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How I didn’t make a rezala

Filed under Food, Indian by admin on September 4, 2011 at 9:25 pm {one comment}

When all that’s left is a distant memory of an amazing taste, how do you recreate the recipe?

I think the restaurant was called Armenia. Perhaps it was not. It could have been Aminia. Or even Amenorrhea. I remember that the city was Calcutta, or perhaps Kolkata, and I was a strapping young fellow who would eat anything twice. It is equally possible that I was a lanky youth who ate sparingly. Nothing is quite clear. I remember a restaurant in a crowded gully near New Market, lots of white tiling which gave it the feel of a public toilet, and three basic rows of tables with benches. A partition provided privacy from adjoining tables.

Most of all, though, I remember an amazing taste. Teasing, spicy, seductive, a come-hither taste that you knew you had never met before and would be lucky to meet again. I remember the dish too — a beige-white gravy, thin is how I recall it, with the beige-white of chicken legs, textured only with little islets of oil.

Really? Was that how bland it looked, a whitish dish in a whitish restaurant? No, I missed out the dried red chillies, vivid but harmless, floating on the gravy to lend it a little presence. Not that I’m even suggesting that the rezala needs any help, heavens no, it’s a one-dish show, just needs a little rice on the side, nothing else.

Years later, in a kitchen in Bangkok, the taste came back, unexpected, uninvited, but right there on the tip of my tongue, challenging, taunting, a guess-who taste, beyond description. This is the story of how I tried to re-invent the rezala, right there, right then, failed — but ended up creating a brand new taste that is seriously enchanting.

Eliminating the rezala

Googling rezala will give you a long line of recipes and a little trivial history. You will learn that it is a predominantly Muslim dish, although it is also now enshrined in the cuisine of Bengal, India. You will learn that it is a standard in that country of first-rate chefs, Bangladesh, and that their recipe is subtler than the Bengali one. Looking through the recipes, I noted that a rezala could be built around the robust textures and flavors of lamb or mutton, or the less aggressive tastes of chicken.

But where my attention lingered were the ingredients — garlic paste, ginger paste, bay leaf, and garam masala, with yoghurt. My heart sank. What was subtle and tantalizing about this everyday combination of the commonest kitchen ingredients? How could they produce the enigma I remembered?

Take the pale colored gravy. It was not coconut milk, this I could swear, but damned if it was just yoghurt or cream.

The mutton rezala recipe from Bangladesh included rose water, saffron, and cinnamon, and I admit all of those can add tantalizing dimensions to the dish, but something in me rebelled against such a simple denouement to my quest.

And this is how, stubborn as a mule, I finally cooked a dish that simply cannot be called a rezala. Call it a mezala. Call it a kaizala.

Here it is, in full and final, the recipe to a dish that I do believe has sprung from my imagination, inspired by elusive memories and fragrances. Try it. Inshallah, it will win you a bride, or if female, a groom.

INGREDIENTS

1 whole chicken, boiled, cut into pieces

3 cups of cashew nuts

2 tbsps of aniseed (saunf)

2 medium-sized onions, roughly

3 medium-sized green chillies

1 stick cinnamon

3 cloves

3 tbsps ghee

1 tbsp cooking oil

3-4 dry red chillies

Salt to taste

For marinade

4 garlic pods, minced

2 onions, chopped fine

2 cups yoghurt

10 freshly ground white peppercorns

1 tsp saffron threads

1 tablespoon rosewater

PREPARATION

1. Mix the yoghurt, garlic, finely chopped onion, crushed peppercorns and salt, add the chicken pieces, and marinate in the fridge for about an hour.

2. Combine the cashew nuts, aniseed, onions, and green chilllies and blend to a fine paste, adding a little water if necessary.

3. Heat a tablespoon of cooking oil with 2 tbsps of ghee, and when it is smoking, add the cinnamon and cloves.

4. Stir for half a minute or so, and then add the chicken pieces, taking care to shake it free of any marinade. Stir till it changes color and becomes white.

5. Add the cashew-nut-onion-aniseed-chilly paste. Lower the heat and stir for about a minute and then add the yoghurt of the marinade. Add salt as appropriate.

6. Add hot water to thin the gravy, lower the heat and cook covered until the chicken pieces are cooked. If the gravy thickens in this process, add some more hot water to thin it to a pancake batter like consistency.

7. Before serving, heat up the remaining ghee, and when it is smoking, add the dry red chillies. Don’t wait a moment, chillies blacken in microseconds. Pour it all over the entrée in the disk, and serve hot with rice and a simple cucumber-tomato-coriander salad.

Since we’ve clearly established that this dish, inspired by the rezala I had in Calcutta a distance moon, cannot be called a rezala, for the time being it has been christened Mysterious Chicken with Cashew Nuts and Aniseed. Be a pet, won’t you?

Make me a name that’ll make this dish unforgettable.

The Minimalist from Rajgir

Filed under Food, Humor, Travel by C Y Gopinath on August 22, 2011 at 11:31 pm {one comment}

Certain simple combinations of spices can almost miraculously wake up simple stir fries, discovers C Y Gopinath

First let me describe the claviger. He must have been in his early eighties. One eye was rheumy and clouded, which might have made you wonder what he was watching so intently on the grainy black-and-white television. The period was the spectacular seventies, when all TVs were grainy black-and-white. Your humble narrator was, at the time of this story, cold, tired, grimy and with several days’ stubble on his face. It was the heart of deep winter in north India. With the determination of a pilgrim, I had been traveling for a week in the footsteps of the Buddha to the towns linked with his life — Lumbini, Sarnath, Bodh Gaya, Rajgir, and Kushinagar.

And now I was hungry.

But Rajgir’s hotels were apparently full of the devout here to pray at the base of the hill where the Buddha had preached his, erm, menu for a better life. A friendly stranger pointed me down a pencil-thin road that led straight out of town, and down this I walked, in search of a circuit house where, rumor had it, one could get a decent meal. The sun sank, a single star came out against the remaining blue sky, the hill became a dark silhouette, and then night fell without a sound. I trudged on, wondering this road would go on forever, leading me into another universe where no one ate food.

Just as I thought I was approaching an understanding of infinite hunger, lights marched over the horizon. Very dim, now there, now not, but finally, there indeed. Perhaps a hut. Perhaps a late-closing teahouse. But no, it was the circuit house, and it stood a little off the road, surrounded by a demolished wall, a bit of barbed wire, a wooden gate that someone had dismantled and laid flat on the grass. A bluish light shone from the building, but all else was dark. There could have been no guests. With diffident steps, I walked in through the wide open door. Within were three corridors, one turning left, one running straight, and one turning right. Ready by now for ghosts, I tiptoed towards the glow.

It was a recreation room. As I reached the door, the tall, quivering figure of the claviger rose from the wicker chair, where he had been absorbing a Hindi film’s violence and violins on a fuzzy old television set. He turned to me, his face stubbled white, hands gnarled, eyes crinkly and sad and full of water, and a fading smile.

“You are hungry,” he said.

I don’t remember speaking or hearing another word. He disappeared through a dark door into another world where he pottered about for about forty-five minutes. I could hear a kerosene stove pump itself up. Some aromas began to stray out, a dance of friendly spices led by a coriander fairy. A black pariah dog suddenly sprinted out through the door, its thin eyes darting with fear and uncertainty, and fled. I heard steel clanging steel, water gushing out of taps, something bubbling. Under it, I could hear human muttering, as though the old man was reminding himself of the recipe.

Then dinner arrived. There was a very simple black gram dal (urad) with a sliver of ginger and two cored and halved green chillies in it. For a vegetable, there was ash gourd, cubed and lightly fried, garnished, God knows what else. And with them was salad on a cheap white plate: sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, with salt and a squeeze of lemon. A hot roasted poppadum.

It has taken me thirty years to figure out what was special about it.

The claviger was a minimalist, I know that now. Most poor people are. Most Indians are poor people. There’s nothing like cooking a family meal over a coal fire with too few ingredients and spices to bring out the innate creativity of a human being.

Imagine a kitchen that is, well, not even a kitchen; it is a corner of the hut in which the family lives, sleeps, eats, studies. It doesn’t look like those amazing Good Housekeeping kitchens, awash with copper-bottom pots and pans, McCormick spices in lovely bottles in a special rack hewn from teak and hand polished, and a sleek cooking range with a hob above it. Instead, in the humble Indian hut, there will be a few key spices in second-hand bottles without labels — for sure, the powders of coriander, cumin, coriander and chillies, and also hing, the powdered version of the aromatic resin asafoetida. Prominently absent from the line-up will be garam masala, the all purpose spice mixture based on cinnamon, cardamom and cloves with a couple of other spices. Now those would be beyond the family purpose. Vegetables? Expect the expected — okra, potatoes, eggplants, green capsicum, cabbage, cauliflower, beans, peas.

What philosophy should we expect from the creative cook in such a kitchen where the vegetable du jour, purchased with the day’s winnings, must be made memorable but with a handful of spices. One doesn’t want to waste either coal or spices, so we rule out elaborate preparation or multiple applications of multiple spices. There is no electricity, so blenders and mixies are out. It is precisely in such environments that Indian minimalist cooking was born.

Unbeknownst to me, I was fed and raised on the minimalist cuisine of Palakkad in the south. In the meals my mother cooked for us at home, the garnish reflected the traditions of Palakkad, the hybrid district at the intersect of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. In Delhi University, where I studied at Shri Ram College and ate at the finest mess on the campus, Gainda Singh, cook extraordinaire fed me minimalist fare from Haryana. And then, one day, eating at a friend’s home while on a visit to Kathmandu, I was served an outstandingly simple dish featuring just okra with a teasing and provocative touch of spices I could not identify. After the meal, I ambushed Arjun, the cook, and learned that this was the cooking from the hilly corners of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where he had his home.

That was my moment. In a flash of epiphany, I knew how the claviger had made that extraordinary little minimalist dinner.

In a minimalist dish, there are no dry spices. All that is allowed is a garnish. Try this simple experiment and you will discover the magical transformational power of the garnish. Take the same vegetable — say, beans or okra. Say, in fact, okra. How can we transform this three different ways, using just a garnish? Here are three simple spice combinations that you can keep readymade in a spice jar. I’ve left the proportions open, and urge you to play around with variations and be creative till you find the mix that works

The Bengal touch (panch phoron)

cumin seeds (jeera)

black mustard seeds (rai)

aniseed (saunf)

fenugreek (methi) seeds

nigella (onion seeds)

The Palakkad mix

urad dal

black mustard seeds (rai)

a couple of red chillies

a few curry leaves (kari patta)

in some cases, (such as beans

The Minimalist mix

carom seeds, or bishop’s weed (also known as ajwain)

cumin seeds (jeera)

asafoetida (hing)

Method

Nothing to it. Heat up a tablespoon or so of oil in a wok. If cooking the Palakkad way, use peanut oil; if Bengal, then mustard oil; and if the Minimalist, then it’s Uttar Pradesh, so any normal cooking oil will do.

Bengal: When the oil is hot, throw in the panch phoron, and when it is turning dark — but not brown or black — throw the rest of the vegetable in. Now need for any turmeric or any other spices. Cook it at low heat, adding a few teaspoons of moisture for moisture. Nothing should burn or brown or char. The vegetables will look thoroughly cooked at the end — that is, nothing of natural color will be left.

Palakkad: Heat the peanut oil, throw in the mustard seeds first. When they begin to crackle, throw in the urad dal, which brown quickly. As they begin to darkne toward a nice golden brown, add the dry chillies, count to three, and throw in the vegetables. Most vegetables benefit from being a little boiled ahead of time, so that they will cook faster without browning. (Okra? Don’t be a dummy. You never boil okra.)

Minimalist: Heat the oil, throw in the hing first. When the flavor rises from the pan, throw in the carom seeds and the cumin. As they begin to brown slightly, add the okra, cut into small pieces. Turn the heat to low, cover and cook until the okra have lost their color, turned brownish-green and limp.

The claviger at the circuit house in Rajgir served me a minimalist dal — mung dal, with a garnish of cumin seeds in ghee, along with wet and juicy cool cucumbers. And rice.

And thus would you discover the pleasure of the simple minimalist life at the foot of Buddha’s mountain.

What Ishtiyaque did with the paan leaf

Filed under Uncategorized by admin on June 25, 2010 at 11:13 pm {2 comments}

C Y Gopinath meets a diabolical Lucknow chef and two wickedly original kebabs he created using betel leaves and a jackfruit

I occasionally treat myself to the uniquely Indian post-prandial confection that comes wrapped in green leaves, the paan.

I respect the pungent betel leaf and its infinite variety, from the ordinary Calcutta sada to the amazingly illegal palangtod paan, said to so perversely excite an otherwise genteel couple that they could put their beds at risk. When I lived in Mumbai, I would have a paan twice or thrice a week, but now that I live in Bangkok, it is a rare treat at some restaurant and never quite as good as the original. Let me add here that once a paan enters my mouth, its fate is sealed. It does not escape. I am not the spitting kind.

But nothing in my long relationship with this species of foliage prepared me for what chef Ishtiyaque Qureshi does with the paan leaf. The paan, to me, has always nature in the raw, filled with lovely things but unaffected by them. But one evening, at the Ishtiyaque’s table, I encountered a kebab wrapped in a paan leaf.

My eyes nearly turned into paan leaves themselves at the sight — but shock heaped on surprise, another dish plopped next to it. A jackfruit kebab. The jackfruit, for me, has always been something found in a large rubber plantation in Kerala, such as my childhood home. They are large chaps, jackfruits, sweet and sticky within, though when cooked they become chewy and a little meaty, losing their sugars entirely. My little mind could not assimilate the thought of a jackfruit becoming a kebab, but Ishtiyaque Q, it seems, had done it.

Ishtiyaque comes from distinguished culinary stock, and I don’t mean the bouillon kind. His father, the famed Imtiaz Qureshi, is credited with having brought the dum phukt style of Avadhi cooking — slow-cooking for hours, with dough over the pot’s mouth to seal in the flavors and the steam — into the light of day. The fact that Imtiaz had never been to school was even inelegantly trumpeted on its menu by the Maurya Sheraton hotel in New Delhi as proof of his authenticity. Today, his sons Irfan and Ashfaque carry on the proud family tradition, but I was drawn to the maverick, Ishtiyaque. Not wanting to be collared by a hotel chain, he chose the road less travelled, consulting with hotels, setting up restaurants for them, and inventing new dishes no one would have dared imagine.

One of these was an experimental dessert with almond-like soft white pods floating in milk. It was only after I had finished the entire dish and pronounced it spectacular that he revealed what it was — garlic, cooked to submission in hot milk

Listen, I said to Ishtiyaque, I’ll make a deal with you. You tell me how a person can make a kebab wrapped in paan leaves, or with a jackfruit, and I — I —

He waited patiently. Then he said, “And what will you do?”

“Why,” I said, finding a thought, “I’ll tell everyone I know how to do it.” It didn’t sound like much of a proposal even to me but then, if you come from Lucknow, it’s de rigeuer to be courteous. So he told me the two recipes. And here they are, in full and final.

Paan Malai Kabab

Ingredients

Paan (betel) leaves 12

12 cloves

200 gms mushrooms, finely chopped

40 gms cheese, grated

40 gms Fresh cream

2 green chillies, deseeded and chopped

1 tbsp coriander leaves, chopped fine

1/s tsp garam masala

12 pods garlic, finely chopped

Salt to taste

Cooking oil

METHOD

1. Remove the stems from the paan (betel) leaves and blanch them in hot but not boiling water for a moment. Transfer them immediately to a bowl of ice cold water

2. Sauté the chopped garlic in a little oil. As soon as they turn transparent, add the finely chopped mushrooms and continue sauteeing for three or so minutes over low to medium heat. Add the salt, chopped green chillies and garam masala. Remove the saucepan from the heat and transfer the contents to a small bowl.

3. After it has cooled somewhat, add the grated cheese and the cream.

4. Place generous helpings of this mixture in each paan leaf. Fold in the three ends of the paan and pin them together with a clove.

5. Shallow fry these packages briefly in a frying pan over a low fire, making sure the leaves do not get burnt. Remove them while the leaves still retain their green.

A word about the jackfruit kebabs, which come next. The first time I ate these, my wife was vegetarian, but didn’t see the twinkle in Ishtiyaque’s eyes as he served this dish up. ”Erm,” she said diplomatically. “I’m staying away from meat for a while.” He pushed the plate towards her saying, yes, this should be fine for her then. She took a bite and pushed the plate away, “This is mutton,” she said, grimacing. And that’s how we learned that jackfruit cooked into a biryani or kebab looks, tastes and feels like genuine mutton.

Subz Barra Kabab

Ingredients

1 kg jackfruit

1 tsp turmeric powder

15 gms yoghurt, hung overnight in a muslin pouch

5 gms black cummin

2 tbsp malt vinegar

Half tsp fresh pepper

1/2 tsp garam masala

1/2 tsp red chilly powder

A pinch of nutmeg powder

25 gms ginger and 50 gms garlic, ground to a paste

Salt to taste

Cooking oil

METHOD

1. Remove the skin and the hard centre of the jackfruit, and cut each flower into cubes about 2 inches long. Boil these, after add salt and a little turmeric, till they are tender.

2. Ad the chilly powder, salt and malt vinegar to the ginger-garlic paste, and marinate the tender jackfruit in this mixture for about an hour. Now add the remaining ingredients.

3. Skewer the jackfruit pieces, and cook them in a tandoor or charcoal grill. If you have neither of these, then use an oven pre-heated to 275 degrees C for 10 minutes. Cook till the pieces are a light brown.

4. Sprinkle with some chat masala and serve with some mint chutney.

Adab arz. Eat with pleasure.

Pasta la vista

Filed under Food, Italian, Wine by admin on May 21, 2010 at 10:41 pm {5 comments}

My son would like to be a capo di tutti cappi when he grows up. He believes this is a matter of getting the accent right. His first words, learned from a Hugo’s guide, are: Davanti mia casa, ce uno piccolo giardino, dove coltiviamo ogni sorta di ortaggi — patate, cippole, cavolfiori ed altri cosi. Depending on the occasion, he can deliver these menacingly, petulantly, or apologetically. Considering that the statement is merely an Italian gardener’s list of vegetables growing in his backyard, all three deliveries sound quite absurd.

I now know that being a capo di tutti cappi is actually a matter of getting the pasta right. I also know now that all my pastas have been duds. Their oiling was inadequate, the ingredients poorly prepared, and the boiling incorrect, yea, even when I followed the minuti prescribed on the package. The Italian chef in my head whispers, Al dente, per piacere, meaning let it be slightly hard to the bite. So let us say it’s tagliatelle, and its 8 minuti, and the little chef timer application on the iPhone has just rung. You drain the pasta in a colander, but the first bite of the first piece tells you that it is still about a minuti away from the correct degree of dente-ness. What now? Does one plop the whole affair back on the fire — for 43 seconds more?

Predicament piles on to dilemma. While I prepare the ingredients, the pasta congeals in the colander. By the time I am ready to put it into the mix, it is one cold medusa-like clump. I poke it with chopsticks to loosen it but only make holes in the strips. I wonder if I should have dipped them into some boiling water, and then perish that thought. They would only have cooked themselves into pulp.

The final dish, prepared before I understood pasta fundamentals, is generally composed of oversoft and ragged pasta, living together but not in amity with all the other ingredients, which are either done too well or not well enough. Without generous sprinkles of either Tabasco or Worcester sauce, the meal would not survive a cursory sampling. Because I serve it to people who are genuinely fond of me, they go out on a limb and say We must do this again.

THOSE DAYS ARE BEHIND ME. I downloaded Jamie Oliver’s nifty iPhone app 20-minute meals, and watched carefully as the master prepared his pasta, prattling in his cockney way about quantities and bob’s your uncle and happy days and how to do one thing while another was doing itself. It was a dish with bacon and peas and mini shell pasta, and if you are desperately curious you can get both a recipe and video of Jamie here. Your humble narrator, meanwhile, observed the fine points of cooking with pasta, based on which he developed an original pasta dish to out-Jamie Jamie himself. The principles behind a good pasta meal, inferred from Mr Oliver’s performance, are —

1. Bacon is magical. Make it the first step. Chop some nice smoked bacon into small bits, and let it fry to a nice crisp pinkness, and release its oils. The rest of your dish, added to this, will carry the slight smoky crispness with it.

2. Keep everything chopped and ready — and start cooking right after you get the pasta into the boiling water. Most dishes can be compiled in the time it takes the pasta to become al dente. That way, you don’t have to keep the pasta waiting in the colander, where it could do its congealing trick, but add it hot and moist and al dente like god meant it to be.

3. Don’t throw away the water from the pasta. It’s starchy, slightly salty, and a cup of it into your pasta will keep it moist and glistening on its journey to the table.

4. Use a dollop of cream. It adds a dimensions of silkiness and body to the dish, not to mention bathing everything in a little sauce.

5. Grate cheese — preferably Parmesan, not Cheddar — directly on to the pasta, but just a minute or so before serving. Much longer and it could lead to either chewy cheese or unwieldy clumping.

This evening’s pasta is driven by eggplant rounds fried to a nice near-crispness. To prevent it getting lost in a jungle of linguini, you would prefer to use any of the smaller pastas — orchiette or ‘little ears’ would do fine, but even something smaller such as the bead pasta (acini) thrown into soups, or the short tubes of elbow pasta (gornito) is acceptable.

Ingredients (to feed 4)

Slender purple eggplants, 5 or 6, sliced into rings about 4 mm thick. Salt generously and let stand for 30 minutes to let the water drain out, and then pat thoroughly dry

Smoked streaky bacon or pancetta, about 10 slices, chopped small

Green olives, about 10, cut into halves

Fresh parsley leaves, roughly chopped

Parmesan cheese, about 150 gms

Any small pasta (beads, little ears, elbow shaped) about 400 gms

Olive oil

A little butter

A tablespoon of thick fresh cream

1 lemon

Dried tarragon, about 1 teaspoon

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

1. Heat up about 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a saucepan, and when it is smoking, throw in the eggplant rings, lower the heat, and let it cook slowly. Stir frequently. When the rings are golden brown and crisp, the eggplant is ready. Drain it free of oil and keep aside.

2. While that’s going on, get water boiling in a pan, add a good measure of salt, and bung the pasta in. Stir it about a little. Note how long you’re supposed to cook it (usually written on the packet) and note the time on your watch if you dont have a timer.

3. In another saucepan, heat up a tablespoon of olive oil and add the bacon. By the time it is nice and golden, the eggplant rings in the other pan should have gone crisp too. The bacon should release some of its lovely oils, which will presently cheer the pasta up considerably.

4. The pasta should be ready by now, so drain it in a colander, but reserve some of that starchy water.

5. Add the pasta to the bacon in the pan but don’t stir it quite yet. Turn the fire low.

6. Grate some of the lemon rind into the pasta, season with pepper and about a teaspoon of tarragon.

7. Add the fresh cream chopped parsley, olives, and fresh cream, and then grate the Parmesan over it. Add about a ladle of the starchy water in which the pasta was boiled, and stir the mixture gently.

8. When the mixture is bubbling happily at the base, and when you can see a little satin gravy when you look under the pasta to the pan, it’s almost ready to serve. Sprinkle the crisp eggplant rings over the dish, give it a quick stir, and take it to the table.

The dish should be eaten pretty quickly unless you don’t mind the eggplants losing their crispness. Goes wonderfully with a simple salad of cos lettuce and reddish radicchio leaves, sprinkled with salt, lemon juice, and a few drops of balsamic vinegar.

As you eat, repeat after me, with your mouth full: Davanti mia casa, ce uno piccolo giardino, dove coltiviamo ogni sorta di ortaggi — patate, cippole, cavolfiori . . . io sono capo di tutti capi.

How to cook a Musa Pseudostem

Filed under Food, Humor by C Y Gopinath on August 6, 2008 at 8:22 pm {13 comments}

C Y Gopinath discovers how to cook the delicious dish that killed the tender coconut tree but completely re-colonized his gut.

Take a medium-sized banana. Chop the pseudostem finely and boil till tender. Spice it and eat while costive.

There, that’s how you do it. I’ve given the recipe away. You can amaze your friends too now by making Banana Tree Khich Khach at home. They’ll laugh at you, of course, and nudge each other and whisper into their respective ears, ‘Goodness, he or she doesn’t know which part of the tree is the edible one. Next thing, he or she will be serving us Coconut Trunk Quiche.”

Don’t be daunted by the mockery, because all that will happen is that God will make them costive, and that will be the end of them all. When I was little my mother took me aside one day in my grandfather’s huge sprawling rubber estate in Kerala and said, “See these trees, son. Some of these are rubber, but a lot of these are banana. And every growing boy needs to eat a banana tree now and then. It is excellent for the bowels. The rough fibres of the banana stem act like a powerful broom, cleaning out the folds and crevices of your perineum.”

My bowels nodded agreement, and that was how I first tried out Banana Tree Khich Khach, for want of a better name.

I fell in love with it , and wanted to eat it every day. I told my mother, “Mother, mother, this stuff is so good for my bowels that I want more and more of it. I don’t want no banana fritters, I don’t want no bananas, I don’t want no banana leaf, all I want is some of that ol’ Banana Tree Khich Khach.”

“Once a month is all you get,” she said sternly. “No one should eat it more than once a month, and less than once a month is asking for trouble. Besides, it is a lot of trouble to cook, and I don’t love it that much. Overbesides, your bowels aren’t that bad.”
You can get banana pseudostems in Matunga in Bombay or Karolbagh in Delhi. They look like pale white plastic plumbing pipes, shiny and smooth outside, and usually cut into one-foot segments. I dialled my mother in Chicago and asked her exactly how much a person should buy. She’s terrible with quantities, like all mothers, and she thought for a minute, while the dollars ticked by. Then she said, “About one-and- a-half talcum powder tins, to feed about five.” How perfect – a banana pseudostem does resemble a cylindrical talcum tin.

Buy the banana pseudostem carefully. Check for discolorations – there should be none – and ensure that it is tender and white. Cutting it is an art best mastered through a little practice. Oil your hands, because the pseudostem exudes a sticky pseudo-goo that soap cannot touch. Peel away about two layers of the outer skin, about a centimetres depth, to expose the tender white rind within. This is the part you will cook and eat.

Cut into discs about four millimetres thick and plop into water. My mother’s voice whispers that you should add about half a cup of sour buttermilk to that water, to prevent the stem from getting discolored.

Here’s how you cook the stuff:

Ingredients:
1.5 banana pseudostems, prepared as described and cut into discs
1 cup tuvar dal
A little ural dal
A pinch of turmeric
A pinch of salt
1 tablespoon rice
3 or 4 red chillies
1/2 coconut, grated1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds
1/2 tablespoon jeera or cummin seeds

Finely chop the banana pseudostem. Pay attention to the lengths of ‘string’ that unwind as you cut. They should be assiduously removed and discarded.

Pressure cook the banana pseudostem, with one cup tuvar dal, some turmeric and some salt.

Take a tablespoon of rice, three red chillies, and fry in oil till just before the rice begins to redden. Grind to a paste with 1/2 the grated coconut

Combine this paste with the boiled banana pseudostem, add a little water if the result feels too thick, and then let the Khich Khach come to a boil over a slow fire. The banana pseudostem absorbs the various subtleties in the coconut paste, and emerges dressed for a party.

Throw a half teaspoon of mustard seeds into hot oil. When it begins to pop, add a half teaspoon of urad dal. As the dal begins to turn a lovely golden color, add a few whole red chillies, just for a few moments, and then throw the whole thing over the dish as a garnish.

It is now time to answer the question that has been distracting you.

What, you are wondering, is the meaning of the word ‘costive’, mentioned so casually in the first paragraph. No, it is not another word for the price index, but simply means — oh, I couldn’t possibly. Go look it up, everyone has Google these days. If you’re too lazy for that, try eating a little Khich Khach.

Read and see

Filed under Food, Humor by C Y Gopinath on July 12, 2008 at 5:15 pm {15 comments}

For decades, this classic set of three books has been the last word on authentic South Indian cooking, says C Y Gopinath

May I offer you some light tiffin? No? A cool drink then?

What about a curd bath? It’s guaranteed to cool you off.

According to the instructions in the third book of the Cook and See trilogy, the offer of a curd bath may fearlessly be made to Brahmin priests during certain auspicious days. The complete bath must include rice, buttermilk, sweet jaggery water, and a coconut chutney, among other things. Towels and soap are not mentioned.

Before you leap to the conclusion that this blog has degenerated into bathroom humor, what with the lavage of priests and all, let me add that bath merely happens to be how the venerable Meenakshi Ammal spells bhath, meaning rice, in her three-part classic set, Samaithu Paar (or Cook and See). As any self-respecting Punjabi knows, curd-rice is what gives the average Madrasi his or her keen edge and legendary stamina.

Similarly, both light tiffins and cool drinks are de rigueur when you are getting your daughted hitched to a suitable boy and the wedding guests are at the door. Page 162 of Book III goes further, offering a ‘List of Items Required for Preparing Food Etc’. In smaller type immediately below this are the words ‘For About One Thousand Persons’, followed by a list of 46 items that includes 12 kilos of coffee powder, 8 litres of ghee, 40 kilos of idli rice, and about 750 kilos of firewood.

Trust me, this is valuable information, available nowhere else on the planet but in S. Meenakshi Ammal’s revered trilogy. Spoken as it would be in Tamil, samaithu paar is a disarming invitation to try your hand at some fun stuff in the South Indian kitchen, make a few mistakes, create a complete balls-up of in all but on the whole have a very good time doing it.

If you are wondering, as you should be by now, where cooking comes into what has so far sounded like a one-stop marriage manual, the answer is Books I, II and III. I doubt there is any recipe or procedure featuring any vegetable or grain you can name that will not be found somewhere in these two volumes, starting on page 1 with four different ways of making sambar, and going on to such obscure but crucial life skills as the method for grinding Australian wheat into flour, preparing a perfect cup of south Indian filter coffee, and how to beat rice flakes into submission. For the latter, there is the helpful tip that “when two people pound it simultaneously by alternate strokes, the flakes turn out better”.

Samaithu Paar is simply the most authentic set of recipes I have ever seen on classic South Indian cooking. I was fortunate to find a fresh reprint at a Higginbothams book shop in Chennai. Amazingly, you will find its 1968 edition listed on amazon.com, but with a small line confessing that it is out of print. The single customer review there describes how indispensable it is to someone struggling to learn South Indian cuisine, even if navigating the book takes a little getting used to.

The books look today as they doubtless did when they were first printed in 1951. S. Meenakshi Ammal’s writing has not been value-added by the pens of modern recipe-makers. The ingredients and the instructions are offered in unhelpfully blocky paragraphs, no effort made to separate ingredients into lines. The tone of voice is that of an older woman advising a younger and inexperienced one. And this, it turns out, is pretty much what Meenakshi Ammal set out to do.

When she wrote her first volume, it was a planet that had not yet felt the need to coin a word like foodie. There was no great demand for cookery books, and no one thought it a great idea for a woman — imagine that! a woman! — to write an entire book of recipes. Meenakshi Ammal had many detractors and only a handful of supporters. One staunch encouraging voice was that of her uncle, father of the Library Movement in Madras State, the late Rao Bahadur Sri S. V. Krishnaswami. And her own indomitable will, of course.

The set I finally purchased had been revised by Meenakshi Ammal’s son, P. S. Sankaran, to include modern weights and measures rather than pinches and pugils and fistfuls. The publisher, in her introduction, explains:

“. . . it was also a time when with the opening up of more opportunities for women and the dawning of the realization that education was for both sexes, a vast majority of girls were not able to find the time to learn cooking in the traditional way from one’s mother. This proved a problem subsequently when, after marriage, they had to build their own homes and manage their own kitchens. In was to address this need that the author with a lot of foresight, embarked on her venture to bring out a cookery book which would serve more as a manual for daily use”.

Where a modern cookbook might have a single sentence, ‘Boil a cup of tuvar dal (pigeon peas) with turmeric’, Meenakshi Ammal has an entire paragraph, titled To Cook Dhal. It is vintage Meenakshi Ammal, cooking instructions as stream of consciousness, not a thing linear, afterthoughts interwoven with forethoughts:

Choose a stoneware of vessel with a very narrow mouth. Wash dhal. Clean and remove stones, if any. Boil water in a vessel. Add dhal, a pinch of turmeric powder and 1 teaspoon of gingelly oil. Cover with a lid or cup, filled with water. (Add this water to the dhal, if needed.) Cook till very soft. (If the dhal is cleanly husked, it need not be washed.) (Some dhals do not cook soon. If so, add a pinch of baking soda. If baking soda is added, do not use the turmeric powder, as the color of the dhal will be spoilt.)

Yes, I know. You want proof of the pudding. So here are three of my all-time favourites from her set. Not only are the recipes simplicity itself, but the spice mixtures I describe may be used for pretty much most other vegetables other than the ones I have described.

Potato Podi

Potatoes 350 gms (choose big ones)

Red chillies 6 or 8

Red gram dhal (tuvar dal) 2 tsps

Black gram dhal (urad dal) 2 tsps

Asafoetida (hing) a pinch

Black mustard seeds 1/2 tsp

Method

Fry the spice ingredients in 4 tsps of oil to golden brown color, and grind to a coarse powder along with 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls of salt.

Cook the whole potatoes in their jackets, and peel. Spread the spice powder on a board and place the potatoes on top of it. Press the potatoes with a roller to break them up. Keep breaking them up till the pieces are roughly the size of large marbles and thoroughly mixed with the powder. Serve with chappatis or rice, and sambar or dal.

Crumbled Arbi Curry

Arbi (colocasia) 250 grams

Juice of an areca-nut sized piece of tamarind in 1/4 cup of water

Whole black pepper 2 tsps

Cummin seeds (jeera) 2 tsps

Black gram dhal (urad dal) 2 tsps

Sprig of curry leaves

Salt to taste

Method

Heat a vessel with enough water to cover the arbis. When the water is boiling, add the arbis (washed and cleaned well) and cover with a lid. Turn it occasionally. When it is cooked, remove from the fire and peel. Cut each arbi into two or three pieces and keep aside.

Roast the whole black pepper, cummin seeds (jeera) and black gram dhal (urad dal). Grind into a coarse powder. This is known as curryma powder.

In a vessel, heat 4 teaspoonfuls of gingelly oil, and add a teaspoon of black mustard seeds. When they start spluttering, add the cut arbi pieces. Add about a teaspoon of salt and scald, turning frequently. Add the tamarind juice and boil till the raw smell of tamarind goes away. Add 1 to 2 teaspoons of curryma powder, curry leaves, and mix well. Keep cooking until the liquid has evaporated, and the arbis become a mass.

Serve with rice and dhal, or sambar.

And in closing, let me add that if some dedicated and selfless person were to take on the task of presenting the priceless recipes in Meenakshi Ammal’s books in a more user-friendly way with clear ingredient lists and instructions, and gorgeous drooly pictures as is the norm these days, on lovely glossy paper — why, I do believe there may be a modern classic here waiting to be lapped up.

Of course, you should make sure you have a word with P. S. Sankaran first. (more…)

Lessons from lasoon

Filed under Food, Humor by C Y Gopinath on November 27, 2007 at 2:47 pm {19 comments}

It might keep teenage vampires away but when you use it well in the kitchen, the unassuming garlic can unite the most diverse people

SMITH AND JONES GRIND GARLIC AT NASHIK. In case you think this is one of those phrases administered to suspected drunks to check their sobriety, it is not. Smith & Jones happened to be a brand of readymade garlic paste, one of latest products of ravenous, emerging giant India. I spied it on the mixes and spices shelf of one of the new breed of US-style self-service supermarkets in Mumbai.

Picked it up at once, of course, attracted by the Victorian-style graphics, the words ‘Traditional English Style’ written below in a pennant. Was this one of the newest Indian-made Foreign Imports coming out of a collaboration between a spirited desi entrepreneur and some expansive expatriate? Would Smith & Jones together wipe out Bedekar and Parampara? Was this the future of garlic, to be smashed and bottled and sold in disguise? Did Englishmen, by the way, eat garlic? Did Britannia rule with waves of garlicky breath? Hmmm.

I checked the fine print and discovered that Messrs. Smith and Jones operate out of a Nashik address, and instantly all was clear. Smith and Jones are probably the working names of some Sawant and Joglekar who have cannily realized that the future lies in garlic.

Made me start thinking about CYG and garlic. Allium sativa had not been a part of my strictly Dravidian childhood. Encountering it in Calcutta and Delhi, where I was shaped from boy to proud manhood, I felt formal towards garlic, like a Japanese towards a Gujarati. Gainda Singh, cook at my college , was a romancer of garlic, but since he shone in all other respects, I, as head of the Canteen Committee, tolerated this aberration.

When the corporate world tamed the garlic and bottled it as pearls, promising there would be no odour and yet the heart would glow with health, I checked that out. This is how garlic ought to be, I thought, unrecognizable, odourless, untastable, unseen. In brief, I was a garlic hater. I thought it behaved like the opposition in the lower House of Parliament, always disrupting proceedings.

I was wrong on all counts and today I stand ready to face the music.

The unforgettable Ishtiyaque Qureshi, ex-chef of the erstwhile Searock Hotel and later the Leela Kempinski, once fed me a kheer in which, I learnt later, the floating almond-like pods were really garlic. Garlic pudding! Aaaaargh. But it tasted somehow like a mild Lebanese paradise. “The trick is to subjugate the garlic by cooking it in milk long enough at the right temperature,” said Qureshi.

In Cairo, a taxi-driver’s wife ground raw garlic and green chillies together with salt and lemon juice, sandiwched it in the mouth of a small fried aubergine and fed it to me with whole fried Cornish chicken and a pasta salad. The one hero of this warrior-like meal was, believe it or not, the garlic.

Though my conviction that garlic was garlic was on the wane, for many years I maintained that it was best consumed in pearl form. Lest your social life take a plunge, you know.

But as of October 17, I have changed forever the way I perceive garlic. In large measure, this is because of a simple soup that was created by my wife Shilpa one sunset when no one felt like cooking and the evening stretched like eternity ahead of us. She threw a dart, it hit a Mexican cookbook, and another dart found page 72, Toasted Garlic Soup, serves 4 to 6.

“Don’t” I said, alarmed. “This marriage will be on the rocks!”

She ignored me. A woman who loves garlic knows what she wants.

I watched as she took a fistful of more garlic than I would have eaten in a month of Sundays, and toasted them. The aroma, forbidden and strong, filled the house. The child began to wheeze. The domestic help began muttering about paid leave. Then the vapours settled and more disciplined, suddenly more exciting, grew out of it. More things happened. I watched, face buried in my hands, nose twitching.

An hour later, I was tasting one of the most rogueish, ill-mannered and utterly charismatic soups I have eaten in a long time.

To get the entire recipe free of charge, all you have to do is click on the Bloggers Choice Award website link on top of this page and, only if you believe with all your heart that Gopium deserves one more vote, go and cast your vote.

On second thoughts, vote anyway. Who cares what you really believe in your heart?

On third thoughts, I’m not that kind of person. Here’s the full recipe:

INGREDIENTS

¼ cup cooking oil

1 large or even huge head of garlic, cloves separated, peeled and coarsely chopped

½ a baguette bread, cut diagonally into ¼” thick slices

4 medium-sized red tomatoes, peeled and seeded and coarsely chopped into chunks

7 cups stock (chicken, preferably, but Maggi vegetable cubes if you insist)

Salt to taste

½ cup thick cream

Method

1. Heat the oil in a large skillet until it is smoking. Add the garlic and stir over medium-high heat for a minute or so until the garlic cloves are lightly toasted. Transfer the garlic to a large soup pot.

2. Add as many slices of the bread to the skillet as will fit in one uncrowded layer. Fry over medium heat for a minute, turning once, until they are lightly golden on each side. Transfer to paper towels to drain. Continue until all the bread has been fried, and set aside.

3. Place the chilli peppers and tomatoes in the skillet and stir over medium high heat for a minute until they wilt. Transfer to the soup pot with the garlic. Add the stock and the salt, bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes, or until the garlic has softened.

4. Ladle the soup into individual bowls. Garnish each bowl with fried bread and a dollop of cream. Serve right away, piping hot.

Muri Blues

Filed under Food by C Y Gopinath on November 27, 2007 at 12:43 pm {6 comments}

There is a connection between young love and Calcutta’s jhalmuri

FROM THE DARKNESS OF KOLKATA’S LAKE GARDENS come the sounds of lovers holding hands.

Bet you’ve never heard the sound of lovers holding hands before, but I have. It’s not the usual slurps and slobs and chwoops and fevered whisperings, but more a steady chomp-chomp-chomp. Occasionally you might hear an intense burp.

It is the sound of two people deeply in love eating Calcutta’s jhalmuri together. No other city serves up this amazing snack based on puffed rice, or muri. The jhal refers to the fiery trail it blazes as it enters your system. Calcuttans buy their jhalmuri from numerous itinerant vendors who emerge towards twilight, with wicker baskets full of muri hanging from their waists. Arrayed around the basket like bullets in a carabinier’s magazine are old tins of ingredients such as rock salt, onions, green chillies and so on. If you took a closer look, you would find at hand a large Dalda tin as well, defaced and blackened, almost tired, in which he will combine the ingredients; and the small wooden baton with which he will give the mixture a twirl before serving it in paper cones rolled from old copies of Ananda Bazar Patrika.

Bengalis will swear that there is something almost magical about the old tin which imparts a fire-tinged magic to the jhalmuri and explains why home-made version can never match what lovers munch at Lake Gardens.

In the lane that runs by The Statesman building in Chowringhee, a gloomy hole-in-the-wall dispenses jhalmuri and nothing else. We used to despatch the office boy on late-work evenings to pick up jhalmuri. Putting aside crowquill and Rotring, we would shovel fistfuls of the stuff into our mouths, cursing at the fieriness of it and wiping the tears from our eyes. Work would be impossible later anyway, so we’d retire to some nearby beer bar and discuss the future of communism in Bengal.

Because it is based on puffed rice, you might mistakenly conclude that jhalmuri is probably a cousin of Bombay’s bhelpuri, but the truth couldn’t be further. If puffed rice is the gene pool, then jhalmuri is the warrior and bhelpuri the poet. The biggest mistake you could make would be to try and adapt jhalmuri to local taste, for that would not be murder, it would be assassination.

I spoke to several people, some of them Bengali, others with Bengal in their blood, to piece together the recipe for jhalmuri. Everyone remembered different ingredients, and I conclude that jhalmuri’s recipe itself must be variable. Accordingly, the recipe I give below lists the basic ingredients, and separately, a couple of add-ons.

[Do note, won't you, that I could have insisted that you click on the Bloggers Choice Awards website link on top of this page and forced you to vote for this blog if you really wanted the recipe, but I didn't, having too much character and integrity.]

INGREDIENTS

Basic

250 gms puffed rice (muri)

1 or 2 onions, finely chopped

2 or 3 spicy green chillies, sliced into fine ringlets

Half a cup of peanuts

1/4 coconut, sliced into slivers

50 gms dried peas (chana)

Boiled potato sliced into flakes

1/2 cucumber finely chopped

Rock salt

1-2 tsps freshly pressed mustard oil

Half a lemon

Add-ons

Raw mango cut into little slivers

Red chilly powder

My only caution to anyone experimenting with other add-ons is to remember that a fine line divides jhalmuri from other puffed rice preparations. On no account should you try to sweeten it, using tamarind water and the like, for that would bring it too close to the Maharashtrian counterpart. Similarly, do not add any ground spices such as aamchoor (dried mango powder) or garam masala — you might get interesting tastes but none of them will be the real thing.

Also, do note the casually used phrase ‘freshly pressed mustard oil’. Not only is this darker and more aromatic than the refined and packaged version, but it gives teeth to the jhalmuri plus it is what Calcutta’s muriwallas use. Whatever you do, do not, repeat, do not substitute mustard oil with any other oil except at your own peril.

You’re ready now. Bung the ingredients into an old magic tin and give it a good twirl with a wooden spoon. Squeeze some lime juice over it. Walk into a cosy dark spot with someone you love deeply, and start eating jhalmuri, occasionally holding hands or burping.

The sorry story of the uttappam

Filed under Food, Humor by C Y Gopinath on October 6, 2007 at 4:02 am {22 comments}

The uttappam was feeling threatened by globalization — who am I? why does the pizza look like me? what should I do? C Y Gopinath counsels

It was a humid day, the sort that dampens all urges towards food.

I was sitting in my clinic, toying desultorily with some listless peanuts, when I sensed that someone was watching me. For a few years now — in fact, ever since parsley and iceberg lettuce began appearing in the local market — I have been running a small but successful practice counseling various culinary items who felt their identity threatened by the influx of Chinese, Italian, Lebanese, and Mughlai cuisines into India. My regular clients today include aloo chops wondering about the meaning of life after the MacAloo Tikkis; vermicelli upmas intimidated by chow mein; puri-bhaji that have been told that the railway platform now belongs to burgers; and others such paranoid entrées. I once had to make peace between some cloud-ear mushroom and a cabbage who feared displacement.

This particular evening, as the nation raced towards the millennium, I was certain I was being watched. I turned around, ostensibly to knock the ash out of my meerschaum, and casually glanced up. There it was. An unprepossessing uttappam about 10 inches across, it surface flecked with a few cowardly onion flakes.

“Ahem,” it cleared its throat. “I was wondering if you could help me.” I said nothing.

“It’s about the pizza,” it continued.

“What about the pizza?” I asked.

“Well, it’s pretending to be an uttappam,” replied the hapless dish. “But smarter. People think it’s an imported uttappam, and they go for it in a big way.”

I thought it was time to take this miserable little flip-flop in hand. “Listen,” I said. “You are an ancient rice batter preparation with history on your side. The pizza is a bread with some ketchup, odds and ends baked with cheese on top. How could anyone confuse you with that?”

Trouble started, said the uttappam, when the Udipi restaurant owner began to sprinkle Amul cheese over the uttappam just before frying it. The cheese would not melt or brown over, but merely turn a little crisp. “We were humiliated,” said the uttappam. “No one has done that to us before. And it’s all because the pizzas are baked with Mozzarella.”

In the meantime, atrocities were being committed upon the uttappam’s cousin, the dosai. The Dosa Manchurian was invented in a small tattukada in Cochin, in which the dosai was made to hold its own weight in chow mein, instead of the usual warm spiced potato mash. Indeed, every conceivable filling and covering was being indiscriminately inflicted upon the dosa — from heron’s egg omelettes to prawn malabari to chicken dopiaza to vegetable stew. The dosai was so crushed by these assaults that it surrendered its identity meekly.

Even Chinese cuisine, once Chinese, latterly Indian, and now victim of the Indian cook’s attempt to please all and sundry, was being mauled. In a small eatery in Mumbai, I had myself tasted the Chow Mein Manchurian Mussallam, in which finally the mainland meets the hinterland in a clashing war of opposite tastes. All lose, only the cash register wins. I had beheld horrified the dawn of the Hakka Afghani, the Tandoori Croissant, the Amritsari Upma, with chunks of Reshmi Kebab in it.

I even understood why it was going on. This country could not stand globalisation. The Indian abroad hides behind papads and garam masala. The Indian at home carefully checks the ‘imported’ dishes coming in through Immigration, and then cleverly renders them insignificant by ‘adapting’ them. The adaptation process is simplicity itself — he must sprinkle garam masala over it, substitute ghee for olive oil, rev up the red spices a little and sprinkle the dish with coriander just before serving. The pizza thus vandalised could be fashionably re-named La Pizza Indiana, and be hailed as a triumph of thinking global but acting local.

My wretched uttappam was sniffling. “What shall I do?” he moaned. “I have lost my self-respect.”

An idea struck me. “You have lost nothing,” I said firmly. “You have only gained. Listen carefully: the pizza is undergoing deep changes. I expect that its base will soon be substituted by a thick dough of rice and lentils. Tomatoes may become optional. This is your chance: you must strengthen your foundation with a strong baking dough made from good baking flour. I want you to welcome all sorts of toppings, even non vegetarian ones. Don’t flinch under bacon or tuna or ham or mince. And when they bake you, smile as though you love nothing more.”

“But — but —“ spluttered the uttappam. “I won’t be an uttappam any more!!”

“You won’t, perhaps,” I said reasonably. “But the pizza will be the uttappam. The more it resembles the uttappam the bigger the market for it.”

“And I? What will I be?” whined the uttappam.

“Why, you silly little pancake,” I said, my patience snapping. “You’ll be a pizza, of course. You’ll be the king.”

A chip of the old Nayak

Filed under Food, Humor by C Y Gopinath on June 28, 2007 at 2:10 pm {10 comments}

In a clear case of judicio-culinary activism, C Y Gopinath is put on trial for declaring Rama Nayak’s wafers to be the best in the universe as we know it.

Yes, M’lud, I am reasonably certain that it was not an Indoor Locker.

Or Indoor Laukar, as they tell me its erroneously called in the teeming wholesale veggie markets of downtown Maharashtra. Or Indore Locker, for all I know. In fact, Your Grace, your best money won’t get you a decent Indore Locker till after Christmas is gone and you’ve rung the new year in. After that, it’s Indore Locker season all the way till May, with the occasional Talegaon showing up.

But if it’s December — and it will soon be — then the potato of choice for frying wafers is not the Indore Locker or the Talegaon but the Mahabaleshwar potato. And I stand guilty as accused of having declared, in a public place and in a loud voice, that the wafers made at Rama Nayak’s 50-years-plus Udipi Hotel, just outside Matunga East station, deploying the magnificent Mahabaleshwar, are the best in this quarter of the universe. Or at least the Asia-Pacific rim.

All I ask, before this august court sentences me to a lifetime of dry dum aloo with no spices, is a chance to defend myself.

The problem, Your Excellency, is that you’ve never held a Rama Nayak potato wafer between your grubby judiciary fingers, else you wouldn’t be trying me for nepotism. It’s really very thin, you know. Wafer-thin would be the exact phrase that’s eluding me. Hold it up against the sun, and God will shine a light through it, coming out all translucent and glorious on the other side. In color, it will be a uniform pale gold, though the occasional one will be streaked with a reddening that got past quality control.

Pop one in your mouth and close your eyes as you chew. It’ll crumble all crisp, like the credits of some modern movie, releasing only texture and a fleeting certainty that nothing is wrong with the world at the moment. The feeling disappears in an instant along with the wafer, but if you want it back just pop the next one in your mouth.

They come in packets of Rs.20 each, Your Rectitude. They are not vacuum sealed or foil packed. And they are completely touched by human hands every little inch of the way.

One the day that I took it upon myself to personally inspect the wafer-making process at Rama Nayak, the human hands in question belonged, respectively, to Ratnakar, potato peeler from Kundapur, South Canara; Uday, potato slicer from Bhatkal, on the border between South and North Canara; and Ramaiah, deep fryer from Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu.

It is nearly a religious experience, Your Wittiness, watching wafers being made. The Mahabaleshwar is a sturdy, soldierly potato with a parched-earth tracery on its red-brown skin. Early in the morning, Satish Rama Nayak, who runs the show, or his nephew-in-training Pravin Kumar, will already have chosen the best Mahabaleshwars in the market, going by shapeliness, girth, and absence of sprouting eyes and discolorations.

“Plus hardness,” says Satish. “A good Mahabaleshwar is full of water, which makes it hard. Soft potatoes go phut so we try to retain the water but get rid of the starch.”

Starch is enemy number one in Waferland. It makes the wafers stick to each other, it absorbs oil, it creates grease and glaze, and it causes, eventually, cardiac arrest in loyal customers. After being peeled, Rama Nayak’s Mahabaleshwars are dunked in cold water for two starch-sucking hours. Then, after Uday the potato-slicer has done his stuff, they do two more hours in a metal tub, where they float pale white and luminous like dream flakes. This water will presently grow milky with starch, while the wafer, losing weight, gains a certain formal bearing.

And it’s ready to boogie.

It will not have escaped your sharp notice, Your Perspicacity, that potatoes start cooking at 113°C but brown at 188°C. It might, however, never have crossed your fine sub judice mind to ask how on earth they measure temperature in a 50-year-old Udipi kitchen without thermometers? I’ll tell you, m’lud. The deep-fryer from Tirunelveli sprinkles a little water on the oil. If it merely crackles unhappily, then the oil isn’t hot enough. If, instead, it shatters the airwaves with a resounding whipcrack, then it is ready to host the Mahabaleshwars.

Into the wok they go. There is a celebratory effervescence as the wafers begin to surrender their remaining water. Then, for exactly three minutes, they jostle around happily like tourists in a 5-star jacuzzi, getting their hides lightly tanned.

They out they come. The surface oil drips away into a colander. Ceiling fans are switched off lest the wafer start losing confidence. There is a light summer shower of salt, sometimes red chilly powder as well. And Ratnakar the potato-peeler turns into Ratnakar, wafer-packer. Does about 60 packets a day. No bulk orders accepted, now or ever.

Your Pulchritude, I’m all admiration for your gush of judicio-culinary activism, pressing charges against a harmless wafer fetishist like myself just because I feel kindly towards Rama Nayak’s wafers, but do you really have a case? Here, try one of these. Want another? Go for it. What about this spiced one? Don’t close your eyes, Your Magnitude. Concentrate on the accused. You have a case to judge.

And you should really stop this injudicious slurping.

And don’t speak with your mouth full.

Your Honour.

Page 1 of 412 3 4 »

How I didn’t make a rezala

The Minimalist from Rajgir

What Ishtiyaque did with the paan leaf

Paan Malai Kabab

Subz Barra Kabab

Pasta la vista

How to cook a Musa Pseudostem

Read and see

Potato Podi

Crumbled Arbi Curry

Lessons from lasoon

Muri Blues

The sorry story of the uttappam

A chip of the old Nayak

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