delivered a diatribe on this forum on what the East Indian community in Bombay is, as opposed to the general East Indian term slapped on all Indians abroad) claim to have their own special recipe for them, but in fact most of the recipes I've seen are more or less on the lines of the one listed by bague25. What I like is the way they are still made. In winters in Bombay these groups of hefty women workers come to East Indian houses (and also other communities that grind some of their masalas for the year, like Gujaratis), and take the spices which are bought and given to them in the right proportions by the women of the house. They then take up residence there for a day or two, roasting and drying the spices in the courtyards or terraces and then mixing and pounding them in a battered wooden bucket using long wooden staves. 3-4 women stand around the bucket and lift and pound in the staves in turn, with a definite rhythm which they keep up for hours until all the spices are powdered into one orangey-brown mixture. The mixture is then kept in old beer bottles which are chosen because they are opaque and their long necked shape makes them easy to use - you just keep a bottle at arm's length while cooking to pick up and shake in as much masala as you need. Here's an all-purpose bottle masala recipe given to me by an East Indian friend (who, as can be seen, had just given birth when she sent it). I can confirm its very easy to do and delicious:

Goan sausage is one of the easiest to cook dishes because it doesn't need any seasonings or even fat to fry it in - it all comes included. I keep them as stand-bys - if you buy good quality ones, they store well and don't need refrigeration - for times when someone drops by unexpectedly. All you need to do then is cut open a sausage from its packet (they are so oily they are uusally sold sealed in plastic) and then the sausage meat from its casing. Put it in a pressure cooker with tomatoes, potatoes and onions, all whole or halved at most. Then pressure cook for half an hour and that's it - the fat of the sausages and the juices in the tomatoes and onions will have combined to form a thin gravy full of that unmistakable Goa sausage flavour. Apart from being easy, the advantage of this method is that its supposed to kill parasites that might well be in the meat, the eating habits of Goan pigs being something one does NOT want to get into closely. On the other hand, it could be argued that if you were bothered about your health at all, you wouldn't be eating Goa sauages in any form. From the health point of view they are pretty deadly - greasy with animal fats, ultra spicy, sour and packed with salt. Yet their taste is so incredible - its like a rich, tempered sourness, a taste sensation really rare in Indian food. So perhaps one could damn one's health and try other ways to cook it. And I will admit that the results from my pressure cooking are never as good as the sausage chilly fry at Martin's in Colaba, which I love so much that Martin's is the one restaurant I never need to order in, the waiter just brings me sausages and pau without asking. And if its over and he sees me coming, he'll come out to prewarn me. Unfortunately they do't share their recipes. My only crib with Goa sausages is that their flavour is so individual and intense that its hard to use them as an ingredient. Has anyone experimented with using Goa sausages in other dishes? Vikram

Lifting this into a separate thread since jaggery deserves one of its own. I love jaggery, its like the much more interesting, bad-boy cousin of sugar. Even with the ordinary stuff and not the spiced version I described, you still get that raw, slightly wild minerally tang that contrasts with the basic sweetness. Unfortunately, jaggery seems to be little talked about or known outside India (are their equivelents in other sugar producing countries?). One of the disappointments of Sidney Mintz' otherwise classic book Sweetness & Power, is that he's so focussed on the role that sugar has played in the West and the Americas in particular that he leaves out much of its history and usage in Asia and I think makes next to mention of jaggery. Tim Richardson's book Sweets was very welcome for not disdaining Indian sweets the way other food writers do, but he was mainly talking of milk sweets. Anil Kishore Sinha's Anthropology of Sweetmeats doesn't talk about it much (and is generally quite a disappointing book). Achaya covers it, of course, though its not something he devotes much attention to. What are the different types that people are aware of? There are the standard yellowish brown blocks sold in kirana shops. There are more refined versions being sold by sugar companies like Dhampur, nicely packed and purified to the extent that its soft and fudgelike. And there's palm jaggery which I'm only just discovering and its fantastic! I've had very hard hemispherical (set in coconut shells) palm jaggery from Sri Lanka ages back. A health food shop in Bombay sells chocolates made from palm jaggery cores dipped in good quality chocolate. I thought it sounded weird, but when I tried it, it was great - the jaggery gave it an almost alcoholic taste. I'm currently drinking coffee in the mornings made by boiling up the powder Turkish style with cardamoms and palm jaggery and its pretty good. I get the impression though that the use of jaggery is declining in Indian cooking as people move over to tamer, less unpredictable sugar. Perhaps its because of children who are used to the sugar taste from sweets and chocolates who can't handle the different taste of jaggery. And adults are told not to eat sweets, so they just don't experience the flavour again. Its certainly rarer to find Indian sweets made with jaggery. I was eating at Sindhudurg in Dadar recently and saw they had a shelf where they sold Malvani products including these sweets, I forget what they're called, they look like twigs and they're dipped in syrup that dries hard. These were made with a jaggery syrup and they tasted so surprising I realised I'd just forgotten what sweets made with jaggery and not sugar were like. In recipes too, I increasingly find instructions to use sugar where a generation or two back it would have been jaggery, and I wonder what loss in taste has taken place? Which are the recipes where you'd say that jaggery, not sugar, is essential? How do people abroad handle, especially in restaurants? Is it easy to get? What's the quality like? Do you just find it more convenient to use sugar? Vikram

This is a good one and you can get it a bit more widely than that. Try, for example, the Mangalorean specialty shops in places like Santa Cruz. Apart from the books they have interesting ingredients you don't get elsewhere. I once bought some fascinating spiced jaggery from there - the spices included pepper so you if you put a crumb of it on your tongue and let it melt, you'd get this sweet-hot sensation - the exciting rawness of jaggery with the bite of pepper. Vikram

There's a book called 'Flavours of Delhi' by a journalist named Charmaine O'Brien that's a pleasant enough introduction to eating in the city. Not everything may be up to date, but it'll give you broad guidelines to eating there. Personally, of course, I don't know why anyone goes to that awful city up north. Come and eat in Bombay instead! Vikram

There are quite a few communities that cook game in India. The Rajputs are, of course, most famous for it and Episure will probably be able to oblige with a recipe for Jungli Maas (for the non-Hindi speakers, jungle meat) or other shikari (hunter) recipes. Apart from them Coorgi pandi curry is an excellent dish usually made with pork but which, in its most ideal form, should be from wild boar (unfortunately I've never eaten the wild boar form, but I've friends who go into ecstasies at the memory). The other community worth checking out for game is the Chettiars. They, and the other non-Brahmin Tamil communities like the Gounders, all have a passion for game, particularly birds. If you try out the big non-vegetarian (somewhat manically so) thali at places like Velu Military Hotel in Madras (military is Madras short hand for non-veg) you could get small bowls filled with curries made from chicken, turkey, duck, quail, partridge and pigeon. Fascinated to read about your grandmother cooking tortoise. I've never heard of this before, but will try and check out with NGO people I know who work in tribal communities, Vikram

Since you got saffron along with the cardamom, why not combine the two to make a Maharashtrian keshar-elaich syrup, saffron-cardamom syrup like the ones sold in Bombay. Don't have a recipe since I buy it from Maharashtrian areas like Dadar, but I guess its simply a matter of making a syrup and letting plenty of saffron and cardamom infuse. The syrup is a reddish-gold colour and has a wonderfully cooling taste. I use it to make my own version of kahwa, Kashmiri green tea. Just boil water with several cloves and, if you like, some cinnamon sticks and cardamom pods, but the cloves are what matter. Then when it boils pour it over green tea - don't use the best Chinese green tea, any ordinary green tea will do. After a bit, strain the tea and add some of the saffron-cardamon syrup, flaked almonds and more sugar to taste. Vikram

Back on the forum after a bit of a break. I was in Madras for family reasons and rapidly got bored with accessing the Net over my mother's ancient dial up connection, but didn't have the time to go out and look for more high speed ones. I did find the time to go out and eat in a few places, not enough to to do an in depth analysis on eating out in Madras maybe, but I'm happy to report that its still possible to get good Korean food there despite the much lamented closing of Arirang. (Going to Madras to eat Korean food might seem bizarre, but I love it and you get it in few other places in India. And as far as Tamil food goes, both veg and non-veg, I assume that as long as Saravana Bhavan and Woodlands is around for the former and Velu Military Lunch Home and Ponnusamy's for the latter, all will be well). Hyundai and other Korean companies still have enough employees in the city to support a couple of apparently really authentic places - well, one assumes the food is authentic, since both Arirang and the places I went to this time, KyungbokChong would get zero for ambience as the best that can be said of them is that they resemble office canteens. But as at Arirang, the beef bulgogi was sensational at KyungbokChong and if the bibimbap was just OK, all the other pickles and small plates of things that go with the meal were good enough to make eating here really a good deal. The other food related activity I did in Madras, and the reason for reviving this classic cookbook thread, is I finally managed to track down the publishers of Samaithu Par, the classic TamBrahm cookbook compiled by the near legendary S.Meenakshi Ammal. I had to go to the heart of old Brahmin Madras, in a small house in Mandaiveli near Mylapore an area which is mentioned by Marco Polo (long before Madras existed) and is TamBrahm Ground Zero. And since everyone on this forum must be used to my shameless posting of my own articles, here's the piece I wrote on it (which came, in a slightly cut form, in EcoTimes last Sunday):

I'd go for Madhur Jaffrey. Her recipes work, she gives the basics, she writes well on more general aspects of Indian food and she's used to writing for audiences not in India. 'A Taste of India' is her book on Indian regional food and I'd got for that since Indian regional cooking often gets overlooked - most people assume Indian cooking starts and ends with the really very narrow (and not particularly authentic) slice of it that they get in Indian restaurants abroad. Jaffrey's 'Introduction to Indian Cooking' might be the better book for beginners though its more narrowly focussed on the type of cooking done by her family which is based in Delhi. Her latest book in the cooking of the Indian diaspora, called 'The Ultimate Curry Book' or 'Kebabs and Curries' in some markets, is very interesting, but perhaps not one for beginners. There are some Indian cooks based in the UK who are producing attactive, easy to use books - Sunil Vijaykar's '30 minute Indian' is a bit of a misnomer, yes its 30 minutes, if you've got someone else to do your prep work for you, but its still a good and attractive book. The one I'd really recommend, if you can get your hands on it, is Monisha Bharadwaj's 'The Indian Kitchen' or 'The Indian Pantry' (name differs with markets) which is a really excellent introduction to Indian cooking through the ingredients it uses. Its not perfect, some of the recipes could have done with some checking and proof reading, but its really interesting and attractive, Vikram

Aren't you making a mistake here - or more correctly, the mistake is in the way others are using the 'fresh dates' term itself? What you describe does sound like fresh dates - the straight from the tree, bright red or yellow, really fresh fruit which, as you note, are pretty to look at, but way too astringent for my taste. What the others seem to be referring to are what I've seen described as 'soft dates' - dried and processed to some extent, but not the dead hard and chewy fruits we're most familiar with. 'Soft dates' are sensational - plump, soft and amazingly sweet. I haven't eaten the medjools and barhis that Mr.Steingarten describes, but here in India we get what are called kimia dates from Iran which sound similar, and are fantastic just served by themselves. Vikram