Vikram
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After starting this topic, I read the book that more than any other date, answers my question. Madhur Jaffrey's The Ultimate Curry Bible (its got a different American title, Kebabs & Curries, or something like that) takes up this very issue of the cooking of the desi diaspora and deals it with in her usual style.
Its an excellent book - lots of fascinating material, both culinary and cultural, and some really interesting recipes which, coming from her, you know they're reliable. I've already made some like the kheema with orange juice which the bf, never the easiest of audiences, has been raving about.
I was so taken with the book that I did a loooong piece on it, including a telephone interview with her - many thanks to Someone for helping me set that up - and miracle of miracles my editor liked it enough to print it almost uncut this Sunday. You can read it here:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/344293.cms
but to help persuade everyone on the India forum to read the book, here's the piece in its totality:
Cooking the DiasporaVikram Doctor, Mumbai 7/12/2003
Calcutta say challat jahhaj, Panwariya dheeray chalo(The ship is sailing from Calcutta, O boatman go slowly)
The words are from a song sung by poor labourers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as they sailed in the 19th century from Calcutta to the other side of the world, to work as indentured labour in the sugar cane fields of Guyana and Trinidad. At a time when modern migrants from North India are a contentious subject again, its worth remembering how old their story is. From 1848 onwards recruiters from Calcutta, known as ‘coolie-catchers’, persuaded thousands of dirt poor mostly Bhojpuri speaking peasants to sign contracts that were only marginally better than slavery. For two five year terms they would labour for absolutely minimum salaries with the promise of free passage home if they wanted it. It was hardly the most generous of offers, but it did have one big benefit: then as now, anything was better than staying in the unchanging caste ridden misery of home.
The story of these migrants is little acknowledged today. If we think of them at all, its more for their descendants, the members of the Great Indian Diaspora, who we’re happy to pursue with our PIO cards, Pravasi Bharati days, Resurgent India bonds and TV crews when their most successful members make ceremonial visits home to see the villages from where their forebears fled (and probably to thank them heartily for doing so, considering how little has changed). Of the actual lives of these forebears, the stories of their journeys, of what awaited them at the other end, of how they survived, of what links they did and didn’t retain with India and where the diaspora is today, comparatively little has been written, especially compared to other diasporas like the Jewish or African ones, which are well served by books, studies and films.
This is starting to change. V.S.Naipaul has been joined by a brash new brigade of young diaspora writers (though still largely based in the US and UK). Mira Nair gave a rare cinematic glimpse of the East African Indian trauma in Mississippi Masala. Academics like Vijay Prashad are exploring the archives - his book The Karma Of Brown Folk has fascinating historical material on early nineteenth century migrants to the US. And now quite literally to add some spice to these efforts comes one of the doyennes of the diaspora herself, Madhur Jaffrey, with a fascinating new book on the cooking of the desi diaspora. Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible takes on the journey of Indian food from the curries of British planters and the scant rations of those Bhojpuri labourers to the time when chicken tikka masala can be claimed as Britain’s national dish and non-Indian Trinidadians riot against an Indian dominated ministry under the slogan “We Don’t Want No Roti Government.” (The use of Indian food as an epithet for the community is very common. In South Africa recently a Zulu song that caused controversy by attacking Indians, had lines accusing South African politicians of indulging them because their “buds are watering for roti and betelnuts”)
For Jaffrey the book has been long in the making. “I’ve been collecting recipes for years as I travelled around the world,” she tells us, speaking from her home in New York. As a very well-known Indian food writer she would naturally attract the attention of members of the Indian community in the countries she went to, and as time went by she found herself becoming increasingly interested in their culture and their cooking. “It was fascinating for me to see the way Indian recipes had transformed themselves in other countries and how they had in turn transformed the food of those countries,” she says. It was a process she herself had been part of in one country; as she modestly notes in her book, she played a vital role in popularising and changing the profile of Indian food in the UK with her cookbooks and TV shows.
Jaffrey brings out the diversity of the diaspora. Apart from those Bhojpuri farmers sailing from Calcutta there were poor Tamilians (and other South Indians) sailing from Madras to Malaysia, Mauritius or South Africa, Gujarati traders journeying from Kutch to Kenya, Chettiar moneylenders to Burma, Sikh farmers leaving the Punjab for California and lets not forget the more recent journeys, like the second dispersal of Indians expelled from East African, or the most recent professional migrations of doctors and software engineers to the West. “All sorts of people were travelling from India,” she says. “I’ve come across a Parsi theatre troupe that toured Asia.”
Beyond these were the hazier trails left by Indian ingredients and techniques in countries like Thailand (biryani like dishes called khao moag), Vietnam (curry powder, perhaps from French colonies in India is used as a seasoning for dipping sauces) or most unexpectedly of all, Japan, where curray pan (steamed and lightly friend curry stuffed buns) or danshaku (potato croquettes filled with curry) are favourite fast food options. Japanese supermarkets have Indian food sections which are larger than their sections devoted to Chinese, Thai and Korean food put together, despite their greater proximity. Not that many Indians would recognise what’s on offer - the top selling ingredient, for example, is something called curry roux, thick slabs made of dried milk, fats, coconut milk and some mild spices that can be melted to form an instant curry sauce. “Japan was really the biggest surprise, because it all seems to have happened with the least influence,” says Jaffrey. (Maybe that’s what Netaji was doing all these years!)
Food changed as the diaspora dispersed further, of course, driving them further away from India and its ingredients. Jaffrey notes how the Tamilian communities in South Africa have lost traditional breads like dosas and iddlies, while similar communities in Malaysia have retained them. The difference was simply availability of rice, which was plentiful in Southeast Asia, but not in South Africa until much later. Instead the South African Tamilians had to substitute mealies, dried corn, the local staple. Many other substitutions were made: pungent wiri-wiri chillies for milder Indian ones in Guyana, a local herb called culantro which was found to taste much like fresh coriander (cilantro), finely ground chapatti atta nearly always had to be substituted with much less healthy white flour (along with Western leavening agents like baking powder for Guyana’s flaky paraata-roti), and yellow split peas had to stand in for all those many lost Indian dhals.
Yet those same dhals are an indication of constancy, she points out: no matter where they went, no matter what local legumes they had to use, the Indians of the diaspora would make some sort of dhall like dish. It could be the dalpuris of Mauritius, bread stuffed with dal, of Malaysia’s dalcha, where ground nuts are added, or Durban’s famous bunny-chow, a hollowed out loaf stuffed with beans meant for black African who were not allowed to eat in Indian restaurants under the strict apartheid laws or even the Indianised version of umngqusho, the traditional Xhosa maize and bean stew dish that a star-struck Jaffrey eats with Nelson Mandela. Along with dhals, the traditional tarka method of adding a seasoning of spices quickly fried in oil at the end has remained. “Its always the same, whether its the tarka of Singapore, which is the mother of all tarkas, they add almost every ingredient, or it can be the chawnk of Guyana, so simple it must still be almost like they did it all those years back in India,” says Jaffrey.
Despite all the differences in how the diaspora was created and the places it went to, there were a few common factors that influenced the food. First, Jaffrey notes, was the simple fact of who was going: the indentured labourers were the bottom of the caste heap, and in any case, whatever caste hierarchies they had were automatically lost by going in the ships and crossing ‘kalapani’. The long journeys also made for bonding. “Whether you were Hindu or Muslim or whatever your case, you realised that those you were sailing with were your brethren,” she says. This meant that caste restrictions on what could and couldn’t be eaten were often dumped. Nearly all the old diasporic Indian communities eat meat she notes, though. in an interesting memory of India, she says they often turn vegetarian on holy days or when they are going to the temples.
Similarly while certain communities may have dominated the ships, they were often forced into one mass by their masters who were indifferent to the differences. All South Indians who left from Madras become one, whether Tamil, Telugu or Malayali (in themselves relatively modern distinctions). This is reflected in the food, where the subtle regional distinctions of India tend to meld - “it all becomes a general spiciness,” she says. A third point is particularly interesting though, especially in comparison to African slaves. For them the separation from Africa was total, there were no contacts, no merchandise obtainable from the lands of their birth. With the Indian diaspora though such contacts were possible, since people could travel back and forth if they wanted and could afford it, and most important of all, another stream of the diaspora, the Gujarati traders, came up exactly to supply the larger diaspora with products from home. “Slowly as people got richer they could afford to buy a few Indian spices, some rice, some products from home,” says Jaffrey. This crucially meant that at least some Indian flavours and traditions could be retained in the cooking.
Today, of course, Indian ingredients can be easily flown around the world, and unlike those poor Bhojpuri farmers, the latest members of the diaspora, the software professionals and doctors and businessmen can afford to buy them. This means that in some ways the sort of changes that came from the restrictions under which the diaspora had to cook need no longer take place. “They now all have wives or sometimes even maids from India to cook for them, so the food remains the same,” says Jaffrey, a bit regretfully. But change can come in other ways. Sometimes its just the new ingredients like broccoli that can now be added to traditional pakoras, or it can come from more non-Indians taking up Indian cooking, experimenting with its flavours and adapting it to their own. That’s how Jaffrey thinks Indian flavours will really spread in its newest territory, the US: rather than the curry restaurant phenomenon of the UK she feels it Indian tastes will spread as more American cooks start using its spices and ingredients.
Reading the book, its evident how much research and passion Jaffrey has put into it. She unearthed and tried to recreate the oldest British recipes for curry and curry powder, even though the people who might have eaten them were not Indian at all. “You have to consider the British, because the diaspora really starts with them,” she says. “That’s why I was interested in the sort of food that planters were eating, what was being served in clubs.” She’s come up with inspired guesses for some of the terms she’s found in the diaspora. Noting that Malaysian roti canai is simply the Kerala style flaky parottha made even larger, she suggests that ‘canai’ is another form of ‘Chennai’ which was, even then, the name by which South Indians knew the port from they set sail. Perhaps the most welcome part of the book is how she restored to Indian cooking the one part of the diaspora that might not claim to be so, and yet is inescapably a part of it and perhaps should never have left: all the many variations on North Indian cooking to be found in Pakistan.
Early on in the book Jaffrey says she realised what a vast subject the cooking of the diaspora could be. For reasons of time and in deference to her publishers she curtailed herself a bit, limiting herself to the best known Indian dish of ‘curry’ which she defines as any Indian dish with a sauce. Since she can’t resist adding kebabs, and some of the breads and salads that would accompany them, the book is a bit more complete than the title sounds. “I was going to put in desserts, but in the end left them out because of space,” she says. “And I have a few pickle recipes, but really that’s a world in itself.” The result is that one gets the impression that there’s an even larger book of desi diaspora cooking struggling to get out of here, to which things like pickles, sweets and snacks could be added and also the few regions she doesn’t really touch on like Fiji. “But I’ll leave that for someone else to do,” laughs Jaffrey. Her next project she says will be a book based on her childhood.
Yet one gets the feeling the diaspora will not leave her easily. The stories she came across, some of which she retells in the book, have clearly moved her a great deal. “So many of their stories are so sad like that song about leaving Calcutta,” she says. “They left everything behind, they didn’t know where they were going, they were cheated so often.” And so many of the memories are disappearing because there have been so few attempts to collect them, even in those communities. “So many of them have had such a struggle just to survive and come up, they haven’t had time for these things,” says Jaffrey. “Perhaps their children will do it. I hope more academics and writers do it.” Above all, she says is worth doing, whether by her or others, because its such a positive one. “Most people I met have done quite well, have become part of the mainstream and are prospering,” she says. Like their food, both Indian and yet changed, the diaspora’s story is one to be savoured, and Jaffrey has given us the most literal way of doing so.
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Why do I always end up promoting my old pieces on eGullet. But so many of the subjects are close to my heart so its not surprising I've written on them before. This piece came in the Times of India a year or so back, before the Times stopped this excellent "In Search Of The Perfect..." column which many writers contributed to. BTW, can anyone confirm the bit about condensed milk being the secret ingredient in Kyani's Shrewsbury biscuits? I'm too lazy to go to Pune and try and coax the truth out of some probably cranky old Irani guy,
Vikram
In Search Of The Perfect... Canned FoodVikram Doctor
Mumbai 16/5/2002
The title of this piece may seem like a contradiction. Aren’t all canned foods by definition less than perfect? That’s what I was told when as a child I started hankering after canned delicacies, the result of brainwashing by Enid Blyton books where they always seemed to be opening cans for picnics or midnight feasts. My mother told me not to be silly. “Why would anyone eat something from a can when you can get it fresh?” she scoffed. She was right, of course. Syrupy sweet, perfectly round and trimmed pineapple rings have none of the complex sweetness, the contrasting textures of the fresh fruit. Even worse are those poisonously red, cotton-wool textured abominations that adorn second rate desserts, so far from the sweet-tart glory of fresh cherries that I refuse to believe they are the same fruit.
Canning was invented for military purposes, so perhaps its best not to expect gourmet food from it. Nicolas Appert, a Frenchman, invented the process to win a prize of 12,000 francs offered by Napoleon’s government for an efficient way to preserve food for its military campaigns. Appert used glass bottles, cork stoppers and an odd sounding sealing mixture of cheese and lime and ironically for Napoleon, it was the British army and navy who perfected Appert’s invention into the tin cans of today. Cans became building blocks for the British Empire. For colonialists, cans from home were seen as safer than suspicious native food. Newspapers from the Raj are full of ads for canned food, extolling them for their freshness and quality, an original taste of England in the heat and dust of the East.
In reality though canning works best when the end result isn’t meant to taste like the original. The appeal of baked beans is the intense tomato taste and mushy texture that could only come from canning. Canned sardines from Brittany are made with only the best quality oil and left to mature just like wine, becoming a much sought after delicacy. But the best product of canning is more prosaic. Using only milk and sugar, canning produces the marvel of sweetened condensed milk.
At less than Rs30 and available from any grocery shop, condensed milk has got to be one of the cheapest, most easily available and legal means to total bliss. (Nestle’s Milkmaid is the better known brand, but Amul’s Mithai Mate has a more convenient to use can. They are identical in taste). Growing up pre-liberalisation one didn’t have the range of sweets and chocolates of today, but there was condensed milk. Eating it was a ritual. We’d buy a can, keep spoons at ready and carefully position the can opener. As soon as it bit into the lid, thick golden condensed milk would ooze out, and it was almost impossible to resist dipping a finger to taste.
Finally the can would be opened to reveal the sticky golden glory within. Spoon in hand you now faced a difficult question: do you take a profligate spoonful, carpet bombing your palate with intense richness? Or do you just coat the back of the spoon and lick it slowly, feeling the concentrated taste spread through your mouth, collecting in a surge of flavour at the back near your throat? The second method also had the merit of making the can last longer, though this was relative. A can of condensed milk never lasted long when I was around.
Condensed milk tastes so good by itself that its hard to understand why manufacturers insist on selling it as a milk substitute or ingredient for desserts. Making ‘fresh’ milk from condensed makes no sense in these days of refrigeration and Tetrapaks, and using it to make sweets you can buy from any mithaiwala seems an awful waste. Condensed milk as an ingredient only makes sense when its centre stage. (I’ll make an exception for Pune’s fabulous Shrewsbury biscuits which, I’m informed, use condensed milk as their secret ingredient). Like when you add lime juice and the acidity solidifies it into an ultra rich lime flavoured milk jelly. Or if you boil the unopened can for around three hours (ALWAYS making sure its well covered with water). Once the can has cooled completely, open it. The milk will have caramelised and solidified into an indescribably delicious, smooth toffee coloured concoction. Dangerous, but very delicious.
Best of all though there’s Vietnamese coffee. This marvellous invention, which we devoutly hope will be made available at coffee places like Barista, is testimony to the advantages of adversity. Shortage of fresh milk during the Vietnam war made them use condensed milk instead, adding it to strong, highly roasted Vietnamese coffee brewed to a super concentrate very much like South Indian ‘decoction’ (in Vietnam you get little percolaters that sit on top of your cup). The result is electric: concentrated caffeine combines with concentrated sweetness to get all your nerves ringing in the most intense coffee experience. The only possible improvement, especially in summer, is to drink this cold. Fill a tall glass with ice cubes, add coffee concentrate and then condensed milk. Mix, but not too much so that most of the heavier condensed milk is at the bottom. As you sip you move from ice cold bitter coffee to ice cold condensed milk, and you’ll know that just occasionally you can find happiness in a can.
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Many apologies to all, especially Episure. After patiently taking me through the back lanes of Bohri Mohalla and introducing me to his favourite barahandiwallahs, the least he could have accepted was for me to have matched his speed in putting up the text to match his pictures.
I can only plead extended chaos at work, though in reality its probably just my journalistic instinct to avoid deadlines kicking in. When I don't have any need to post on eGullet I am happy to write reams; the moment I have to, it becomes another assignment to be avoided! Anyway, I'm not even going to try estimating how late I am, I'm just thankful I'm getting to do it before Ramzaan ends.
In the meantime though I've had plenty of time to refine the knowledge acquired from Episure in the course of several visits to Mohammed Ali Road. I credit him with having quite altered my position on barahandi. In the past I just dismissed it as tons and tons and tons of grease below which lurked inedible muck. Now I know its tons and tons and tons of grease below which, if you go to the right place, you can find something fantastic.
At some point in the evening, as yet another plate of meaty stew embellished with fat was placed before us, and watching the guy behind the cooking pots dice gelationous masses of marrow to add as further garnishing, it occurred to me that this was the answer to Monica's question of some weeks back. Want to know how to do Atkins in India? Just get your catering from Mohammed Ali Road and hold the rotis. (OK, I know its not so easy because as Episure pointed out, these are classic 'poor man's stews' where a small quantity of meat is eked out by thickening the juices with flour or dhall, so there sneak in those carbs).
I met Episure outside the police headquarters just facing Crawford Market. It was around 8.30 just as the market was shutting down for the night, but all around it the lanes that lead to Mohammed Ali Road and Pydhonie were just getting active. There strings of lights over the street leading to the main mosque, there were benches and tables laid out in the streets and everywhere there were people out for the night to have the iftaar.
And not just Muslims - what striking about Ramzaan is how cosmopolitan this whole iftaar scene has become. Most of the year most people in the city don't go to the Mohammed Ali Road area, not because its dangerous (this is, thank god, still Bombay, not that horrible city up north), but because its really crowded and chaotic and now there's this major flyover, the longest in the city, that takes you from Crawford Market almost to Byculla so you zoom over this area. Its a pity, since its a fascinating area, with all the wholesale markets and lots of old buildings that are lovely or would be if someone cleaned them up. There are also some striking mosques too like the Zanzibari Masjid in Dongri which has beautiful painted tilework.
But people outside this area rarely come here except maybe to go to Chor Bazaar (the so called Thieves Market, though the merchants there indignantly try and pretend its a corruption of Shor Bazaar or Shouting Market!) - and during Ramzaan. There was a time when bringing women friends here I'd advise them to wear a salwar-kameez and be ready to cover their heads. These days girls in jeans and strappy tops don't seem to have a problem walking through these lanes.
Anyway, Episure and I first went to Nagdevi Street, a good place to start because its not as chaotic as the Minara Masjid road area, so you can get acclimatized so to speak. Nagdevi Street is a turning to the left just before you reach the main Mohammed Ali Road. If you want a culinary landmark, its the road that start a little in front of Arife's, the shop at the side of Crawford Market which is still the main place in this city for buying anything to do with baking - cake tins of all shapes, muffin pans, icing bags, tart tins, sweet moulds.
Everyone comes to Arife from catering college students to old Catholic aunties from Bandra looking for marzipan moulds for Christmas. (As a sidelight, Christmas cake making season is clearly on us now. CNBC was just running a snip on hotel chefs stirring up their cakes and walking through Crawford Market just before meeting Episure I saw a group of nuns buying candied peel from one of the only shops that still stocks it, a Goan grocery shop called Vincent's. All the younger nuns were laden with bags full of broken nut pieces and raisins, as they waited for their ancient superior to carefully open her purse and count out the notes).
OK, enough detours, we're finally in Nagdevi Street and there's only one game here, which is Barahandi - and only guy dishing it out, Faroque Surati Barahandiwala, the guy who made Episure and me promise we would mention that he has absolutely no branches. You want Faroque Surati Barahandiwala's barahandi, you've got to come to Nagdevi Street (he's there year round, though on a more modest scale). His shop is called Tawakkal, the blessings of Allah, he tells us, and its turnover during Ramzaan is clearly pretty big, though he sidesteps answering exactly how much.
He shows us the barahandi - there's an example in the third picture Episure posted (though that's not from this shop). Its a large steel box that contains the coals and has circular openings on top into which the pots can be placed to cook. Despite the "12 pots" promised in its name, most places seem to have only nine, but I think the other three refer to some of the other stuff bubbling on the side - usually a pot of paya (trotter) soup and some other stuff like that. (Episure, I've just remember, did this guy tell us that one of the pots which had something creamy in it, was haleem - the big Hyderabad ramzaan speciality?)
Faroque Surati Barahandiwala shows us the different dishes - which one is paya, which one is pichota (tail curry), which ones are "bade-ka" or "chote-ka" (from the big one or the small one, meaning beef and mutton). And he tells us that if we want to try it all, he'll give us a plate of 'bhel' - using the term for Bombay's favourite mixed-up snack, for his muxed up meats! I can just imagine what my Gujarati vegetarian friends would feel about this! Apart from this he's got a big chicken grilling and frying operation going on - pix four and five from the ones Episure posted.
Its tempting to eat here, but we're just at the start of our walking, so we tell this to Faroque Surati Barahandiwala, who takes it with good grace. Come some other time this month, or even other times of the year, he tells us. From there we walk on to Mohammed Ali Road and take a shortcut that takes us into the heart of the Minara Masjid Road area. That helped us circumvent most of the chaos there which I'd posted about earlier, and took us straight into the main area where the mutton dishes are made.
Its interesting seeing the way people specialise at this time. For example, the barahandiwallahs have tandoors for making bread, but they don't operate them at this time, just focusing on the bara handi. If you want bread you have to go to the bread shop which is only making the big tandoor cooked rotis that Episure has photgraphed, or another type of twisted leavened bread if you want something to really soak up the gravy. Similarly here in the middle of Minara Masjid, its all specialised - one guy does the mutton tawa items, another cooks the organ meats, another the chicken, another the kebabs and if you want khichada - wonderful creamy dhal and mutton cooked together - there's yet another guy who'd got a big pot he'd doling it out from.
Not that you need to go to them yourself. You just plonk yourself at one table and tell the guy what you want and if he doesn't make it, he sends one of his army of boys to fetch it. How they keep accounts in the middle of all this chaos is beyond me, but it seems to work. I usually prefer to sit near the mutton tawa guy since I think his bhuna ghosht, quick tawa fried lamb is the best thing to eat here - hot, tender and tasty with coriander and chillies fried in. The khichada is very good here too, not unbearably rich as it can be in other places, but just creamy enough.
The chicken is NOT good here, the sikh kebabs can be OK, if you insist that they get good ones (the boys seem to know when you really want the good kebabs). The organ meats can be excellent, though the real reason to eat them is the rich gravy they cook in, and not the slightly rubbery meat itself. The one thing I can't eat here is the quails - I love quail, but its distinctly offputting eating them when there's a cage of live ones above you looking on miserably as they wait for their turn.
Episure and I were really in search of barahandi so we gave this place a miss and walked to the beginning of the road. This took us past the sweet shops where the huge yellow malpua pancakes were bring fried - Episure's last picture. They look amazing, but taste, I think, rather gross. Another sweet only found in this area is sandals - a sweet only made by the muslim Memon community (Minara Masjid is in Memonwadi) that is like a sanna (fermented rice batter cake) topped with sweet cream and tastes very odd.
There are hundreds of other sweets on offer here particularly at Sulaiman Usman Mithaiwala, the most famous sweet shop in this area (also negatively famous for being where during the 1993 riots the police shot dead a bunch of their employees apparently thinking they were rioters, but who wants to think about that now, right?) There are flaky flour pastries, aflatoon which is like sweet ghee mixed with dried fruits, surprisingly good Bengali sweets, milk sweets of all kinds, flavoured with different fruits and covered with silver vark. In a belated nod towards health concerns they have now started making sugar free sweets from dry fruits only - an anjeer (fig) barfi is particularly good.
The real reason to stop here though is the phirni, the rice pudding made in clay containers that leach out water from it, leaving the phirni even creamier. This year Sulaiman Usman has gone ever fancier - the phirni still comes in clay pots, but it now has snazzy clear plastic covers with the Sumailan Usman name printed on top. A lot of people clearly like the food here, but prefer to take it home to eat and all the shops are prepared for this. We don't stop here, but I buy several phirnis, both the yellow kesari (saffron) ones and the plain white ones. There are all the fruit flavoured ones - the guy tries to get me to try a blackcurrant phirni, but I'm sticking to the traditional ones!
Finally we leave Minara Masjid and cross the road and walk into the quieter bylanes that lead to Bohri Mohalla. This is where Episure's favourite barahandi walla Vallibhai Barahandiwalla has his shop. Before going there though we stop at the bread shop in the photographs below to take pictures. Its very tempting to eat the rotis hot from the tandoor, but Vallibhai is just up ahead and we know he'll be getting the rotis from this place. When we reach it, the shop is oddly empty - these barahandi places have strange rhythms of their own. There'll be times when they are packed to the gills, and then equally suddeny empty, like there are fixed servings.
But this suits us, since we can talk to the owner and eat in peace. He says he'll give us 'sukhe mutton' first and at Episure's request he does go easy on layering on the grease at the end. The dish is certainly not 'sukhe' (dry), but comes with a thick gravy and is totally delicious. This is basic, stick to your ribs sort of food and not, as in the barahandis I remeber, essentially unspiced - there's a subtle spicing here, not too hot, more just to complement the creamy mutton taste. We demolish this and move on to paya - more grease this time, but the gravy below it is really good. After that there are several other to try, but we want to eat something grilled now, so we stop at that.
The grill stall is a few streets away, close to Chor Bazaar. Its a smaller place than Faroque's, but we've had enough of the walking now and just want to eat. The first thing we order is a speciality of this area - khiri, or chopped up and grilled cows udders. OK, I can just hear the barfing at that - even seasoned organ meat eaters find the idea of eating udders a bit offputting. But first, it doesn't look like udders - these are just bite sized pieces of meat. And second, they are really denying themselves something special because udder have a totally disinctive texture. Its hard to describe - not the fibrous texture of muscles, or the soft texture of some organ meats.
There is something chewy about them, but not rubbery, easy to eat, but with a mouthfeel entirely of their own. Some people might dislike it, but then some of the people I have introduced them to have really tripped on it. A writer friend I took the other day was in ecstacies, saying it was the best thing he'd eaten that night. (This was in Minara Masjid, where its distinctly better than in the Bohri Mohalla place Episure and I ate in, though that wasn't bad). Episure and I polished off a plate of khiri and then tried one of pasanda, which Episure explained to me is a cut of the meat, but I've forgotten the term he used. Whatever it is, this wasn't it - as Episure said in disgust, what we got was just grilled fat.
That sort of put the lid on our eating (and remember the barahandi stuff is HEAVY). So we called it for the night then and staggered to a taxi. Episure went hom to his website where he responsibly uploaded the pictures quickly and I went to my computer where I prevaricated on writing this until now! Apologies again for that,
Vikram
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I would have to recommend Belgian-style white ales or "Wits" as they are sometimes called. They often are flavored with coriander seed and curacao bitter orange peel and have citrusy, spicy overtones. They are light and effervescent as well, which is a nice complement to spicy food. Brands I highly recommend are La Chouffe (best. beer. ever.) and Hoegaarden, both from Belgium. Hoegaarden is easier to find, but La Chouffe is worth the hunt.
I agree, I've been beating the drum for drinking Belgian beer with Indian food, for longer than I can remember. Hoegaarden seems to be the easiest to find though not, alas, here in India,
Vikram
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Madhur Jaffrey has just come out with something called the "Ultimate Curry Bible", which is, despite the somewhat misleading title, about Indian diasporic cooking. Here is the Telegraph review (about half way down the page). The book doesn't seem to be available in the U.S. yet, only in Britain. Have any of the posters in the U.K. taken a look at it yet?
I've got it, just bought it last week (and at a discount too, three cheers for Strand Book Stall). Its pretty good - all that you might expect of a Madhur Jaffrey production and with the benefit of being focussed on Indian food (am I the only one who felt she was getting increasingly flaky, the more she ranged into southeast asian and world vegetarian food?).
Its a nice solid looking book, good notes on food in different parts of the diaspora, all clearly based on personal experience and the recipes are well written and, most important of all, make you want to run out and start cooking at once.
As the title indicates she's rather oddly passed on the opportunity to write The Big Desi Diaspora Cookbook, limiting herself to curries, meaning wet and spicy dishes and the starch and accompaniments that go with them (long piece on roti canai BTW), but that does cover a lot of ground. (The main losses are, I think, with the ways in which sweets and snacks have evolved in the diaspora).
Its also not comprehensive since some regions aren't really covered like Fiji and, most surprisingly, Mauritius. Still, as I said, this is as close as we're getting to The Big Desi Diaspora Cookbook unless there's some unknown genius toiling at it out there,
Vikram
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I think he'd find Khau-gullis easier to deal with that certain Indian wines... jjread, for your sake, I hope you haven't been conned here by certain unmentionable Indian winemakers to give your professional opinion on their products....
Vikram
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Whilst you are at it, bring some expensive wine and in return we will turn you into a curry addict.
What are you planning Episure-dada? Take his wine and dump him in a khau-galli off Mohammed Ali Road for casting aspersions on eating out in Bombay?
Vikram
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There's an excellent piece on the evolution of eating out habits in Bombay in 'Consuming Modernity' a collection of essays on Indian popular culture edited by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge. I can't remember who the author is and some evil person has stolen my copy so I can't supply the information at once, but if you cant get your hands on the book, I can look around for the information.
As I remember it the piece deals largely with Irani restaurants, as the original cosmopolitan eating places in Bombay, but I think there's some info on other places as well. I remember seeing a map of the Fort area in the 1920s sometime back and Wayside Inn is marked over there. Of course, really really really tragically, this wonderfully characterful place disappeared sometime back to be replaced by a southeast asian eating place of astounding characterlessness.
I suppose the real tragedy is that this change seems to have been inevitable, since for all its character, Wayside Inn didn't have much by way of clientele towards the end. I can't really blame the owners, since I know they resisted the change for as long as they could and the standards of its old, British style cooking - fish and chips, cutlets, fry-ups, etc - didn't change much, but people just weren't going, and finally they had to change to survive.
Since you seem to be from Cal you might appreciate - enjoy would be the wrong word since the essential subject is sad - a good piece by Jug Suraiya last Sunday on the end of a similar Calcutta institution. I ate there a couple of times and can confirm that the food was excellent, in a sort of heavy, cheesy sauce sort of way. And I realise its odd asking this on an India list, but does anyone have a recipe for chicken tetrazzini?
Vikram
A moveable skyJUGULAR VEIN/JUG SURAIYA
[ SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 02, 2003 12:01:45 AM ]
Three years ago in Bangalore we chanced to have lunch in a small restaurant on Church Street . The menu was dedicated to the memory of the legendary Sky Room in Calcutta .
For Bunny and me, it opened the floodgates of nostalgia. As an eight-year-old, I was taken to the then newly opened Sky Room on Calcutta ’s Park Street . The dark blue ceiling was dotted with lights, a night-scape scattered with stars, a roomful of sky. I gazed at it, dazzled. It made even a small boy with scabby knees feel elegant, privileged to dine in such heaven-seat splendour.
Sky Room was much more than a place that served great food. It represented the cosmopolitanism, that sense of cultural crossroads, which made Calcutta unique. Everyone went to Sky Room. Communists and capitalists, old and young, shudh vegetarians and devoted steak eaters. It was a place for everyone under the sky. Including a little girl who would hoard her daily pocket money for a week to buy a single dinner roll which a benign genie disguised as a waiter would bring to her on a salver and which she’d wrap up in her handkerchief to eat on the walk home. Bunny — for that was the little girl’s name — told me the story when we first went to dinner at Sky Room. A magni-ficent repast of shrimp cocktail and chicken tetrazini (Bunny’s all-time favourite). And then, for old times sake, a dinner roll, packed up for future reference.
Every Calcuttan had a personal story to tell about Sky Room. And when the restaurant was forced to close in the 1980s because of labour problems, Bachi wrote a tribute to it which brought a tear to the tastebuds of every true Calcuttawalla. And then, more than 15 years later, by a random encounter in Bangalore , Bunny and I found Sky Room again. It was like opening a birthday present and discovering it contained your childhood. We ordered the chicken tetrazini. But instead of packing up a dinner roll to take away, we put down a deposit for a house in a Bangalore suburb where, inshallah, one day we’ll settle.
You’re daft, people told us. Buying a house in a city just because it has a restaurant which reminds you of a restaurant in quite another city where you once lived.
Totally daft. And anyway, Bangalore ’s no bed of roses any more. It’s overcrowded, the pollution’s much worse than in Delhi , there’s no water, frequent power cuts, they’re pulling down all the beautiful old buildings and cutting down the lovely rain trees to put up multi-storeyed mons-trosities of glass and concrete. True, all of it. But still, Bangalore reminded us of what Calcutta once was and might have continued to be had it not misplaced its once eclectic embrace, its sheltering sky strewn with stars.
So we went back to Bangalore to take possession of our house (does one possess a house, or is one possessed by it?) and look for the restaurant on Church Street . And we couldn’t find it. Not our house, the restaurant. Worse, we couldn’t remember its name. Dafter and dafter, said people. You want to move to a city because of some place you ate in once, and now you can’t even remember its name?
Undeterred, Bunny and I questioned Bangaloreans about the place whose name we couldn’t remember. It used to do a fantastic chicken tetrazini, said Bunny. And a friend said: You must be talking about Vicky’s; it shifted from Church Street to a farmhouse outside Bangalore . We rang up Vicky’s. To discover they were open only on weekends. And we didn’t have a weekend left in Bangalore . Then Bunny mentioned Sky Room to them, that we were visitors not just from far away, but also long ago.
So what’s the end of story? Did we ever get to Vicky’s? Are we really going to go live in Bangalore one day? That’s another story. For the moment, let’s put it this way: The tetrazini tasted even better the second time round.
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I understand that Bombay is not exaclty a food mecca
I was about to send off an explosive reply to this when it occurred to me that I've actually written something similar on this list at some point. I think what I was saying is that relative to certain other cities like Hyderabad in the south, Calcutta in the east, Lucknow in the north and Ahmedabad in the west, Bombay is not as insanely food obsessed, since who has the time here.
But that's not to say you can't eat very well here - in fact, you can probably eat a greater variety and better in Bombay than anywhere else in India. Partly because of that lack of time, the restaurant culture is very well established here and it being a business city means that people have the money to pay for it.
Above all, I think Bombay scores in variety because of the number of different communities who have come to make up the city. As a result, almost uniquely for an Indian city, there is no dominant community like the Punjabis in Delhi or Tamilians in Madras or Bengalis in Calcutta. So the cooking for Bombay really is an amalgam of all the communities that have made up the city.
A friend of mine from the Asian Wall Street Jounral, Stan Sesser, was in Bombay earlier this year to write a fairly rapturous piece on the city as a part of a series he was co-authoring on the best places to eat out in Asia. He came to Bombay, he said, with no great expectations, but it turned out to be one of the really pleasant surprises of his survey.
I can mail you Stan's full piece directly if you like, but for now I'll post a very rough list of different restaurants, divided up by region, that I'd sent him to give him a basis for his piece,
Vikram
Bombay eating- Mangalorean (seafood, all downtown)
· Trishna
· Mahesh
· Apoorva
· Excellensea
- Malvani
· Anantashram
· Saayba (Bandra)
· Gajalee (Vile Parle East)
· Sindhudurg (Dadar)
· Konkan Cafe - five star hotel style (President)
- Gujarati
· Rajdhani
· Friends Union Joshi Club
· Shree Thakker Bhojanalaya
· Panchavati Gaur
- Bengali
· Oh Calcutta
- Tamil
· Udipi Shree Ramanayaka (Matunga East, this is more Mysore Tamil)
· couple of more places, some possibly more typically Tamil in that area
· Dakshin - five star hotel style (Grand Maratha), all South Indian regions, far out near airport
- Parsi/Irani
· Britannia
· Jimmy Boys
- Muslim (Chillia)
· Olympia
- Muslim (Mughlai)
· Shalimar
· all the small places near Minara Masjid
· Dum Pukht - five star hotel style (Grand Maratha), for the Lucknowi dum pukt (closed cooking) style, far out near airport
- Punjabi/Frontier (tandoori)
· Crystal
· Peshawari - five star hotel style (Grand Maratha), far out near airport
- Goan/East Indian
· Martin’s
· Goa Portuguesa (Mahim)
- Sindhi
· Kailash Parbat
- Malayali
· Rice Boats
- General
· Swati Snacks
· Indigo
· Tea Centre
· Prithvi Cafe (Juhu)
· Samovar
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For those who want to get a flavour of Ramzaan in India I have - of course! - an article which I did along with a colleague last year. (I should note that Episure is probably going to pour complete scorn on the eating places I've listed, but that's why he's taking me on an iftaar jaunt soon).
The one really interesting point in this article is the interview I did with Ummi Abdulla, the doyenne of Moplah (Kerala Muslim) cooking, who cast some light on the lesser known south Indian Ramzaan traditions. Can others on these forums supplement this with other memories, descriptions, recipes of Ramzaans/Ramadan feasting they have enjoyed?
Vikram
IftarVikram Doctor
...Ramzan, the Muslim month of fasting, often recollected as the season of perfect meals. Ramzan, a lunar thing, never arrives at the same point each year, coming instead with an aura of slight and pleasing dislocation. Somehow it always took us by surprise: new moons are startling to see, even by accident, and Ramzan’s moon betokened a month of exquisite precision about the way we were to parcel out our time.
Sara Suleri Meatless Days
There are many reasons to celebrate Ramzan, even if one is not a Muslim. One can celebrate the Koran, which was supposed to have been revealed to the Prophet in this month. One can appreciate the sense of solidarity observing Ramzan gives to all Muslims, in every part of India, and across the world. One can observe how the world is groping its way to an understanding of the Muslim world - painfully and with problems, but still trying: who would have imagined iftar celebrations at the White House?
There are also the more physical pleasures. One can enjoy the discipline of keeping the roza, the daily fast and the pleasure of breaking it with iftar, the meal eaten just after the sun has gone down. One can enjoy the wonderful foods prepared for iftar, with both similarities and regional differences across the country. And there is too, as Sara Suleri notes in her wonderful book of memoirs, a small, but certain pleasure in the unexpected way that Ramzan keeps sneaking up on us.
This is due to the calendrical difference between lunar and Gregorian calendars which means that Ramzan is slowly moving up through the calendar year, coming earlier every time. In 1998 this discrepancy resulted in two Ramzans in one year which cemented my liking for the festival: who couldn’t like a festival that came earlier every year and sometimes even twice? And a festival that happens at night time too, with the air cooler and the moon shining brightly. It gives it all an air of being pleasingly different, like the fantasy of a child climbing out of bed at night and emerging into a magically altered world.
Its true that of late iftar has been given a dismal overlay of politics as politicians compete to don caps, eat kebabs and make insincere, vote-seeking noises of love and affection for the Muslim community. The antidote for this is simple. Forget all these artificial iftar parties, but get out at night and go to the older, traditional Muslim areas of your city where iftar has always been celebrated in the proper way. In the press of the crowds, the carts piled high with embroidered caps, the bright lights, the sticky piles of dates, the open fires roaring as the tavas sizzle on top, the rich, sweet smell of malpuas being fried and the happy noise of families out to enjoy themselves for the night, you will find the real joy of Ramzan.
Ideally, of course, one should do it in the proper spirit and keep roza, but if the flesh is weak and can’t quite do it, go anyway (Muslims believe that one can make amends for breaking the fast by feeding the poor later) and go again and even better go with friends, to make the most of this month of fasting and feasting until it comes again. Here at The Economic Times we’ve done this for your benefit (well, we didn’t need much persuading), in Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai finding out the best places to go, tasting the local specialties, comparing the merits of rival kebab shops and searching for the phirni with the perfect, slightly grainy texture. Here are our findings.
Mumbai
Like the cosmopolitan city they live in, Mumbai’s Muslims are a mixed lot, drawn from all parts of the country. Perhaps the most prominent are the Muslims from Gujarat and Kutch - Khojas, Memon and Dawoodi Bohras, who all make up an important part of the business community. Chillia Muslims from UP dominate the restaurant business (though the managers of Noorani’s at Haji Ali, one of the best known Muslim restaurants in the city, are from Kerala). Muslims have come to Mumbai from the North, from Bengal, from Iran, from the Deccan. And all of them have bought their culinary traditions which bubble together richly to produce the city’s Muslim food.
And there is no better time to taste them than Ramzan. First one has to choose where. In a city as spread out as Mumbai there bound to be several places one could go to celebrate iftar - Cadell Road in Mahim, for example, or Bandra near the station. But really there’s just one place: Mohammed Ali Road that starts in the bowels of the city around VT Station, Crawford Market and the Docks and uncoils from there towards Dadar.
This is Mumbai’s Muslim heartland, a lively, chaotic, crowded place (though an enormously long new flyover has helped a bit). Beautiful mosques (check the tilework on Dongri’s so called Zanzibari Masjid) rub shoulders with decrepit buildings. A few blocks away you are in the heart of Gujarati Mumbai in Kalbadevi with thali restaurants, Gujarati signs and sari shops; cross over to Mohammed Ali Road and its kebab stalls, Urdu signs and burqas on the shop racks. Must of Mumbai’s enterprise comes from its wholesale markets - as does, in a slightly different form of enterprise, its Underworld.
M.Ali Road is long and on Ramzan there are food stalls almost all the way. But four mohallas or neighbourhoods stand out. Nagdevi Street near Crawford Market is easy to walk to from VT Station, though in a particularly crowded and fairly dirty area. If that’s OK with you, then this is the place for paya, a thick, greasy soup made from sheep’s feet, which is eaten with lamba pav, diamond shaped loaves of bread. At the other end of the area we’re looking at is Nagpada (strictly speaking a bit off M.Ali Rd) which is worth going just for the simply stunning kebabs at Sarvi. Grilled on charcoal the kebabs are intensely meaty and flavourful, but also amazingly tender - hanging together when you pick them, but disintegrating in the mouth in an almost galouti kebab way.
But Sarvi admittedly - luckily - is open year round, so for iftar one should go to Bohri Mohalla in the centre. Here, next to the main Bohri mosque, is the place for bara-handi (from the eponymous Bara Handi hotel, though you can also get it elsewhere). These are the twelve pots of bubbling beef and mutton stews of different kinds, like pichota (tail curry), bade ka paya (beef trotters), chote ka paya (mutton trotters) and so on. You indicate what you want and your plate is filled. This is also the area for nalli nihari, a curry made from mutton marrow bones.
Some of these restaurants are so focused on their meat stews, they don’t even provide bread. You have to go to the bakery next door, but a good supply of lamba pavs, then fight your way through the crowds at the door (lots of people take away from these places) to find a place and eat. At this point we are going to be a bit heretical and admit that this is not quite to our taste. Its not the crowds and the pushing - hey, we travel by Mumbai’s trains - as the bara handi itself. Its way too greasy even for those not concerned too much with health (think an inch of fat floating on top) and too underspiced. But we accept there are those who like its rich, intensely meaty taste and if you’re one of them, this is for you.
Personally, we’d prefer to walk a small distance and go straight to Minara Masjid in the heart of Memon Mohalla. This is easily the most visible place in Mumbai during Ramzan. Its intensely lit up, its wall to wall crowds, food stalls on all sides, music, sermon and calls to prayer blaring, handcarts piled high with caps, slippers and clothes, small merry go rounds for kids whirling in the side lines - and this goes on almost all night! Forget just seeing and hearing Minara Masjid - you can smell it before you get there since the whole area is saturated with the rich sweet smells from its most famous shop (or series of shops now) - the peerless sweet seller, Sulaiman Usman Mithaiwala.
But that comes later. First one must eat meat, and that means entering Minara Masjid lane which is easy said than done since its so packed with people. Obeying traffic rules you enter on the left and have to push past handcarts and stalls piled high with sticky dates, the traditional food with which to break the roza everyday. Eat some if you like (ask if they have the sensational soft dates from Iran) and push on into the main street, every inch of which is mapped out in culinary terms. On your left for example is a line of stalls and tables and chairs where you can eat poultry -mostly chicken, but also quail, live specimens of which are looking down at you from cages. This is a rather dismal spectacle and the chicken is just OK, so its best to push on, ignoring the stall owners who try to hold you and drag you to their tables.
A little further there’s a cross road and a decision to be made. If you go left you’ll get tava cooked mutton - buna ghosht cooked with chilies, onions and tomatoes and bursting with flavor, baida roti, mutton rolls and above all, gurda kapura, a stir fry of organ meats which invariably leads to arguments about whether this includes testicles. I don’t think it does, not usually, simply because the organs are on display around the tavaa - compact curly brains, kidneys like swollen red cashews, glossy lobes of liver, the muscly mass of heart, but no testicles. Whatever the composition, the result is sensational. The meats tend to become rubbery, but their juices blend to a hugely flavourful gravy.
On the other hand, if you go right you get khichda - Mumbai’s answer to Hyderabad’s haleem, a creamy stew made from wheat and meat. Khichda adds dhal and is almost too rich at times. But the M.Ali Road stalls get it just right a blend of creamy and soupy, meaty, but with the carbohydrate satisfaction of what and pulses. You’ll also get thick, spicy chicken soup on that side, so its a dilemma. To add to the complication, straight ahead of you are the kebabs, batter fried chicken, fried fish and also sandals, a Memon sweet which is best described as a sweet iddli covered in cream and if that doesn’t sound complementary it isn’t meant to be. (The best solution to the dilemma, by the way, is to sit on the mutton side at the corner, and then get the serving boy to bring over a pot of khichda from the vendor on the other side).
Whatever your decision, the end of the iftar is not in doubt. You do a U-turn and exit, this time with Sulaiman Usman on your left. Outside the shop are the show-stoppers: wide vats of bubbling oil in which huge, violently yellow malpua (pancakes) are being made. If you are familiar with the small, cream filled pancakes of the North, forget them. These are serving plate sized monsters, saturated in beaten eggs, fried till they’re crisp, syrup added and served. They are cholestrol insanity and rather hard going to eat. You’re probably better off with Sulaiman Usman’s famous aflatoon (a sweet made from ghee and dried fruits), their barfis (the mango one is great), khaja (maida pastries) and above all, their phirnis, mango-yellow or plain white served in flat little earthen pots.
Phirni (rice pudding), to us, is really the ideal way to end an iftar feast. After all the rich meat, you’re looking for something simple and satisfying and phirni provides it. The rice flour and milk make for a cool creaminess that is not cloying as real cream would be. Some places offer phirni in plastic tubs and these are to be avoided at all costs. Not for authenticity, but because the clay plays an important role, absorbing some of the moisture to leave the contents even creamier. Despite using clay though, other places get the texture wrong: its easy to make phirni into a sweet white glue or a slimy paste. The ideal phirni must be slightly grainy in texture and that is exactly what you get at Sulaiman Usman, the perfect phirni for the perfect end to iftar.
SehriIftar is the main meal of Ramzan, but there is the other, its predawn counterpart known as seher, suhur or sehri. This meal has also traditionally had its dishes, usually of a particular richness to sustain the faithful fasters through the day. As Sara Suleri describes it, the food “was insistent in its richness and intensity, with bread dripping with clarified butter, and curried brains, and cumin eggs, and a peculiarly potent vermicelli, soaked overnight in sugar and fatted milk.”
Suleri enjoyed getting up at this unusual hour to eat, but not as much as her grandmother did: “I think she fasted only because she so enjoyed the sehri meal and that mammoth infusion of food at such an extraordinary hour... Dadi’s eating was a sight to behold and admire. She hooted when the city’s sirens sounded to tell us that we should stop eating and that the fast had now begun: she enjoyed a more direct relation with God than did petty municipal authorities.”
Suleri’s grandmother’s defense was to quote the Prophet himself. He had apparently told a friend that sehri did not end until the horizon was a white thread separating land from sky. “In Dadi’s book that thread could open into quite an active loom of dawning: the world made waking sounds, the birds and milkmen all resumed their proper functions, but Dadi’s regal mastication - on the last brain now - declared it was still night.”
We have to admit that we’ve never quite made it to a sehri: late nights for iftar are one thing, predawn is quite another. And in any case, most of our friends who keep the roza admit that few people eat like Suleri’s Dadi any more. Sehri will be dishes left over from last night, or normal breakfast foods. Just enough to keep you going until the end of day and its time for iftar again.
A southern iftarRamzan and iftar are usually thought of only in North Indian terms. True, there’s Hyderabad with its matchless haleem, where five parts of meat - usually mutton, but also beef and chicken - is cooked with one part of what for at least six hours until it acquires a creamy, intensely meaty consistency. So popular is Hyderabad’s haleem that a scheme this year to distribute it through the Post Offices has been a runaway success. Everyday between 1500-2000 kilos of haleem are taken from Pista House in Hyderabad and sold though 75 post offices through Andhra Pradesh. The owner of Pista House, Abdul Majeed, is now thinking of opening a counter at Dubai Airport Terminal.
But Hyderabad is really a reflection of Northern Muslim culture, transplanted and temepered by the Deccan, but North Indian in its roots still. More truly South Indian is the Moplah community of Kerala, descendants of Arab traders who used monsoon winds to cross the Arabian Sea, then stayed on the Malabar Coast till the winds would take them back. Not surprisingly they often intermarried with local girls and the descendents are the Moplahs, centred in North Kerala around Kozhikode. Moplah culture is an interesting mix of the directly Arab - they had a closer connection than the Northern Muslims, of Turki origin and not in constant direct connection with the Arab world - and the Malayali.
This comes out in their iftar dishes. According to Ms.Umi Abdulla, the Chennai based doyenne of Moplah cooking, they will break the fast in the usual way with dates, water and few snacks. “This is called cheriyah nombu thoddakal, the small fast breaking,” she says. This is followed by prayers and then the veliyah nombu thoddakal, the main fast breaking meal. This typically will not have rotis, parathas or even rice dishes like the famous Moplah biryani. Instead they will eat pathiri, like chapatis made from rice flour. Pathiri is creamy white, exquisitely thin and light and probably the most delicate of Indian breads. This is eaten with a normal mutton, chicken or fish curry.
On special occasions though, Ms.Abdulla says they will make their version of haleem known as aleesa - an immediate link to the Arab world where the dish is usually called harissa. Like most Malayalis they eat kanji or rice gruel, but at times this might be thickened with coconut milk, spices and meat. Kappu or tapioca, another Malayali staple, also features to be eaten with a hot fish curry. There will also, of course be sweets: Moplahs have their specialties, like kaiadai, made from boiled and ground bananas soaked in egg yolks, made into a dough with flour, then deep fried and soaked in sugar. Or mutta mala, noodles of egg yolk cooked in sugar syrup.
Despite all these options, there will be those who long only for the best known Moplah dish, biriani, whcih is based on their fried rice recipe called neichoru (ghee rice). Ms.Abdulla tells them to be patient. Birianis of several kinds will be made to end Ramzan at Id ul Fitr.
DelhiChandralekha Roy
According to experts, Muslim cuisine in India's capital can trace its origins to the campaigns of Ghengis Khan. As the Mongol cut a swath of destruction and mayhem, sweeping through Central Asia and carving an Empire up to the fringe of Europe, he sent some rulers scurrying for refuge across the Hindu Kush. Many of them camped on the outskirts of Delhi. More importantly, their armies included the kitchen brigade. It was the Tughlaqs who made Jahanpanah their capital and put Delhi on the international culinary map.
If the groundwork was laid by the Tughlaqs, it was the Mughals who built the superstructure. In particular, Akbar's son and successor, Jehangir is credited with giving this city two delicacies: khichrhi and falooda. This kihchrhi is not to be confused with the kedgeree to be found on most British breakfast menus and to be consumed to overcome gastric indisposition, according to Hobson Jobson. Jehangir had days when he avoided eating flesh (unusual for a Muslim monarch) and he made up for it with a khichrhi, also called lazzizan, that involved rice cooked with pulses, clarified butter and aromatic spices and garnished with dried fruits and exotic nuts. It is still available today, but only on special order.
More generally available is his other favourite falooda, jelly like noodles eaten with fruit and ice cream. The British traveler, William Hawkins, was impressed by the fact that Jehangir balanced his feasting with fasting. When Shahjehan shifted his capital to Delhi, he brought the cuisine of his ancestors to the city. To be sure, the food was much subtler and milder. For our parents generation the ultimate gastronomical experience was at the legendary Karim’s' which exists still inimitably -in the same manner tucked inside a perennially dirty and muddy narrow bylane near the Jama Masjid.
Then there was the eternal Moti Mahal , which opened in Darya Ganj, the dividing line between Old and New Delhi. It served, apart from it's delectable kebabs, tandoori chicken, makhani dal and nan. Before, the nouveau riche Punjabis came in droves, here were qawalis, and the restaurant was generally tented. But, Moti Mahal grew, it added floors and bought up next door houses and became an open-air restaurant creating new genre of Indo-European eatery where the ambiance was what mattered and the newly emerging middle class felt more at ease, in spite of the Pathan waiters with their starched white salwars and shirts, large upturned moustaches and kohl in their eyes. Today, Moti Mahal is probably not even a Muslim joint anymore, and has been bought over. The food is mediocre - but it has a following who swear by it.
But, real foodies go elsewhere, apart from Karim's that is. In the Jama Masjid area, two really good places for biryani, and gravies are New Jawahar Hotel and Flora's!!! The best burras at Kashmiri Gate area, (also in the Walled City) is in a place called Khyber. In the Jama Masjid area, the best breakfast of really hot meat, peppered lavishly with chillies and naan is in a shop called basically a one-man operation - who sells out by nine in the morning and then shuts shop. Also try Shabbarati Nahriwali and Haveli Azamkhan.
Just below, the Jama Masjid there are three restaurants Aadimi Meerut Kebab, Aasli Meerut Kebab, and Meerut Kebab - which foodies rave about, but standards aren't constant. They have their good days and very bad days. Even at the famous Karim's some years ago, a friend of mine remembers asking for mutton biryani and being served a mutton pulao. When he bristled, he was asked: “what’s the difference" to which he replied, if I have to tell Karim’s, then it's time you shut shop." Outside the walled city, the common feeling is that the best biryani is at Matka Peer's - which is actually a dargah - with a side-business. The best kebabs and haleem is at the bus-adda near Okhla. Its really a shacky little place with no name - but has a huge following.
KolkataChandralekha Roy
Kolkata is a city where the Mughals, local and Avadhi have almost captured the market for slumming and street food. The legacy of the Moghul princess in exile and the nawabs of Dhaka, now in Bangladesh, can be seen at a number of places. The cuisine is less rich and more subtle than both the Delhi and Nizami style of cooking, tending to substitute yoghurt and lemon juice for the cream and the solid kheer of other Muslim cooking. Shiraz is the most popular, of what the Bongs calls "Moghlai" eatery.
The one dish is would be a mistake not to try is the Kachi Kaliya. If you were to look at the dish etymologically, one word would be superfluous. Kachi indicates the babies of baby goats, and so does Kaliya. However, in cooking parlance, Kaliya is now synonymous with a style of gravy cooking, the other two being Qorma and Saalan. There’s a place known to aficionados on Park Street joint which cooks the kid with potatoes.
The other dish we would strongly recommend is Nargisi Koftas, boiled eggs wrapped in mince kofta simmered in cashew enriched gravy. It must be had with saffron tinged yoghurt and is a racy substitute for cocktail snacks. Aminia, on S.N.Banerjee road, makes its living off mutton egg potato tomato, besides mutton chop and chicken dopyaaza. But, the best chops or "chaaps" are to be had off the small row of eateries near the Nakhoda Mosque. Also try the biryani and rezala from Shabir's, Kolkata probably being the only place where biryani is made with potatoes.
One the best known specialties developed by Bengali Muslims is the rezala made with khasi (castrated goat), in which lemon, yoghurt, milk and spices are combined with the almost heretical addition of lots of hot green chillies. The paratha also has an interesting take in Bengali Muslim cooking. A first class cook can present you with a small dinner-plate size paratha with fifty flaky layers underneath a golden-brown surface. This originated in the courts of the Bengali nawabs in Dhaka, and can probably only be found in homes. We have never eaten a single one like that in a restaurant.
If you are lucky the odd eatery in Calcutta will serve you Bengali Muslim delicacies like Bhuna Hans or fried duck or Handi Kabab, which is curiously made inside a large, thick bottomed pot with a narrow neck, or Dimer Halua, which is halwa made out of eggs, flavoured with saffron and garnished with eggs. It's a pity that the real delicacies of ‘East Pakistan’s Muslim fish cooking didn't travel beyond the border after Partition - like their exotic recipes of fish with oranges and pineapples!
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The gods really have it in for those of us trying to follow diets. No sooner are we recovering from Diwali's flood of sweets, then Ramzaan (Ramadan, outside India) starts today. And as anyone who's seen it - or read Sara Suleri's wonderful description of it in Meatless Days - for most people the day long fasting just seems like a way of whetting the appetite for the night feasting to come.
I'm not a Muslim and I don't keep the roza, the day fast, but that certainly doesn't stop me going after sunset to Mohammed Ali Road, Mumbai's main Muslim area, to enjoy the chaos and crowds in the night, the whole area lit up like a carnival and, of course, the ultra rich food. Its death to diets, but who can resist it? Every year I go there several times and take friends who have never been before.
This year though there's going to be an e-Gullet twist to the iftar (the evening meal. Episure has promised to take me to even better, lesser known places way in the depths of Mohammed Ali Road, and I;m already salivating at the prospect. Are there any other e-Gulleteers in Mumbai, or likely to be here in the course of this month, who would like to join us?
Khiri, khapura, kheema, here we come!
Vikram
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A nice enough article I guess, and certainly as a long time proponent for South Indian food I'm happy to see it. Nevertheless, being irredeemably contrary, I have some bones to pick with it.
Like did he have to go to Cochin and stay at Brunton's Boatyard (one of those places that certainly looks very imposing, out there on the waterfront, but is rather less so up close. Especially when the Malabar House Hotel, which is truly something, is close by) AND eat there? Like there's no better place in Cochin? Like the Grand in Ernakulam, which is by almost universal consensus the best place to eat fish in Cochin if not Kerala, doesn't exist? And like eating in the hotel you're staying in doesn't seem a bit lazy?
I had some other small cribs, but can't remember, so maybe they're not important. Except for this one BIG crib: where has everyone suddenly got these words 'Keralan' and 'Keralite'? I have very occasionally heard Keralite, but NEVER Keralan. Its always Malayali. I think 'Keralan' sounds awful, and the presumed thinking behind it is worse. Its like its too much effort to explain to Americans that the adjective for people and things from Kerala is Malayali, form the language they speak, Malayalam, so lets just simplify it for them by making the place name into an adjective.
I have only this thing to say to people who think that way: so are you OK with us calling you USAns and USAites??????
Vikram
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Suvir's highlighted a lot of interesting old threads which I've been going through (the fact that I've a deadline probably explains why I'm so happy to spend my time doing this!).
I feel embarassed at the way I keep posting old articles of mine, but the Ayurveda thread reminded me of a couple of articles I'd investigated and written on the subject recently.
Its an interesting subject and possible quite healthy. My only problem is - sorry Suvir - when people start going on about Ancient Indian Traditions of Spirituality and how ayurveda fits in, I always get a strong craving for steak tartare. Irredeemably tamasic I guess.
Anyway, the places I describe below are very well worth eating in if you come to Bombay. Pinakin's Cafe Sattva in particular is really beautiful,
Vikram
Ayurvedic FoodVikram Doctor
Ayurvedic food comes with a definite image attached. You’re thinking vegetarian obviously, but also ultra bland and low on spicing. Nor is it going to be the tasty stuff that everyone likes, like onions and potatoes and besan, but tedious tasteless things, pumpkin, bottle-gourd, snake gourd and their bulbous brethren, along with sundry greens of mouth-puckering bitterness and a slimy consistency when cooked. You’re thinking the essence of everything you hated to eat as kid, but were forced to by your grandmother because it was ‘good for you’.
And you couldn’t be more wrong. That sort of food does exist unfortunately and is sometimes even passed off under a vaguely ayurvedic label. But its a mistake to assume that that’s what ayurvedic food means. In fact, its probably incorrect to say that there’s any specific ayurvedic type of food. Rather, ayurveda is a way to eat under which all kinds of food can come. Its even possible to imagine meats and spicy food coming into an ayurvedic diet - if that’s what suits you.
The key phrase is ‘suits you’ since that is one of the essential principles in ayurveda. The two basic principles of ayurvedic eating could be: (1) eat according to what suits your body and (2) eat in balance. Before you start imagining though that chocolate covered doughnuts suit your body very well, keep in mind that ayurveda means something quite specific here. Ayurveda works on the ancient notion of the five basic elements that make up the world (earth, air, fire, water and ether) which combine in different proportions to form three basic doshas, body states or ‘humours’: vata, pitta and kapha. These dictate the sort of person we are, and hence the sort of food we should eat.
A vata dosha, for example, is considered to be made up of air and ether, and hence a personality dominated by wind, which makes for dynamism, but also for instability. A kapha dosha is made of earth and water, which makes for a strong and stable personality, but in excess it could be avaricious and greedy. A pitta dosha is made up of fire and means an intelligent, energetic personality, but one also prone to rage and violence in excess. An ayurvedic diet would hence start not with the food, but with you - determining what dosha you are. “An ayurvedic vaid start diagnosing you even before you open your mouth,” says Pinakin Patel, whose Cafe Sattva, reviewed here last week, attempts to serve ayurvedic food. “He starts his diagnosis based on the way you look, the curves of your body, and then your pulse.” What sort of person you are, how you feel, the food you eat, all comes afterwards.
Its not enough though to find out what dosha you are. You also need to determine how balanced your dosha is, and then how to bring it into balance or to ensure it stays that way. So its not enough to know which foods suit your dosha, but you also need to know which food raise or lower it, in order to be able to control it. So a weak pitta temperament , for example, can be strengthened by foods that are sour or salty or pungent, like chillies or curd, but an excess of it can be reduced by sweet foods, like sugarcane juice. A vata temperament however is weakened by strong and pungent foods, while grains, fruits, milk and even meat broth can strengthen it.
The principle is balance, and food emerges as the key means of achieving it. What becomes evident once one starts looking at ayurveda is how completely wrong that idea of it being something medicinal to be taken to set you right. The idea of a quick fix from swallowing something is typically allopathic: ayurveda takes time and food can be more important over time that any medicine (or more precisely, there’s no difference between food and medicine). As K.T.Achaya puts it in his Historical Dictionary of Indian Food in the entry on ayurveda: “Anna, diet, is the main agency by which this (good health), the two others being the use of medicinal herbs and drugs, aushada, and various exercises, vihara.”
Unfortunately for those seeking to follow an ayurvedic system of eating, as one gets deeper into the subject its all too easy get confused. As with many traditional Indian systems, there’s a multiplicity of concepts that must be taken into account, each of which can interact with each other in a dizzying variety of permutations and combinations (no wonder we’re good at maths). For example, every type of food is thought to have its own characteristic, not all of which are immediately evident. Fresh milk, for example, might seem sweet and cooling, yet because it emerges hot from the cow’s udder it is also be considered a substance that is naturally cooked, not raw.
Further complications come in through concepts like rasa, the basic tastes, of which there are considered to be six, virya, the potency of the food and vipaka, the aftertaste, which can be distinct from the rasa. And finally just to complete the complexity, there’s the concept of the three gunas or inherent personality types: sattvik, or serene and refined, like Vishnu; rajasic, energetic and dynamic like Brahma; and tamasic, wild, rough and even violent, like Shiva. These concepts, which are arguably better known than the doshas, are again what are supposed to dictate what you eat. The stereotype of ayurvedic food as bland and vegetarian is essentially referring to sattvik food, but there’s no reason why you can’t eat tamasic food if that’s what suits you.
One could conclude from this that running an ayurvedic restaurant is next to impossible: how can you serve a standardised menu when everyone is supposed to have a customised diet? And why do most such restaurants only serve sattvik type food? For the second question, I think there’s a practical explanation. Tamasic and even rajasic food are not exactly in short supply: pretty much anything in standard restaurants falls under these categories. Genuine sattvik food is only found in restaurants like these new ayurvedic ones, or in ashram canteens, or the few Brahmin restaurants or ones that specialise in food for fasts like Phansikars in Mumbai (Dadar and Girgaum).
As to the first question, Patel admits the contradiction. All he’s trying to do at Cafe Sattva, he says, is provide an experience of a balanced ayurvedic meal which might stimulate people’s interest to find out more. In that in the end is perhaps the idea to take from ayurvedic eating. Forget the complications and combinations of trying to match your food to your dosha or guna. Just make sure its balanced and with nothing, neither specific ingredients or quantities, in excess, and you’ll be fine.
AyushaktiVikram Doctor
Malad is not the most prepossessing of Mumbai’s suburbs. Its a solidly middle-class area, with crowded roads and little of note, except maybe the old East Indian village of Orlem on its fringes. From a culinary point of view, what’s on offer in Malad seems to be summed up just outside Malad station.
Exit on the west-hand side and you’re confronted with a huge sign for M.M.Mithai, a well-known local purveyor of mainly north Indian snacks, although this sign is advertising that ultimate Mumbai mouthful, the vada-pau. M.M.Mithai’s version of this potato-bonda in a bun is delicious, giving just the right, spicy, deep fried carbohydrate kick, but fairly deadly from a calorie point of view. Especially if you were to follow it up with MM’s other specialties like soggy mal-puas dripping grease and syrup, or tall glasses of extra-creamy frothy lassi. If M.M.Mithai is anything to go by, health is not exactly a top Malad priority.
Which makes it all the more amazing to find the Ayushakti centre, tucked besides the railtracks a short auto ride from Malad station (ask for Milap cinema and then check the small lanes leading off the main road opposite). In these unlikely surroundings you’ll find a complete ayurvedic health centre. The Ayushakti centre has been set up by Dr.Pankaj Naram, a noted ayurvedic doctor from Mumbai, with a big practice in Germany and the USA. The centre serves as a focus point for his activities in India, where people both from India and abroad who want specialised, in depth ayurvedic treatment can come. Its a well designed building, nondescript from outside, but inside its open and lots of traditional Indian materials like polished wood frames, laterite floors and red tiles have been used to give is a pleasant atmosphere. Its a self-contained building, from a big meeting hall in the basement, a cafe and dispensary on the ground floor, consultation and treatment rooms on the floors above and at the top, rooms for the patients to stay in over the course of their treatment and even a small rooftop garden.
The cafe was originally intended for these patients, since following a proper diet was essential for the success of their treatment. But the centre then decided to open it to the public which posed a problem for its newly arrived chef, Suman Majumdar, a food industry veteran who had worked with the ITC Welcomgroup, the Marine Plaza hotel and the Mars group of restaurants in Mumbai before arriving at the centre. “When I came here I was given a list of vegetables that could be used for the patients who were all following a strict sattvik diet - vegetables like a lot of gourds, pumpkin, parvar, tindoori and so on,” he says. “But when we decided to go commercial we realised we couldn’t just give these. We needed to serve food of more general appeal to get the commercial customers.” But, of course, still with an ayurvedic focus.
Majumdar’s solution was to go easy on the strict concepts of what constitutes ayurvedic food (see box), but to stick to its spirit. “Ayurvedic food is all about being balanced and easily digestible,” he says. “So we moved away from the strict sattvik menu - though that’s available for the patients and if people want it - and added some rajasic elements to make it more commercially acceptable.” The principle he says is to make sure that whatever’s added is balanced or counteracted by something else. “For example, cauliflower is seen as gassy, but if you boil water with ajwain and tamarind and salt, and then blanch the cauliflower in it, that takes care of the gassiness. You can then even shallow fry it with a little onion and ginger,” he explains. “Or paneer is usually seen as very heavy and hard to digest. But we cook it lightly with basil, mint and black pepper and that makes it easy to digest.”
A lot of experimentation has gone into the dishes at the Ayushakti Cafe. Majumdar is particularly proud of his attempts to create healthy versions of Mumbai’s street food. Its similar stuff to what you’ll get at M.M.Mithai, but a million times healthier. His ragda-pattice, for example, a streetside staple of chole with a vegetable cutlet (pattice), is made using mung dhal and vatana (dried peas) rather than channa dhal. “We mix the mung with hing and mustard to reduce gaseousness, and we stuff the pattice with ginger. Its one of our most popular dishes.” With dosas, the problem was that they are made with a fermented rice and urad dhall batter, but ayurveda is against the consumption of fermented products. Majumdar has invented a substitute from a made on the spot batter of rice and urad dhall flour, besan and some fenugreek. Its not an exact substitute for a dosa, but very tasty and satisfying.
Perhaps his biggest challenge was pau bhaji, the city’s favourite, calorie-bomb concoction of tomatoes and other vegetables, griddle cooked to a mush and eaten with toasted buns. Not only was the lavish use of butter bad, but ayurveda frowns on the essential ingredient, tomatoes, for being too acidic. Nonetheless, Majumdar decided to go ahead with tomatoes, but after removing the seeds, which are the most acid part and the hard to digest skins: “Then I made a pulp from them and balanced that with an equal quantity of pumpkin pulp, and cooked them using our freshly ground masalas.”
Ayushakti’s food is certainly healthier than standard fare. But it may still pose a problem for standard ideas of health. Most people these days derive their ideas of nutrition from the West, where healthy eating tends to mean low calorie. The problem here is that ayurvedic food is balanced, but not necessarily low calorie,. This is particularly due to its love of cow’s ghee, which Ayurveda - but emphatically not Western nutrition - imputes with many healthy characteristics. Majumdar says he steers a compromise here. “We do use ghee, but not always, because I find its taste is so strong it can become too dominant. So we also use rice bran oil, which is light and healthy. We make sure this oil is completely chemical free, not refined using sulphur, and we make sure we only use oil that is less than six months old.”
Majumdar’s innovations have been good for the cafe. Apart from the patients who eat there as part of their treatment, its often filled with people from the neighbourhood. Its a sight worth seeing for those who think of ayurveda as an elitist activity: the centre doesn’t get a trendy crowd since its hardly known in the city, and is anyway set far away from any fashionable area. These are just ordinary people who might normally go to the M.M.Mithai’s of the world, but when given the option are only too happy to opt for good, light and healthy food, eaten in pleasant surroundings. Its a lesson one hopes that other food entrepreneurs might learn from.
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I recently went to a big function at the Oberoi in Bombay which had an interesting buffet dinner. The people organising the function had decreed the buffet was to be vegetarian only, and in a somewhat desperate attempt to add some interest here the Oberoi chefs had come up with the idea of having one dish from every state in India in the buffet.
I thought the idea was amusing, especially given how desperate they got when they came to those perenially overlooked Northeastern states (patriotically inclined desis can stop right now and do a test by seeing if they can name them all). Since these places aren't exactly noted for their vegetarian dishes the chefs ended up with some pretty weird variations on bamboo shoots - except for poor Tripura where they gave up completely and just put the boiled rice in its name.
I'm putting the menu below. Can anyone suggest what more appropriate dishes for each state might have been? (Like I don't agree with the Kerala dish. Curd-rice is something I associate more with Tamil Nadu, and I'd have chosen something like kalan or olan rather than this). Ot what a non-veg version of this buffet might have looked like? I'll post vague translations for the non-desis.
- Andhra Pradesh - Pappu Dasaki (Curried bottlegourd. This is one of those veggies I think just shouldn't exist)
- Arunachal Pradesh - Laija (leafy greens boiled. Tasted like spinach only)
- Assam - Potato Oambal (tasted like indifferently made alu posto)
- Bihar - Baingan ka Salan (aubergine curry)
- Delhi - Aloo Papdi chaat (spicy potato chaat)
- Goa - Bibinca (a dessert since everyone knows the only vegetable they eat in Goa is coconuts! These are incredibly rich and rather rubbery textured stacked coconut pancakes)
- Gujarat - Patra and Dhokla (Patra is spiced, fried and rolled colocassia leaves, dhoklas are steamed rice batter cakes)
- Haryana - Rajma Masala (spicy kidney beans)
- Himachal Pradesh - Longia Bhutta, Dhingri Subzi (curried, dryish corn and mushrooms)
- Jammu & Kashmir - Khatti Bindi (meaning sour okra, it was okra cooked in a yoghurt sauce)
- Jharkand - Dum Ki Arbi (someone in F&B was thinking tribals = tubers! What is arbi in English, BTW?)
- Karnataka - Bisibelebath (spicy rice, thank god for this dish which is what most people ended up eating)
- Kerala - Curd Rice (ridiculous, which self respecting Malayali has ever eaten this willingly?)
- Madhya Pradesh - Makai ka halwa (no, thank god that wasn't a sweetcorn pudding, but a corn curry)
- Maharashtra - Koshimbir (coriander leaves in chickpea flour, pretty good - or pretty hard to screw up)
- Manipur - UTI, black lentils (well, at least no bamboo shoots)
- Meghalaya - Wak Bizak (Bamboo shoots with chilli and ginger)
- Mizoram - Bai (boiled bamboo shoots and spinach, not exactly likely to increase gastronomic tourism to Mizoram)
- Nagaland - Vegetable Stew (bamboo shoots again, this time with tomatoes)
- Orissa - Chana Dhalna (never reached Orissa either)
- Tamil Nadu - Dhal Payasam (of all the things in Tamil cooking, they have to give us sweet lentils!)
- Tripura - Boiled rice (my heart bleeds for Tripura!)
- Uttaranchal - Dhal Wada (forgot what this was, don't think I made it to Uttaranchal!)
- Uttar Pradesh - Subz Dum Ki Biriani (meant to be from Lucknow I guess. I don't eat biriani, so can't comment)
- West Bengal - Rassagulla (a no brainer I guess, for the dessert)
Just realised that I've got nothing listed for Chhatisgarh or Punjab! Or the union territories. Must have missed out some, unless the bread rolls were meant to be from Pondicherry!
Vikram
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Reading this thread on Indians and pickling reminds me of this story I wrote recently which is somewhat rude on the subject.... I hope a certain San Francisco based writer isn't on eGullet, but honestly has anyone READ her work?! Have people read Monsoon Diary? Any comments?
Vikram
Indian Food WritingVikram Doctor
There was a time when Indian women who married and went abroad would make pickles to sell to other Indian immigrants. These days Indian women who marry and go abroad enrol in creative writing programmes to write impassioned narratives about making pickles. Pickle making seems to be the hidden subtext in modern Indian writing (it even features in its ur-narrative: in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children the hero, Salim Sinai, ends up in a picklemaking factory). Somewhere in the US, in a midwestern University a Ph.D. student must surely be doing a thesis on the analytical aspects of aam-ka-achar as an attribute of alienation among Americanised Indian authors.
These narratives come in different forms, fiction, autobiography, poetry, even film, but share a numbing sameness. Idyllic childhoods spent watching grandmothers cook slide into the confusions of school and college where for the first time people from other communities are encountered, then comes the journey abroad which may or may not be preceded by marriages, arranged or unwise, then the culture shock, the unfamiliar shops, new temptations, new tastes... all in an ultra lush prose style brimming with bathos and basmati rice. Here’s a typical extract from Preeti Nair’s recent novel One Hundred Shades of White. The narrator, Nalini, is, naturally, making pickle:
"Day by day, I let feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness burn with peppercorns and chilli. The peppercorns and chilli would sizzle in the boiling hot oil and expand until they could grow no further and then they exploded, releasing a suffocating smell that choked. Freshly squeezed lemon juice and the ginger would calm and soothe the aroma, evaporating the stench, bringing it back to a neutral place. To this mixture was added a sweet ripe mango, bursting with so many dreams, and lightly fried onions that grounded and made things safe and possible. All were bottled until the man became a shadow of a memory."
The doyenne of this heartburn inducing school has to be Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a San Francisco based writer whose double jobs of teaching creative writing and running a helpline for South Asian women seem almost to guarantee the steady stream of anguish and asafoetida laden novels she’s come up with, starting with The Mistress of Spices, best described as Tarla Dalal meets Harlequin Romances: “I put on the white dress Raven gave me, all foam and flower-scent falling over slimness of waist and hip, all whisper and glide around my bare legs. I fill a small silk sachet with lotus root, herb of long loving. Tie it on a silk cord around my neck so the sachet lies between my breasts that smell of ripe mangoes.” (In this genre breasts evidently can’t be like anything other than mangoes).
Despite all this prose, purple as eggplants, there is something to be said for these books. They are, at least, expanding the scope of food writing that in India has otherwise stuck stubbornly to cookbooks. Abroad food writing is a broad field, also including anthologies, anthropology, articles, fiction, film, guides, history (the latest trend is for the histories of particular ingredients: potatoes, apples, caviar, codfish), humour, memoirs, poetry, travelogues, even culinary crime fiction. Indian equivalents are still rare and little read. For example, many Indian chefs and food fans haven’t heard of K.T.Achaya’s pioneering work in Indian food history, and despite all the media coverage given to food, his death last year went almost entirely unacknowledged.
Achaya’s work has been followed up by a few scholars like R.S.Khare, Arjun Appadurai and A.K.Sinha (author of an interesting Anthropology of Indian Sweetmeats). With more general food writing though one pioneer, as with much else to do with popularising Indian food, is Madhur Jaffrey whose first cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Food, had stories of her Delhi based family woven in. Another pioneer (from a Pakistani background) is the Yale based writer, Sara Suleri whose luminous book, Meatless Days, with its wonderful title essay with stories of meaty meals in pre-dawn Ramzaan mornings, sets the model for such books of cross cultural memoirs. Its just as well the memoir field is strong since on the evidence of Divakaruni, Nair or even Bulbul Sharma’s pleasant enough The Anger of Aubergines, we’re far from getting an Indian equivalent of Joanne Harris (Chocolat, Five Quarters of the Orange) in food fiction.
Oddly enough, the best contender in memoirs is confusingly closely named to Divakaruni: Chitrita Banerji, an American based writer of Calcutta origin, has written outstandingly on the place of food in Bengali culture. Her first book, Life and Food in Bengal is simply the best book on any Indian regional cuisine, combining seasonal descriptions of Bengali cooking with a fictionalised telling of her own life. Her more recent book The Hour of the Goddess: Memories of Women, Food and Ritual in Bengal, is a meditation on key aspects of Bengali cooking: the importance of fish, the difference between East and West Bengali cooking, on the Bengali love of bitterness, of cheese based sweets and panchphoron, the typical Bengali five spice mix.
Shoba Narayan’s Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, is the most recent entrant in this field. The New York based has written of growing up in a family from Kerala, living in Coimbatore and Chennai, and then going to study in the US. Its a well written book, lively in its characterisations and descriptions of the frustrations of negotiating across cultures. At times the tone is a bit simpering: the author is too aware of always being the perfect daughter, sister, foreign student, budding artist - perfect even in her (carefully contained) rebellions - until she ends as the perfect Indian wife. Still, if one can stomach this, (and the excellent recipes make it easier) Monsoon Diary is engaging reading, and hopefully might serve as more of a model than Divakaruni for all those Indian women on creative writing courses.
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With no modesty or regard for eGullet storage concerns, an article I'd written on this subject sometime back. It might provide some fodder for discussion. The Appadurai essay I refer to is well worth reading, if you can get your hands on it:
On Indian CookbooksVikram Doctor
Trends in Indian publishing change all the time. Fiction, of the magic realist kind, shot up with Salman Rushdie, to be overtaken by fiction of the magic ethnic kind around the time of Arundhati Roy, then tiresomely confessional fiction by a number of women writers and at least one Bombay based male one, and then NRI fiction, and now it looks like desi thrillers are having their day. Non-fiction comes and goes, autobiographies alternate with biographies, translations should be up there more, poetry almost never does (thankfully, given the general quality) and children’s books are also always on the verge but never there.
And through it all, one category stays strong: cookbooks are low-key, but solid sellers, rarely producing a sensation, but always simmering away profitably. Any bookshop you enter will have a huge heap of cookbooks in a corner, paperbacks and hardcovers, lavishly illustrated or plain printed ones, expensive imported books and cheap local ones (though even local prices are on the rise, a sign perhaps that consumers now value them enough to pay more), books from star names like Tarla Dalal and Sanjeev Kapoor and books from humble local ladies associations, books for beginners and for chefs, books that revel in meat and books that shun it, books for mothers, bachelors, students and books in particular on every type of Indian cooking.
So plentiful are they that its hard to remember what a recent phenomenon this is. In the West cookbooks have a long history, from the collections of recipes made by Roman and mediaeval chefs, to the 18th century housewives manuals compiled by writers like Hannah Glasse and Maria Rundell, to the Mrs.Beeton’s doorstopping Victorian best-seller to all the many variants in the Twentieth century. By contrast, the Indian tradition is curiously bare. Its a fact highlighted in one of the few studies done on the written traditions of Indian cooking, but by a most eminent figure, the anthropologist and pioneer of popular culture studies, Arjun Appadurai, who’s currently Professor of International Studies at Yale.
In ‘How to make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India’ Appadurai notes that ancient Hindu texts deal with gastronomic rather than culinary issues: “That is, while there is an immense amount written about eating and about feeding, precious little is said about cooking in Hindu legal, medical and philosophical texts.” He suggests reasons for this - that the writers of these texts were more interested in food as part of spiritual or medical practices, rather than the food and its preparation itself. he also considers that there were strong impulses to safeguard local variations in cuisine as part of hallowed local traditions, rather than to experiment and develop a larger type of cuisine. While conceding that texts might have been lost or damaged, he concludes that from all that is known of the Hindu science of cooking, “the impression of a minor genre is unmistakable.”
As with so much else in India, things change with new waves of people into the country. The Muslims brought the concept of an aristocratic cuisine with courts like Lucknow and Hyderabad particularly known for their food. In these courts it was possible for chefs to become celebrated and to make some record of their recipes. With the Muslim courts too, a common type of cuisine comes up across the country, although adapted to local ingredients - a Lucknowi biriani could be very different from a Hyderabadi one, but the common point was the same.
These trends get built upon and extended by the British who created two different types of cookbooks, each reflecting different facets of the Raj experience. On the one hand there were those writers who loved India and wanted to get close to it, and for whom the food was one of the easiest points of interactions. This was best exemplified by books like ‘Culinary Jottings from Madras’ by ‘Wyvern’, the pseudonym used by Colonel A.R.Kenney-Herbert, who retired from the Indian Army to set up an Indian cooking school in Britain. (This book is out of print and really needs reissuing). The other trend, exemplified by books like Flora Annie Steele’s Indian Housekeeper and Cook was to distance India, with the rather abominable intention of creating British cooking from Indian conditions. Pat Chapman, the British founder of the Curry Club and an all round enthusiast for Indian cooking, notes with horror that “Her book devotes just one and a half pages (out of 400) to what she dismissively calls: ‘Native Dishes - added by request’.”
These books may not have done much for Indian cookbook writing, but the British did indirectly influence their development through the number of Indian magazines and newspapers that came up during the Raj. The English language ones might have been mainly concerned with business and politics, but the vernacular publications were soon printing recipes from housewives. By contrast, professional chefs in India have rarely written recipes, perhaps because many were illiterate, but mostly out of a desire to hoard their knowledge for themselves and their children. “The biggest tragedy in Indian cooking is this refusal of chefs to share their knowledge. We have lost invaluable traditions due to this selfishness,” mourns Jiggs Kalra, the well known food consultant.
Whatever the consequences, the fact that these pioneering recipes came from housewives meant that their focus were determinedly practical. A friend recalls how one lady who was famous for the recipes she contributed to Marathi papers was famous for her extreme detail. “Her recipes would include warnings of every step where things could go wrong - and then had suggestions on would could be done with the stuff, if things did go wrong!” Not everyone went to these pessimistic excesses, but there’s a clear sense of practical care in these recipes that was greatly appreciated by their readers, who would cut and paste them in collections that were often handed down to their daughters.
Finally, people took the initiative to collate and print these in simple books. Quite often this impetus came from community organisations like the Saraswat Mahila Samaj in Mumbai, who first came out with Rasachandrika, a collection of Saraswat recipes in Marathi in 1943. A copy is now a standard item in every Saraswat kitchen. Another famous example is of Samaithu Par (‘Cook And See’), the standard book on Tamil vegetarian cooking, came out in 1951, in this case from a single author, S.Meenakshi Ammal. She had the benefit of the backing of her uncle, a pioneer of the library movement in the then Madras Presidency, and over fifty years later the book is still in print, in Tamil, English, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam editions. The only changes have been minor ones, like the use of evocative old measures like ‘ollocks’ and ‘visses’ have given way to grammes and liters - and there is now a “Best of Samaithu Par” cookbook in the modern, well printed and illustrated form.
Samaithu Par illustrates another function of these books. Most people only buy the first volume that covers the Tamil vegetarian basics, but in fact there is another volume covering more detailed recipes and items like pickles, and a third one that deals with rituals and ceremonies - not just recipes to cook for them, but how to prepare and conduct them. The author writes that this section came about due to the number of requests she received from young housewives settled in far away places. Its a point noted by Appadurai, that many such cookbooks are either written by or for Indians uprooted from their native contexts and fearing a loss of traditions.
Appadurai notes however another, perhaps even more popular trend in cookbook writing. Women living in cities were increasingly interacting with women from other communities, in their new apartments, as the families moved out of their traditional dominant community neighbourhoods, or perhaps even at work (or in Mumbai, on the way to work in the trains). And when they interacted they exchanged recipes, and in time this leads to cookbooks. “In many of the introductions to these cookbooks, the authors thanks women they have known in various metropolitan contexts for sharing recipes and skills. In some cases, it is possible to discern a progression from orally exchanged recipes to full fledged ethnic or ‘Indian’ cookbooks.”
Looking at cookbooks in terms of the women they are written by and for, helps one identify other trends. Appadurai notes the emergence of specialised cookbooks for quick recipes, budget recipes or for recipes from leftovers as reflections of the realities of housewives’ lives. “Some of them explicitly recognise the dual pressure on working women to earn part of the family’s livelihood and simultaneously cater to the culinary sophistication of their families and friends.” The cookbooks serve larger social purposes as well - creating an idea of an ‘Indian’ cuisine overriding the earlier regional and community distinctions.
This might seem admirable, but Appadurai also points to the negatives. The cookbooks propagate stereotypes - Gujaratis put sugar in everything, Bengalis eat fish with everything - that drown the complex realities. He admits that the cookbook boom has seen the emergence of specialised cookbooks that claim to preserve the food of specific communities and regions, but says that a trade-off still takes place. To make this specialised cuisine seem attractive and worth attempting (and hence sell the cookbook) a simplification occurs. “When written by insiders, they represent fairly complex compromises between the urge to be authentic and thus to include difficult (and perhaps, to the outsider, disgusting) items and the urge to... popularise the most easily understood and appreciated items.” And when the books are written by outsiders to the community, he notes, the simplification is even more brutal.
Finally, at a larger level, Appadurai suggests a more brutal jockeying for position is happening with certain more visible cuisines - perhaps linked to the more visible, well travelled, communities they come from? - ousting less sales savvy cuisines. “Thus Telugu cuisine is being progressively pushed out of sight by Tamil cuisine, Oriya by Bengali cuisine, Kannada by Marathi, Rajasthani by Gujarati, and Kashmiri by Punjabi.” The other traditions have their cookbooks, of course, but they are losing out in the battle for the middle-class kitchen bookshelf. Appadurai’s article was written before the current restaurant boom, but its interesting to see how in some ways it corroborates his thesis.
Many of the new ‘ethnic’ Indian restaurants are started by professional restaurateurs with no link to that ethnic group - they just buy a cookbook and, inevitably, they go for those from the best known ethnic communities. Even when someone from a particular community starts a restaurant, they find it hard to sell to general consumers if they aren’t familiar with it (as anyone in Delhi if they have any idea of what Maharashtrian food is like) or have only extreme stereotypes (like the idea that Andhra food is so hot that it’ll mean lengthy lavatory sessions the next day!). Another dismaying consequence of this standardisation of local traditions is the disappearance of local ingredients. For example, most of the new cookbooks will specify ‘chilli powder’ without specifying which type of chilli (or at most distinguishing between mild - or tasteless - Kashmiri chillies and another, generic ‘hot’ kind).
In the process the amazing variety of Indian chillies is getting lost. Even in a city like Mumbai where its possible to get at least some level of variety like slim ‘Guntur’ or the fat, parrot’s beak shaped ‘Madras’ chillies, there are few takers. At Motilal Masalawala in Central Bombay, a very well known spice shop, I was told they didn’t stock them because there was no demand. They can only be found with a few sellers at Crawford Market, or otherwise community specific neighbourhoods like Matunga for South Indian chillies. To some extent this sort of standardisation is inevitable as people live in increasingly cosmopolitan settings. But cookbook writers could help too by trying to preserve and grow a demand for such variety, rather than just aiming, as Appadurai points out, for some vague ‘national’ mean.
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let me add a plug for my favorite cookbook in this category - Rasachandrika. it's more at the maharashtrian end of konkan food (the recipe names are often marathi rather than konkani, for example - and tend to use fresh rather than roasted coconut) but they are authentic and a good place to start.
Rasachandrika is excellent for all the Saraswat dishes. Its now exactly 60 years since the Saraswat Mahila Samaj (Saraswat Women's Association) in Mumbai first came out with it, and it is still a standard presence in every Saraswat kitchen, however stained and tattered with use it may be. I'd put it up there with Samaithu Par as one of the bases for Indian cookbook writing. What are the other such books that people would nominate in other regional Indian categories?
I'm lifting this out of the Konkani cuisine thread since it might make for a good new topic. Which were the first Indian cookbooks that people encountered? Did your mothers and grandmothers (if they were Indian) use any? Did your mothers and grandmothers pick up recipes from anywhere else? Which cookbooks have you found the most useful? Any particularly interesting or unusual ones? Which of the new Indian cookbooks do you like best (we'll take it as a given that Monica's and Suvir's forthcoming one will feature on your list!)?
Vikram
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let me add a plug for my favorite cookbook in this category - Rasachandrika. it's more at the maharashtrian end of konkan food (the recipe names are often marathi rather than konkani, for example - and tend to use fresh rather than roasted coconut) but they are authentic and a good place to start.
Rasachandrika is excellent for all the Saraswat dishes. Its now exactly 60 years since the Saraswat Mahila Samaj (Saraswat Women's Association) in Mumbai first came out with it, and it is still a standard presence in every Saraswat kitchen, however stained and tattered with use it may be. I'd put it up there with Samaithu Par as one of the bases for Indian cookbook writing. What are the other such books that people would nominate in other regional Indian categories?
Vikram
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As always, I'm a fervent advocate of south Indian breads. Its not just because they are lesser known compared to the north Indian ones, as because some of them are really outstandingly delicious.
So apart from the dosas, iddlies, appams that most people are familiar with, why not go for flaky Kerala parottas, or ultra-delicate pathiri, or spongy starfish shaped ney-patal, or light steamed neer dosas, or thick and hearty adais, or thick tasty puri-like Konkani vades, or healthy mung-dal pancakes (pudla), or hard crisp thalipith which a food writer friend from the Asian Wall Street Journal dubbed one of the best new things he'd eaten in Asia?
Some of these, I think, like pathiri and parottas are really quite difficult to make since a lot of the secret is in the technique which only comes with practice. But others like pudlas and thalipith and adais should be easier,
Vikram
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I am sort of sceptical of this whole idea of "contemporary Indian cuisine" as a new and - the underlying premise - improved form of Indian food because it seems to me to be applying a conceptual framework that isn't really applicable to Indian food.
That conceptual framework seems to take its definition mainly from French food, which evolved a grand and highly codified tradition, practiced by specialists (though in reality many may have taken their inspiration from peasant food), against which a tradition of lighter and more modern contempory food was able to define itself.
But other forms of cooking do not always have such grand traditions. It requires the long term support of an affluent aristocratic class which wasn't always the case in India, however much people like Jiggs Kalra go on about the 'royal cuisines of India', a term that I'd say have more to do with the imperatives of five star restaurants trying to flatter customers into coming, rather than any real history.
Of course there were pockets of royalty which evolved their own styles - Hyderabad, Mughlai - but I think their influence was pretty limited and the results were never codified as they were in the West (the cooks would never share their recipes outside their families). So is there really a classical style to differentiate a contemporary one from?
There's also the point that in India at least no one would talk about any one thing called 'Indian food', but defining the debate in that terms could possibly indicate what 'contemporary' means in this context - an opposition to the sort of standardised menu evolved by 12 to the paise Tandoori joints that pass themselves off as 'Indian'.
Even then I'd say the succesful examples of contemporary Indian restaurants are more 'regional' than 'contemporary' and if they do things that don't feature in regional menus, like Das Sreedharan's recipe for broccoli thoran from his book New Flavours of India (nice book, but misnomer in title again, it should be New Flavours of Kerala), then its simply pre-empting the sort of development that would have happened naturally enough when that regional cuisine encountered the broccoli at home. After all, the ubiquity of tomatoes, potatoes and chillies in India shows how the cooking could take as its own even New World vegetables like this.
So I think rather than trying to force Indian food into categories of classical vs contemporary, we should perhaps acknowledge that its essence has always been ethnic/regional and that within this general framework there's plenty of scope for change and renewal. As Carlovski says this would save us from people doing the same as they always did, except with added coriander, and calling it contemporary Indian!
Or another way of looking at it would be to look at the one part of Indian cooking where techniques, traditions and ingredients have been mixing up together very happily - in street food. Which takes us back to another long running thread....
Vikram
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There's a garlic-methi (fenugreek) version of this which is my standard solution to boring food. Its dry and keeps very well, so I always have a jar in office and have even travelled with it, to use when things are getting too bland. Don't have a recipe for it though, since its so readily available here in Bombay,
Vikram
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Hoegaarden makes a pretty good one. Celis is allright, nothing great imo.
I don't usually drink beer, but wheat beers (does witbier translate as white beer or wheat beer?) like Hoegaarden, I adore. On the India forum I recently recklessly dismissed all attempts to match wine and Indian food, a pointless pairing especially when there really was a good pairing in white beer. Its the lightness and the spiciness and the coolness, that all balance out Indian food brilliantly. Why don't more people make them? Are they hard or expensive to make?
Vikram
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two of my favourite are kori ghashi and kori sookha. The ghashi is a curry they eat with a thin crisp wafer-like bread called kori - roti. It is a must-try! I'll post both chicken recipes soon
Its an odd dish, the point of which seems to be the soggy texture that the koris (think quite hard snapping rice papads) take after you dump the chicken curry over it. You get it in some of the Udipi restaurants in Bombay if you ask them for it specially. Its usually not on the menu, but I think the workers cook it for themselves once a week.
Rajsuman, a question, how are you defining Konkani cuisine? Judging from the recipes you post you're mostly referring to Mangalorean style cooking, but isn't Konkani - since it has a geographical sense - a wider term? I would think it would cover any cooking on the Konkan coast from South Gujarat till south of Mangalore, after which point the Kerala influence becomes stronger?
If that's the case then it would cover quite a range of cooking styles, from East Indian near Bombay, Malvani (or Gomantak) further south on the Maharashtra coast, Goan (Christian and Hindu) and then Mangalorean, with possibly links to other styles like the Parsi ways of cooking fish from their settlements in south Gujarat, and all the variations of coastal Maharashtrian cooking - CKP, Saraswat, Pathare Prabhu, etc.
That's the sense with which Konkani is used in Ananda Solomon's excellent Konkan Cafe at the President Hotel. There are many similarities, of course, across these styles, like the use of coconut milk, kokam and the fish of course are mostly the same, but there are enough distinctions between areas for, I think, Konkani to be used more as an larger, catch-all term.
Any thoughts?
Vikram
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The neatest smoked food trick I've seen in Indian food is smoked buttermilk or lassi. Rajdhani, the Gujju thali place near Crawford market does this as an extra to the main thali - you have to ask for masala chhas.
Its quite a production. They bring a brass tray with a few smoking coals on it, then in front of you add some ghee on the coals and then a few spices, I forget which. Then as the ghee is spluttering and the spices start smoking, they quickly put a stainless steel tumbler over the coals to trap the smoke.
Then after a minute or less they take the tumbler out and VERY quickly before the smoke trapped inside has a chance to escape they pour in the buttermilk, swirling it around so it captures the smoke. And it really does taste smokey, its quite something. I've never seen this done anywhere else.
- I roasted the uncooked dal, even burnt it a bit on purpose, and then cooked it. This tasted burnt (and why wouldn't it? ) rather than smoked.This works very well with skinned mung dhal. In a Taste of India Madhur Jaffrey has an excellent Bengali recipe for roasted skinned mung dhal with spinach, where the roasting gives the dhal a wonderful rounded taste.
Vikram
Indian desserts
in eGullet Q&A with Jeffrey Steingarten
Posted
Hallelujah! I loved your two books, read them lingeringly, limiting myself to as essay a day like really good pieces of chocolate (OK, so occasionally I binged and read five at a time), and I even conducted a long drawn out campaign to get my office - I write for a financial newspaper - to subscribe to Vogue, arguing that it was next to impossible to report accurately on international business trends without regular reference to Vogue. I got unexpected support from an editor who, I think, was more interested in the lingerie models, but I wasn't complaining. And the magazines arrived and it turned out they'd got us British Vogue....
But yes, sitting here in Bombay, it hurt bitterly to read your comments on Indian desserts, and I cried silently into my kulfi, wondering if there were Mexican fans somwhere choking down sobs along with their fried grasshoppers. I can't entirely blame you though. The very few times I've eaten in Indian restaurants out of India the desserts have been generally unspeakable - stale sugary barfis, kulfis that were more crystals that creamy, greasy halwas, and above all, really leaden heavy gulab jamuns, a dessert that is served everywhere, but VERY difficult to get right, even here in India.
Added to that, there's the problem of the extra-sweetness and intense milk flavours, and here there's nothing much that can be done - either you're one of those people who go for it, and such people tend to really trip on Indian desserts, or just hope you get used to it. I note that when people do take to Indian desserts they tend to be things like phirni (rice pudding) or, as you mention, ras malai, which are somewhat less sweet & milky than the average.
The biggest problem though is that food writers, particularly in the US, very rarely seem to try Indian at all, so the chances of them eating good Indian are pretty low (of course, with eGullet's own Suvir in action at Amma the odds for should be rising rapidly). Has Alan Richman ever eaten an Indian meal? After years of reading his stuff in GQ, I've never read of the merest morsel of tandoori chicken passing his lips. So too with many other food writers, which is why it was great to read you've done a trip here and April is too long to wait to read about it.
I only hope for two things. One, you didn't just go to that awful city up north called Delhi and eat north Indian Punjabi-Mughlai food in the course of the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur quickie which is what too many Americans mean by visiting India. That food can be good enough - though not the debased form of it that's the staple of most Indian restaurants abroad - but there's lots more interesting stuff in the regions, so please tell me you went to the south, or came here to Bombay (even Indians don't go to the east, which is a pity, since Bengali food can be fabulous).
And second, if you did get out to the regions, I hope you got out of your hotel room and ate around a bit. It amazes me how many food writers finally come all the way to India and then don't seem to have the guts to get out of their hotel room. A.A.Gill comes and nominates Kandahar at the Oberoi Hotel as the best Indian restaurant ever. R.W.Apple says the best Malayali (not Keralan, you can read my rant on this in the Indian room on this site) food is in the restaurant at, surprise surprise Brunton's Boatyard the hotel he just happens to be staying in.
These aren't bad places, but honestly doesn't it seem to suggest a certain lack of motivation somewhere? I certainly wouldn't expect it of you.... remember, we have ways of reaching your rasmalai...
Vikram