Secret Indian Recipes

[Suvir Saran]

Well-said Steven.  We are all fundamentally same.  And recipes are a great tool in describing the basic steps.  And I am with you on that one.  And have been from the start.

What I have failed to share with you after much writing has been the essence of India.  While the villager has little money and resources in India, their food is dependent on what is available locally and seasonally.  Very little if any garnishes are used and even less fat.  They have little options and big families to support.  So, like any poor country, the countryside will not give you any sense of cuisine.  In fact, it is not uncommon to find a villager in the north making a lunch out of a chapati ( a flat bread with no fuss ) and a freshly pulled onion, a green chili and lime if and when available.  That can often be a meal.  Would you like a recipe or a technique for that?  No, I am safe to assume.  In the south, the same poor farmers counterpart could be found eating rice with chutney made with green or red chilies and some ground Kari leaves and whatever is locally available.  Again no frills and no complex cooking techniques.  

But, when you take the conversation about technique and comparing next door neighbors even in a small Indian city, and even a lower middle class family, you open yourself into a very distinct and stylized difference in cooking from door to door even in an apartment building.  In my building in NYC, if I were to survey all the residents, we would find many things in common in our food preparation or even grocery lists and tastes.  In the same set up in India, take for example my parents building in Mumbai, the neighbors come from as diverse places as Assam, Madras, Delhi, Bhubhaneshvar, Tonk and Jammu.  So in one floor you have 6 families with very diverse cultural and linguistic differences. They each have the stamp of an Indian citizenship, but little more than that in common.  Maybe I can assume that they are all Hindu.  But the ones from Assam and Bhubaneshwar will eat fish; the ones from Madras could be vegetarian and not eat any meat or fish.. or could be otherwise and love meat and fish, the one from Tonk could be a Jain and be a strict vegetarian that does not even eat any root vegetables.  The one from Delhi could have a very varied background, but it happens to be my family, so it is safe to assume they have a more northern flair to their diet and the one from Jammu has a cuisine that shares roots from the Punjabi and Kashmiri style of cooking.

It is safe to assume that many dishes have common roots, but across those 6 different linguistic and social divide, there are so many variable nuances, that the minute differences that have been added over many centuries, the recipes that maybe generations ago may have been common and just mere variations are today distinct from one another.  So, it is not correct to assume that a few variations being documented will give you any insight into Indian cooking is a genre.  It is a vast cuisine.  And unlike French cooking to which you compare it today, you will find even more differences in the largest Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and its cuisine than in all of France.  That largest state of India has people from all the many religions.  Speaking many different languages and representing all the many castes and sub-castes of each religion and from all parts of society.  So, in that one state, you will see every variation possible to the cuisine of one state.  And t o that you add the changes that are brought to dishes from religious tradition.

While we can certainly document a recipe and use it only as a very basic list of ingredients, that can be possible.  But to assume the documentation will show you something very true to what was a masterpiece centuries ago, I am afraid, you will have to show me by doing yourself or through someone you know.  I have not known anyone that has been able to decipher those masterpieces that have been lost in our great oral tradition.  Whose loss is not mourned but celebrated by the natives of India for the very reason that it created a change and a renewal.  

While I would not waste my time writing recipes and documenting a culinary tradition, I also do not claim to be working on creating a literary ultimate in the expose of all of Indian cooking.  I can only decipher that which I grew up with and have worked with.  I have spent more hours in my friends and classmates home kitchens than their own mothers.  And yet, that time spent only gave me a glimpse in what happened in those kitchens in those days that I was observing the cooks.  The food would change each time I ate a meal in those homes.  While yes the recipe for a Masoor daal would change only slightly from day one to day 4 in that house, it was totally different from Masoor daal cooked by our chef.  And even more different from how my maternal grandmother made it in San Francisco.

So, again this brings to me share with you the belief in Indian cooking of letting go of ego and control and cooking in any moment.  It is similar to what they preach in the many religions that thrive there.  Letting go of the human need to dominate, control, stipulate and command life.  

We tend to try and be spectators watching our own lives parade in a path we control as little as we can.  Like every other human life in this earth, we often do the same, want to find a semblance of control, and we like all lives, find defeat and victories as we move towards that goal.  

But Indians for the most part, have a very deep rooted sense of Karma and Dharma and Taqdeer and so in the end, even the moslem population of India can often fall into that thinking which leaves everything for the divine power to change and affect.

This has made our food, out music and dance very free flowing.  The one tradition of dance that is similar in some ways to ballet dancing in the west is called Nautanki.  It is very precise, rigorous and structured. For any change in plan could risk the life of the dancer.  Nautanki is not considered a high art form, for the main reason that it has little if any room for change.  Though, this is not the best example to illustrate my point, it is but one of many one could find.

Another is the reverence accorded to the poetry of Rabindra Nath Tagore.  But the music he composed and set in stone has been not as greatly appreciated.  It was music that the masters of Indian classical music feel has no soul.  It is predictable.  It fails in its limitations and its very finite rendering.  Classical music thrives in opening the realm of improvement at every step.  Thereby challenging the singer at every note they sing and catch with their voice.  That to the Indian mind is the calling and life of a master.  Not the singing and learning of Tagore Music. While his words inspired generations, his songs have fallen into mediocrity.  I will certainly be facing great wrath from Simon for having used the word mediocre for the great Rabindra Nath Thakur, but I say it to illustrate this point.  From the same part of India, another poet never became as famous as Tagore but his music is loved and enjoyed by all practitioners of Indian classical music that have been lucky to get exposed to this mans genius.  His words were powerful and evocative of a very secular Bengali culture.  His music is respected by people far removed from Bengali culture for being classical in its roots and what that brought to his music was a formal structure that set the rules and opened them to be altered, changed played and improvised with.  That gives a man long dead, life with every rendering of his songs today.  When masters of Indian singing perform his music, they do so with glee and with freedom to create, romance and free a spirit that was structured and meant to be indulged in.

So, in Indian homes in cities, read only cities.. Small and big, one finds diversity and difference like you and I cannot imagine as we argue this here.  We could not even get a good glimpse after a 6-month stay in India.  In 3 years in Nagpur, I barely got a very basic understanding of Maharashtrian food and culture.  While I came away with some knowledge of that food, today, I use that knowledge to make my own cuisine.  That is not ever going to be authentic, but is a good use of my understanding of their way with foods.

So, while you and I each respect what little and what big help a recipe can be, we cannot meet in our understanding of where to find them. While you are looking for master recipes with variations, I seem to consider each variation a master recipe that will be varied the very next day by the same chef.  That is the reality of cooking in India outside of a restaurant.

I know my mother and some aunts try to keep consistency going in their recipes, but then, there are always those elders that will come and make fun of a person stifling their creativity by being too consistent.  So, what you want to see happen, is not considered very attractive to many Indians.  And in fact, call me a cussed one.. I too, have become a freedom monger.  

In my classes I will share the basics that I know, and then I teach my students to do exactly what each family is doing differently from their neighbors, creating a new dish from the recipe they have on hand.  A dish created by the person's mood for doing something new.  It works wonders.  I have had some students cook stuff t hat was terrible, but most come back on the 6th class with me and make a dish that is at once original but still authentic in its Indian roots.  And these are mostly non-Indian students.

[Fat Guy]

It seems to me, Suvir, that when you talk about Indian cuisine you're talking about more than cuisine: You're talking about an integrated whole of cuisine and culture. And it may be impossible to reproduce that whole outside of its native place and perhaps some emigrant communities overseas. But a plate of food standing on its own does not in my opinion carry with it the thousands of years of tradition that may have led up to its creation. If it did, learning to cook the food of another culture would be a near impossibility. I think the plate carries only what is on the plate; it is a collection of ingredients that have been subjected to quantifiable and describable processes. I see cooking -- divorced from its cultural underpinnings -- as unsentimental. Now, you may say the experience of Indian food is incomplete without its cultural component, and that may be true, just as eating a plate of food from one of Ducasse's restaurants is very different if you eat it in the dining room than if you eat it in the alley out behind the restaurant whilst seated upon an upended milk crate. But the food itself and the technical processes that underlie it are the same.

I also want to say that all this talk has made me 1) want to go to India (actually, I think I may want to become Indian), and 2) angry that there aren't any good Indian restaurants in New York. I can't do much about either of those things anytime soon, unfortunately.

[Suvir Saran]

And that is where Steven you and I will never meet. Since you cannot understand my food and the need of people from my part of the world to have that cultural baggage associated with food.  You want the same distinction that you find yourself laying on food to be mine.  It will never be Steven.  And it is in this very basic difference in our lives and understanding of essentials that we can find the richness that the world has.  Or we can simply want the other to change and create unrest.  The choice is ours.  I choose for plurality.  I am confident as you read further, you will too.

I was hosting family friends from New Delhi at our home the other day. I had done a tasting of 7 rice dishes.  Only cause I was working on the rice chapter.  While they ate the foods, the food was important yes, but what was more important to their enjoyment was how the food transported them to many trips into each place from where my recipe had been borrowed.  While the recipe was not exact, to their minds, it was evocative of the very moment when they had enjoyed a rice dish similar to what I had prepared.  The comparisons would certainly have gone through their thought process and their enjoyment of the rice and that meal, immediately had the cultural baggage of each of their trips involved in their enjoyment on Thursday night.  It made the moment rich and memorable and the food greater than any they could have found anywhere else.  For it came with rich nostalgia, had its own feet and had the mysteries that made it just slightly different and yet so close.  They were searching through their taste buds for those subtleties of my hand and of the chef that had prepared the same dish decades ago.  Perhaps it is a poor way of enjoying food.  But that is how they enjoyed their meal. And their stories of each rice dish and where they had first enjoyed it and in what setting and how it was different or similar to mine, made me understand my own cooking better.

The next moment we were chatting about my large collection of pickles and chutneys and again we were being transported back to kitchens of the many grandmother and aunts that each of them remembered preparing similar dishes.  Again it was the memories that clouded that moment and made it what it was.  

We in India seem to thrive in not needing a pure carefully secluded moment to enjoy the many beautiful things of life.  Maybe it makes us less in tune with the beauty of each of those things individually, but Steven, that is where Indian lives.  Our textiles evoke similar memories, our music does the same, our dance and our language evokes similar comparisons and richness.  No one would be interested in sitting at a dull table eating great food in India.  They would rather sit as a loving group, full of tension that makes for exciting and thrilling conversations and talk about all things considered uncouth in the west as a group and that makes for an enjoyable meal. I remember how as a child, we had some boring aunts and uncles and we hated eating in their homes.  My mother says they prepared great food like all other family members, but only she, who is truly generous and very kind, finds that ability.  To the rest of the family, a dinner in their house was like eating a terrible meal in detention. And now, when the same aunt and uncle come to meet us, I can understand where my mother was able to find some taste in their food, for my aunt has cooked in our kitchen.  The conversations have been those that I encourage in hour home and people that we have invited and those that could not eat her food in India, now like it.

We talked the same day about Chaat and how in India the mere mention of the word Chaat ( which refers to mouth wateringly delicious foods found in streets ) will make most people that have grown up eating it, start drooling and for real.  I mean drooling as the dictionary describes it. I am not drooling after tasting it, as I am drooling as I even write about chaat.  There are memories associated with the enjoyment of chaat and they make us involuntarily start salivating right at the thought.  And I and my family and friends are not alone with that experience.  I have friends from India across continents, who come to visit me in NYC and want to eat chaat I make at home.  And as they tell me that, they are stuttering for they are so excited by the mere prospect of having that food they so crave.  

But we in India are very different from people even in our near vicinity.  And that is common is it not. Americans in the US are different from the Americans in Canada or Mexico.  We each grow up in different worlds.  Ours places  great importance in the cultural and traditional aspects of food.  Which does not mean we need it in all foods.  When I ate are Arpege, I was not seeking anything more than the adventure of that one meal.  When I go back thee, I will certainly have colored lenses through which I will taste the food the second time.  That is how I and most Indians I know think.  But for I have little connection with Arpege, the first time was as pure and disconnected from me as it could be.  But not for Indian food my friend.  In that world, each memory of the dish I am cooking and eat in another kitchen, will change how I enjoy that meal.

That is just how it is.  I am sorry if I fail in being elevated to a level of purity, but I have been trained in a culture, where if I go back and live as you do here, they would look at me and what I say, as you do about what I say here.  But it is this richness of difference and plurality of life that makes the world so wonderful.  That we can each have such different reactions to the same thing, should make us love life and enjoy it for that diversity.