links_
A TASTE OF INDIA
LONDON LETTER
BY: T.R.KPuritans have always maintained that food, like sex is an overrated preoccupation. But there are those among us who have stubbornly refused to be cured of these primal afflictions. I have spent three decades in Europe as a shameless epicurean in search of newer culinary experiences. A evening in Budapest, lunches in Bordeaux and Strasbourg, dinner in Rome overlooking the Appian Way, great Indian feasts in Birmingham and London's Southall. It has been time well spent in the company of fellow gourmets, sharing our passions and indulging our addictive frenzies.
Indian cuisine which has come to be rated highly in recent times has seen a wholesale transformation during these three decades, surprising even its most ardent and discriminating converts. Shafi, the restaurant that called itself the oldest Indian restaurant in England nestled in Gerrard Street in London's Bohemian Soho, next door to the renowned Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club and a wine bar called La Cave. The owner of this dark and cavernous establishment embalmed in twenty years of Eastern promise was a curmudgeonly fogey whom we called Mr. Shafi. He was always dressed in what appeared to be a blood-stained apron, and he would give his large hands a generous wipe on this piece of chef's flannel before shaking hands with his celebrity guests. I remember seeing Robert Morley eating alone and talking to himself in great explosive slurps; Alec Guiness incognito in a raincoat, with a lady in dark glasses; famous writers, critics and Fleet street hacks. I met novelist Raja Rao (of Serpent and the Rope fame) with his editor from publisher John Murray in La Cave before adjourning to Shafi's for a dinner.
The menu was what came to be derided as the curry pot; dismissed as curry on tap: meat, chicken, fish or vegetable were drowned in generous portions of one of three identical dark brown sauces, medium, hot and very hot, Eastern brews from the pre-war galleys of merchant shipping. The first generation Bengalis from the small district of Sylhet in what was then India, with no culinary tradition, were the owners of this entrepreneurial culture in England. Tandoori was all but unknown; the wonderful unleavened breads of the Punjab had not put in an appearance. However these pungent, rich, cheap and plentiful sauces which went by the generic name of curry, a term unknown to me in India, set Anglo-Saxon palates on a journey of insidious and new addiction. It has taken two decades for the biochemists to establish that the chilli in the Indian curry is indeed addictive. Chilli causes pain, and the body releases pain-killing endorphins which are addictive.
Yet the second generation of this enterprise culture has boldly borrowed from Indian's regional culinary repertoire. Whilst not always getting it right the menus now reflect this change: tandoori salmon, trout and quail; kohlrabi greens and lotus root dishes in a cream and spice sauce; nans and rumali rotis from Peshawar; piquant fish curry from Mangalore; the lists have borrowed the best from India's four corners and its crowded culinary culture. The diners are generally discriminating, widely travelled and demand high standards.
Over a decade ago, a young Bengali who barely spoke English opened a Restaurant called The Red Fort, abandoning publicly the curry-pot tradition, replacing it with dishes from the North West of the Indian subcontinent, with uncompromising attention to their authenticity. Ali Mia, the young chef became a celebrity himself and a darling of the food critics for a decade and more, and forced his fellow Bengalis to raise their own standards. Great chefs from the Punjab opened new restaurants, often in Asian strongholds like Southall, away from the fashionable theatreland of the West End of London. The Taj Hotel group saw an ever-growing market for this newly purified and fashionable cuisine and opened the Bombay Brasserie. Its genius formula was the lunch time buffet in its Kensington fastness, where London's cognoscenti queue patiently to indulge in a culinary feast of Goan, Bengali, Gujerati, Tamil and Gujerati dishes laid out as if for a King.
These twin themes of authenticity to the vast regional repertoire and the high and meticulous standards of cooking have given rise to a new genre of pseudo-cultural styles of Indian cooking in England. The names are inventive, comical and challenge one's credulousness. The kitchens of the Anglo-Indian ayya and the governess that gave us the mango chutney and the mulligatawny soup have given London Chutney Mary in fashionable Chelsea harbour, UK's first such restaurant. Dishes speak of invention and marriage of cultures and the Raj nostalgia. The kitchens of Birmingham with a large population of Asians, bored with convention, "discovered" balti cooking, curries in a bucket. Uncompromisingly rich and spicy dishes are finished seconds before serving in Chinese style woks with the final addition of sweet peppers and ginger, and brought sizzling to the table with accompanying assortment of breads. Diners are expected to abandon all table manners, dispense with fork and knife and size mouthfuls with a roll of their hands, requiring ambidextrous skills. The prosperous Gujerati community, many of whom are vegetarian, has taken to South Indian masala dosas, chutney, idlis and sambar and vadas with a zeal that has extended to owning these establishments and even adding these to their own Gujerati culinary repertoire. Woodlands with its Udipi brahmanical roots has assembled an exquisite if puritanical and spartan thali that teases the palates of the most critical of aficionados of Indian food, at a price that would give visiting Indians palpitations!
The Sloane Rangers of India, the public school educated Simla elite have unknowingly given their name to a new faddish restaurant chain, the Shimla Pinks. If the publicity is to be believed, this deviant of the Anglo-Indian tradition that borrows from all the regional repertoire, then alters and burnishes the dishes with the technical panache of the new generation chefs, is set to invade Britain.
India's own celebrities often play a public role in promoting this passion. Ismail Merchant, the celebrated producer of Ivory Merchant duo appeared recently in a TV programme produced by himself, nailing his colours to the mast of this renaissance. He claims that he seduces his European and American financiers and fellow producers with an Indian culinary spread that appears magically, effortlessly from his kitchen. It would make a comical scene in one of his own films if Ismail Merchant, cast in his own self-promoted image as culinary artist sent out for these fully finished and effortless creations from the local Indian takeaway, delivered to his back door to be served to his unsuspecting but adulatory bankers. A decade ago, Syed Jaffrey, arguably the best known Indian actor in England played a lugubrious and harassed Indian restaurateur in Farrukh Dhondy's Tandoori Nights. This was meant to be a send-up of the heavy and indiscriminate borrowing by restaurant industry from the British Raj phrase book. There were dozens of Jewels in the Crown, and Tastes of the Raj, dotted round Britain's high streets.
The Indian food tradition has also created its own media communicators, who became TV's super cooks, with several sumptuously printed coffee table cook books as a spin off from the TV series. Madhur Jaffrey, a super cook and a talented actress who appears in wonderful cameo roles, is now India's culinary ambassador, with a genuine enthusiasm for her craft. She has made Europe and America aware of the diversity of the cuisine from the Indian subcontinent, by assembling recipes from countless unsung mothers, housewives straight from the hearths of India. It is every foodies' fantasy to be taken out to lunch by Madhur Jaffrey. She does not need a "Portrait of A Super Cook" by me to further her career, but I would not mind.
There is a serious need for a film producer like Ismail Merchant and a gifted actress and super-cook like Madhur Jaffrey to consider teaming up to produce an epic film about the obsessional discovery of Indian food, very much like Tampopo, a film set in Japan that explores mercilessly the sublimation of sex drive into gluttony. The semantics of India's high-table, the insidious chilli-factor that seduces book critics to indulge in hyperbole about a novel like Reef by Romesh Gunesekere that was all about cooking, the secret of this craft, the journey that delivers a Babette's Feast to our tables; these could be the themes of such a seductive film.
In retrospect, it seems that many like me have spent a lifetime in restaurants, Indian restaurants in particular, remembering the rich and sumptuous wedding feasts of India, in the company of friends. We reminisced about the humble dubbas of lunch-time Bombay with its mooli pickles and its corn rotis, the back street Moslem cantinas of Old Delhi, getting one's fingers round the meat stew with a piece of rumali roti, the pungent broth that all UP-wallahs called an "e-stew", and the Mughal eateries of India's five star hotels.
1510 words
1996
Reviews Index >>