Archive for the 'Food' Category

Dalit food: The poor man’s palate

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on February 22, 2010
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Vikram Doctor in The Economic Times:

Mary was a little diffident, wondering if I would really like it. She brought out a small bowl of what looked like chopped long beans, but whitish, and in a rich brown gravy. They were goats’ intestines she said, waiting for me to refuse them. But, of course, I didn’t and it was delicious — the slight chewiness was more than made up by the rich, savoury gravy, which had a slight jelly-like thickness. I knew from much eating in Mumbai’s Muslim areas that some organ meats like liver and brain are eaten for their own unique texture, but others are more valued for the rich savour of their juices, and these intestines were like that.

Once she knew I was interested in her food, Mary would happily serve me some, always the really cheap meats she bought. Another time she cooked salt fish curry, and again it was delicious, with a tang that you never get with fresh fish. It was the sort of dish you would never find in a restaurant, partly from genuine constraints — the Taj Group’s Chef Ananda Solomon told me wistfully he would love to serve the Mangalorean salt fish dishes of his childhood at his Konkan Cafe, but doesn’t dare for fear of the smell penetrating and lingering through his hotel kitchen — but also because most customers would not order what they saw as poor people’s food.

I thought of Mary’s food when I read that the Dalit poet and activist Namdeo Dhasal has started a restaurant. Dhasal has done this due to the financial problems he’s been facing, and it sounds like a regular place serving North Indian style kebabs and curries, but apparently he also plans to serve lesser known dishes like a curry of harandodi flowers and vazri, which is intestines and tripe (the stomachs of ruminants). These are dishes typically associated with Dalits, or more generally, the poor who could not afford other foods, and I think there is a real niche here if Dhasal wants to develop it. More:

The end of the squashy tomato?

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on February 2, 2010
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Researchers at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi have developed tomatoes genetically modified to stay fresh for 30 days longer. From The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Plant biologists in India have discovered two previously unknown genes that are involved in fruit ripening and shut them down to create what might be the world’s longest-lasting tomatoes.

The tomatoes developed at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, can retain their firmness and texture for up to 45 days without refrigeration, compared with ordinary tomatoes that shrink and lose texture in about 15 days.

The researchers at the NIPGR have applied their gene-silencing technology on tomatoes, but they say it may also, in theory, be used to increase the shelf life of mangoes, papayas and bananas.

“We’re not adding new genes into tomatoes — the shelf life is increased by shutting down two genes that make the fruits go soft,” said Asis Datta, the senior scientist at the NIPGR who led this research. More:

[Graphic: The Telegraph]

Yoga for foodies

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on January 27, 2010
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From The New York Times:

The past decade has produced thousands of new foodies and new yogis, all interested in healthier bodies, clearer consciences and a greener planet. Inevitably, the overlap between the people who love to eat and the people who love to do eagle pose has grown. In 2007, a combination yoga studio and fine dining restaurant, Ubuntu, opened in Napa, Calif.

Yoga retreat centers now offer gourmet cooking classes and wine tastings; New York yogis trade tips about which nearby ashrams (Anand) and studios (Jivamukti) serve the best muffins.

But not everyone agrees that the lusty enjoyment of food and wine is compatible with yogic enlightenment. Yoga purists say that many foods — like wine and meat — are still off limits. Others, like Mr. Romanelli, say that anything goes, as long as it tastes good. The debate is exposing rich ores of resentment in the yoga world.

“The culture of judgment in the yoga community — I call it “yogier than thou” — is rampant, and nowhere more than around food,” said Sadie Nardini, a yoga teacher in New York. (“Yogis” are those who do yoga, teachers and students alike.) More:

India’s food historians

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on January 24, 2010
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Anindita Ghose and Parizaad Khan on people who document recipes and the grammar of Indian cuisines that could soon be extinct. From Mint-Lounge:

Take restaurateur and food researcher Jacob Aruni, for instance. His repeated cajoling of a septuagenarian woman, Sigappi, in a small coastal town of Tamil Nadu, led her to share rare recipes with him—such as rice cooked with betel leaves. A few months later, she died, taking with her several other recipes that may well be lost forever.

Pushpesh Pant, a professor of diplomacy at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, believes that food, like monuments, performing arts, language and costume, is an integral part of any civilization, which is why it should be conserved for future generations.

Pant is a food scholar himself. His book, Hindu Soul Recipes (Roli Books-Lustre Press, 2007), takes up the humble khichdi, among other dishes. The Ayurvedic kshirika, he writes, has mutated in several different directions. In the Mughal emperor Akbar’s time, in the 16th century, it was slow-cooked with aromatic spices and lamb, and befittingly came to be called laziza, which means tasty. In Bengal, it transformed into a spicy delicacy known as khichudi—strictly vegetarian—cooked during religious feasts. And centuries later, in its avatar as the Anglo-Indian kedgeree in the mid-18th century, it reintegrated its meat element as a breakfast dish that couldn’t do without fish. More:

Recipe: Waffled aloo parantha

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on January 21, 2010
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“Waffled aloo parantha — a potato-filled flat bread from India that is, surprisingly enough, more typically cooked on a griddle or in a skillet.”

From Waffleizer:

This recipe comes to us from Kathy Skutecki, who blogs at Stresscake: Exploring the bake and release theory. It was adapted from Mark Bittman’s The Best Recipes in the World.

The waffled aloo parantha is pictured served with a cilantro chutney and garnished with slices of red onion and cilantro.

If you have leftovers, they can be warmed in a 300-degree oven.

Parantha dough

This recipe makes enough for about a dozen stuffed flatbreads

Ingredients:

* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

* 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

* 1 teaspoon kosher salt

* 1 teaspoon ground cumin

* 2 Tablespoons olive oil

* 3/4 cup warm water

Directions:

1. In the work bowl of a food processor, add both flours, salt and cumin and pulse to combine.

2. With the motor running, add the water and olive oil through the tube and process until a ball forms. If the dough is a little dry, add another 1-2 Tablespoons warm water until it comes together.

3. Turn the dough out onto the counter and knead briefly until smooth.

4. Place dough in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest 30 minutes while you make the filling.

Read on for the ingredients (how to make the potato filling), put it all together, and also the recipe for “Cilantro Chutney” (we call it dhania in India).

Richard Gere serves up a haven for vegetarians

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on January 10, 2010
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Actor and Buddhist activist backs campaign to make the Indian town of Bodhgaya a meat-free zone. Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:


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Richard Gere, the Hollywood actor who has spurned red meat for the past 30 years, has thrown his support behind a plan to transform the site of Buddha’s enlightenment into a vegetarian zone to spread the message of peace.

The activist, who is taking part in a five-day training session with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader, in the Indian town of Bodhgaya, took part in a candlelit march this week highlighting the campaign. “Bodhgaya is a pious place and I want to come here again,” the star of movies such as An Officer and a Gentleman and Pretty Woman told reporters, after joining around 500 monks and activists who took part in the march. “I am with the people who have launched this campaign.”

According to Buddhist tradition, Bodhgaya, in the state of Bihar, is where Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment around 500BC. Starting in the 19th century, the area gradually become a site of pilgrimage and is now visited by Buddhists from all over the world, whose presence gives it a very different character from the rest of north India’s impoverished “cow belt”. More:

Selling India Pale Ale to Indians

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on January 7, 2010
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From GlobalPost:

The most exciting development for Indian beer lovers, however, is not brew pubs, but the recent launch of Little Devils beer by an upstart called TVB Craft Breweries.

The reason: Along with a wheat beer, a craft lager, a strong ale and a golden ale, TVB has finally brought the beer brewed and named for India — India Pale Ale, or IPA, as it is known by beer lovers around the world — back to the country that first made it famous.

“Indians don’t even realize that it’s named after India,” boomed David Home, TVB’s Australian chairman, in a recent interview at the company’s New Delhi marketing office. “This is the first time that it’s being brewed in India for 70 years. People love that.”

Like many inventions, India Pale Ale was discovered more or less by accident.

As the story goes, in the late 18th century London brewer George Hodgson — commonly known as the creator of IPA — sent a shipment of his October Bitter Ale to India, only to see it run into rough weather around the Cape of Good Hope. The delay caused the ale to mature more rapidly than normal in the casks. The strong, hops-flavored ale that resulted soon became the most popular tipple in the colony known as “the jewel in the crown.” More:

Masala dosa and rosogolla

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on December 27, 2009
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A typical Bengali spread

A typical Bengali spread

According to Outlook magazine’s nationwide poll published in its year-end edition, India’s national dish is not butter chicken but masala dosa. The national dessert is the juicy rosogolla. Outlook carries essays on India’s regional cuisine.

Nilanjana S. Roy, the author of A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food:

Given that biriyani, pulao and khichdi are part of the Indian palate, and that a rough three-fifths of the world’s nations have some kind of rice dish as their national favourite, surely we can anoint some combination of rice-and-veggies or rice-and-meat? Not so. Aside from the fact that wheat-eating regions will have their sentiments damaged, there’s the tricky question of which recipe you choose. The classic, plain vanilla dal-and-rice khichdi has over 60 variations. Choosing a Lucknawi biriyani over the Hyderabadi kacchi biriyani over, say, a classic coastal seer fish biriyani is beyond my capabilities. And we haven’t even got to the pulaos yet. More

Chandan Mitra, a politician and a journalist, on Bengali cuisine:

Let me detail some of the items that would be considered non-negotiable in a traditional Bengali meal. It should start with fried miniature bodi, a few spoonfuls of lightly fried saag and uchchhey (small bitter gourd)—aloo fry, begun (brinjal) bhaja and/or bhindi bhaja (chopped fried bhindi). This should be followed by shukto (a light stew of aloo, karela, green banana, laau (green gourd) etc. Coconut-laced preparations are common in Bengali cuisine; hence a chholar dal (dhuli huyi chana with chopped coconut) is considered a delicacy. This also goes well with luchi (medium-sized puris made with maida rather than atta). At lunchtime, bhaja mooger dal (dal made with roasted moong) is often the next item. Alongside, there is a wide array of side dishes. They range from aloo posto, sager ghonto or chocchori (palak cooked with aloo, brinjal and various other vegetables including pumpkin), laau-chingri (shrimps cooked with finely cut pieces of green gourd and cabbage), chhenchki (pumpkin, aloo and other vegetables bunged together to make a mash), and in some cases chhanchra (a mash made of palak, aloo, laau, topped up with the head of fish—a huge delicacy). More:

Farrukh Dhondy, a UK-based writer, playright and journalist, on Parsi food:

Parsis perch or poach eggs on most things—one can have papeta par eida, bheeda par eida, kheema par eida, bhaji par eida, tambotaan par eida, which in turn mean: eggs on potatoes, okra, mince, spinach, tomato and almost anything else. Ideal starters for the wedding banquet (and, while on the subject of eggs, the curried, scrambled, coriandered breakfast dish akoori is far superior to what our Punjabi compatriots call bhujiya), to be followed by sali-boti, sali-marghi, lamb (goat, actually) or chicken cooked with slender, fried potato straws and/or with lugan no sahs—fish, usually pomfret, surmaai or ramus in a gently spiced, sweet and sour sauce—or patraan ni machchi, pomfret baked in banana leaves with a grated coconut chutney. All that is then followed by Parsi pulao, our version of biriyani topped with the definitive Parsi dhan saak daal. More:

Also read V. Gangadhar (Gujarati cuisine), Arun Jaitley (Punjabi), Dileep Padgaonkar (Saraswat Brahmin) and more.

Rice

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on December 26, 2009
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Jhumpa Lahiri in the New Yorker:

My father, seventy-eight, is a methodical man. For thirty-nine years, he has had the same job, cataloguing books for a university library. He drinks two glasses of water first thing in the morning, walks for an hour every day, and devotes almost as much time, before bed, to flossing his teeth. “Winging it” is not a term that comes to mind in describing my father. When he’s driving to new places, he does not enjoy getting lost.

In the kitchen, too, he walks a deliberate line, counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal (fifteen) and never boiling even a drop more water than required for tea. It is my father who knows how many cups of rice are necessary to feed four, or forty, or a hundred and forty people. He has a reputation for andaj—the Bengali word for “estimate”—accurately gauging quantities that tend to baffle other cooks. An oracle of rice, if you will. More:

The many menus of Mumbai

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on December 21, 2009
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From the Wall Street Journal:

The New Martin Hotel Eating House here is off limits to many Hindus because it serves beef. It’s off limits to many Muslims because it serves pork. Yet at 2:30 on a weekday afternoon, the sidewalk is still crowded with people waiting to get a table for lunch.

Any trip to India should include some of its great restaurants. For visitors, it’s a chance to sample a wide variety of regional cuisines that, though often little known abroad, have a place on any gourmet’s map of the world.

New Martin Hotel (the hotel part is long gone), for example, offers the distinctive and delicious food of Goa, the Indian coastal state that was once a Portuguese colony. Outside of New York and London, finding a restaurant serving Goan cuisine can be a challenge. Bengali, Gujarati, Malvani and a couple of dozen others, all are easily found in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital formerly known as Bombay. More:

Grains of truth

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on December 18, 2009
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It feeds the world, provides a livelihood for 50 million Indian families, comes in an amazing variety of forms, is the ideal accompaniment for spicy food, and even the bags it is packed in are satisfyingly practical. Denise Roig rhapsodises about the humble staple, rice. In the National:

Rice bag / The National

Rice bag / The National

A smiling Mogul emperor. A bucolic scene of distant mountains and placid lakes. A Bengal tiger. The Taj Mahal. Strolling down the rice aisle at LuLu or Carrefour you can catch a glimpse of images lovely enough to frame. That these sweet illustrations appear on packaging for that most prosaic of staples – rice – only adds to their charm. The cotton bags in which rice is sold here are made beautiful with these vibrant illustrations but they are immensely practical too – a perfect illustration of form and function.

They are made from closely woven cotton, with a zippered opening, which keeps out insects and dust. They are sturdily sewn with strong handles, making them easy to carry (you often see them used as shopping bags or slung over the saddle of a bicycle as an impromptu pannier). The bags can be stacked – whether in 2kg family size or 40kg restaurant size – making them easy to store in homes where storage is scarce. In a throwaway world, they are almost infinitely reusable and can be used to store not only rice but other dried grains, beans and pulses. More:

Patenting melon juice? Not if India gets its way…

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on December 13, 2009
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Fed up with foreign companies patenting traditional medicine from India, the country’s top scientific body is compiling a giant database of everything from yoga positions to medicinal fruit juice. An AFP report at Physorg.com:

WatermelonsThe initiative has had early success since going public in February, repelling two foreign patent applications in July — one for a skin cream based on melon extract and another for a cancer medicine based on pistachios.

Another 30 cases are being examined worldwide, drawing on the database which aims to prove medical precedents and therefore undercut attempts by companies to patent knowledge that has been passed down over generations in India.

V.K. Gupta, the head of this library, known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), told AFP he hoped the database would provide a cheap and easy system to prevent “wrong patents” based on Indian naturopathy.

“Nobody in the world has a right to take our knowledge, repackage it and claim it as theirs,” said Gupta, who works for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

The TKDL already contains 30 million pages and more than 200,000 medicinal formulas derived from herbal and mineral-based treatments originating in India and abroad, such as ayurveda, unani, siddha, as well as yoga techniques. More:

The masala diaspora

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on December 8, 2009
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S Subramanian reviews “Curry: A Global History” by Colleen Taylor Sen. In the National:

curry-bookOne way to reach the Isle of Skye is to ride the West Highland railway until it terminates at Mallaig, a lonely port on the corrugated western coast of Scotland, and then progress across the waters by ferry. Mallaig is a fishing town that believes firmly in eating the product it so painstakingly pulls out of the ocean. When some friends and I entered a restaurant one evening in 2002, we were buffeted by a dense aroma of batter-fried fish, lifting in golden, fatty waves from nearly every plate on every table. Our waitress handed us menus and chanted the day’s specials, but nothing we read or heard about had ever lived on dry land. This posed a significant problem to our party, none of whom ate fish.

“Is there anything else?” a friend inquired, his voice bereft of hope. “Anything other than fish?”

Our waitress looked stricken for a few seconds. Then she brightened. “Ah,” she said. “We could do you a chicken curry and rice.”

The spread of curry – or, to be precise, of the concept of curry – to locations as far-flung and un-Indian as Mallaig has been useful for the defenders of globalisation. More

The Indian Thanksgiving

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on November 24, 2009
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Sarah Khan in the Wall Street Journal. Sarah Khan is an editor at Travel + Leisure and blogs at http://www.bysarahkhan.com

A naturalization test at an immigration office in Boston was the last hurdle standing between me and U.S. citizenship. But for me this journey had actually begun years before, on a rickety vessel you may have heard of—The Mayflower. Except in my adaptation, that leaky ship sailed down the Red Sea to the New World of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where I proudly played the role of a pilgrim in a kindergarten play at the American school. Decked out in a gray frock and a hat fashioned from black construction paper, I prepared to welcome a band of friendly Native Americans to the very first Thanksgiving.

n my five-year-old mind, it seemed perfectly logical that a scrawny Indian girl with brown skin and a Canadian passport should be charged with inviting those other Indians (feather, not dot—although I’m Muslim so we don’t have either) to celebrate the founding spirit of America. In a desert nation, no less, thousands of miles from Plymouth Colony.

“Sarah, is it?” asked the immigration official testing me. “So, where are you from?”

Easy question, no easy answer. More:

Also in WSJ, Indian Thanksgiving recipes. Check out Zuhoor Khan’s Cheeni Murg.

The Andhra Bhawan Canteen of Delhi

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on November 9, 2009
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andhra_bhawan

Missanabeem at The India Tube. Photograph by Hitesh Malaviya:

The first rule of the Andhra Bhawan is be fast. Order fast. Eat fast. Leave fast.

The second rule is: no sharing. Get your own thali, no poking in your friend’s tray. Not that hungry? Bad call. You should be very, very hungry when you step in the canteen.

The third rule: no menu options. Actually, there is an option: vegetarian thali (100 Rs) or non-vegetarian (70 Rs extra). No offense to the vegetarian crowd, but if you don’t get the mutton (everyday in the menu of the day), well, you’re missing out. More:

How to be a culinary show-off

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on November 7, 2009
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Posted by Shekhar Bhatia:

I had the privilege of working with Tushita Patel, whose book of recipes, “Flash in the Pan,” will be published this month by Westland Books. I also had the privilege of working with her husband Aakar, now an eminent columnist. (You can find links to some at Asian Window).

After many happy and successful years in journalism Tushita joined Vijay Mallya, billionaire owner of Kingfisher Airlines and many breweries in India and abroad, and also a politician, as his political secretary. Mallya is said to be a workaholic. Some years back, in a profile of Mallya, The Telegraph of London quoted Tushita: “Even before his aircraft can touch down, his core team is summoned over the satellite phone to the airport. Half the office shifts to the runway – with papers, phones, laptops. We work in the plane, then in the car, then in the office, continue at home, pool, disco, back to the car, back to the plane…”

And yet she managed to write a book!

Below, her recipe for what she calls Mustard Fish 101 excerpted in Mint Lounge.

This is such an exotic dish with so many variations that I had to, absolutely, include it.

Ingredients (serves 6)

1 cup mustard seeds

1 tsp + 1/2 tsp salt

2 + 2 + 1 green or red chillies

1kg fish (ideally river fish)

1/2 tsp turmeric powder

1 tbsp + 1 tsp + extra to taste mustard oil

Method

Soak the mustard seeds in 1K cups of water, with 1 tsp salt and 2 chillies for 20-30 minutes. Drain and pulse grind. If the fish is large, cut it into pieces about K-inch thick and 2-inches long. If the fish are to be kept whole, and are about 3-4 inches long, just trim them. Wash the fish and pat dry. Coat fish with K tsp of salt and the turmeric and let it marinate for 15 minutes. Heat 1 tbsp of oil in a pan. When hot, fry the fish in batches, on each side for a minute. The idea is not to make crisp fries, just remove the rawness. Remove the fish from the pan and set aside. Add 1 tsp of oil to the pan and heat. Slit 2 chillies and add them to the pan. Dilute the mustard paste in water, and holding a strainer over the pan, filter it through. This I do to keep the rough mustard skin out and make the gravy smoother. Once it starts bubbling, lower the heat and put in the fish. Cook for 2 minutes and turn off the heat.

To serve, pour the fish and the gravy into a dish. Swirl a little oil on it for a sharp kick. Split the remaining chilli and place it in the dish. This should not be runny like a curry, but just the fish coated in the mustard.

There are some more recipes in Mint Lounge

Eating fish in Mumbai

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on October 5, 2009
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From the New York Times:

Surmai fry at HIghway Gomantak, Mumbai

Surmai fry at HIghway Gomantak, Mumbai

Any true Mumbaiker knows not to eat seafood during monsoon season, from June to September. The choppy, churning waters stir up mud and grime, making it hard to find a fresh catch. And the government enforces a seasonal ban to keep the fish population sustainable.

Now that the rains have receded, the city is breaking its collective seafood fast. There are the no-brainer choices you’re likely to find in guidebooks, like the king crab at Trishna or the Goan fish curry at Mahesh Lunch Home. But if you are looking for something off the tourist-beaten path, better to head for a few lesser-known places that serve authentic coastal seafood.

A good spot to start is Highway Gomantak (44/2179, Gandhi Nagar, Bandra East; 91-22-2640-9692; www.highwaygomantak.com), a Goan specialist that’s been around for two decades. There are no napkins, air-conditioning or English spoken, but there is a focus on food. (As at all the other places below, pointing is a perfectly reasonable strategy: most of your fellow diners will be locals, and they’ll know the drill.) More:

Taliban Food Centre

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on October 1, 2009
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taliban-restaurant

Taliban Food Center is a small restaurant in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. More at All Things Pakistan

‘Designer’ butter chicken: Serves 2; Rs 6,000 (or USD120)

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on September 28, 2009
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From Mint:

butter_chickenMumbai: A cup of Evian natural spring water, a tablespoon of Filippo Berio olive oil and a pack of Lurpak unsalted butter are just some of the gourmet ingredients that go into making the “classiest butter chicken” currently available. Software professionals Iran Bharat Saxena and Padma Prasad are the chefs and people behind this home delivery venture, Anaarkali butter chicken, which costs Rs6,000 for a portion for two.

The designer dish is packed in a Borosil container, with a pyramid-shaped lid and a firm paper base, which is finally placed in a cardboard box and delivered to your doorstep fresh and warm. It comes with a garnish of black olives and coriander with specks of edible gold and silver. The orders for the dish have to be placed online, at www.anaarkali.in.

More:

The Economist obit: Norman Borlaug

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on September 20, 2009
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field

Wherever he went, Mr Borlaug showed the same impatience. Paperwork was spurned in favour of action; planting, advising, training thousands. In India, where he set up hundreds of one-acre plots to show suspicious farmers how much they could grow, he was so frustrated by bureaucracy that when at last his seed came, shipped from Los Angeles, he planted it at once despite the outbreak of war between India and Pakistan, sometimes by flashes of artillery fire. And when in 1984 he was drawn out of semi-retirement to take his seed and techniques to Africa, he forgot in a moment, once he saw the place, his plan to do years of research first. “Let’s just start growing,” he said.

As a boy, he hadn’t known what hunger was. He came from a small Norwegian farm in Iowa, the land of butter-sculptures and the breaded tenderloin sandwich. But on his first trip to “the big city”, Minneapolis, in 1933, grown men had begged him for a nickel for a cup of coffee and a small, dry hamburger, and a riot had started round him when a milk-cart dumped its load in the street. He saw then how close to breakdown America was, because of hunger. It was impossible “to build a peaceful world on empty stomachs”. More:

Also see in AW:  Norman Borlaug, who led Green Revolution

How a royal flu spawned a culinary gem

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on September 19, 2009
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‘Nahari’, a traditional beef stew cooked overnight, is one of the few dishes that Delhi can claim as its very own. It rises to special prominence during the month of Ramzan. Anindita Ghose in Mint:

nahari_map

nahariChiraguddin serves the stew straight from this cooking pot to a young boy who comes in with a steel bowl and asks for a serving of Rs20 to take away. Nahari is measured by the ladle and portions usually sell for anywhere between Rs20 and Rs2,000. Over the serving, he pours a spoonful of bright red rogan-oil that onions have been caramelized in. He then garnishes the dish with shredded ginger and finely chopped green chillies.

Nahari was originally consumed as a breakfast meal and traces its origin to the Urdu word nahar for morning. Today, it is mostly had in the evening. During Ramzan, however, several shops such as Haji Shiroo’s make it available in the morning as well in order to accommodate Islamic fasting norms.

Ramaswamy says that though the origin of nahari dates back to the 1650s, Delhi’s oldest surviving nahari shop is not that old. The entire fabric of the city, including its eateries, was torn apart during the partition of 1947. Overnight, along with large chunks of its Muslim population, the city’s traditional eateries also vanished. Haji Shiroo resisted the move to Pakistan. Coming from a long line of caterers, he had set up the shop in the mid-1940s ahead of the subcontinent’s partition. Chiraguddin isn’t aware of the precise date, but insists that his shop is the oldest surviving one, a belief that is corroborated by every passer-by we meet. More:

[Image: Kaushik Ramaswamy / Mint]

Curry for a crowd

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on June 21, 2009
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In an attempt to standardise food served on trains across the country, the Indian Railway has introduced a common recipe book for all private caterers. Prepared in collaboration with the Institute of Hotel Management, the recipe book has been issued to the 100-odd base kitchens across the country. The Telegraph, UK, has reproduced four recipes:

train_food

Egg curry

For 200 gm portions

eggs 210, onions 5kg, tomatoes 6kg, ginger 8.3g, garlic 8.3g, ground chilli 10g, oil 3l, salt 15g, red chilli powder 20g, turmeric powder 10g, coriander powder 30g, garam masala 7g, ground coriander 50g

1. Hard boil eggs, de shell and deep fry until golden.

2. Fry sliced onions in hot oil until golden brown.

3. Add ginger garlic and ground chilli paste until oil separates.

4. Add salt, red chilli powder, turmeric powder and fry until oil separates.

5. Add egg pieces and garam masala powder.

6. Garnish with ground coriander leaves.

7. Serve hot.

Click here for Murg Jhalfrezi (cream chicken) and Murg Saagwala (saag chicken)

[Image: Gene / CC]

Foreign food in surprising places

Published
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on June 19, 2009
in Culture, Food and Travel
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No time to travel in Paris? Get a French infusion in Pondicherry instead. For a dose of India, look no further than Singapore. From the Wall Street Journal:

PONDICHERRY

pondicherryAs Bastille Day events go, the reception was rather low-key: a speech by the French consul, a few plateaux of fromage and saucisson — that’s trays of cheese and sausage to the English speaker — but no parades or fireworks or singing of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem.

Still, the interesting point is that the event happened at all. Why should this tranquil Indian city of 220,000 people, 8,000 kilometers from Paris in a country that was once a British colony, mark France’s July 14 national day? The answer lies in its peculiar history: From 1674 until 1954, seven years after Indian independence from Britain, this little corner of the country was an off-and-on French possession. And while the tricolor flag no longer flies, there remain some connections to France, including three representatives in the Assemblée des Français de l’Etranger (Assembly of Overseas French).

The prospect was enough to draw my wife, who is French, and me to the city now officially called Puducherry (the old name is still used, and the nickname remains “Pondy”). It’s in the far southeast corner of India, an easy three-hour drive from Chennai. More: [Image: vegdevil / CC]

SINGAPORE

Whenever Sydney resident Priya Jaikumsingaporear flies to London, she always schedules a two-day stopover in Singapore to get her India fix.

For Mrs. Jaikumar, who immigrated to Australia from India 20 years ago, it’s a chance to stock up on glittering saris, ornate gold jewelry and Bollywood music, hit up a few temples and stuff herself with inexpensive Indian food. If there’s a chance, she also tries to catch a dance recital or two.

“All our relatives now live in London or Sydney, so we don’t get back to India much any more,” she says. “But we love to stop in Singapore when we travel; we’re really able to get a taste of India that we miss so much.”

If you can’t make it to India, Singapore’s large and vibrant Indian community may offer the next best thing. Ethnic Indians, who comprise 9% of the city-state’s population, date back to the establishment of the British colony in 1819, when they arrived as assistants and soldiers. Later in the 19th century came a second wave, mostly Tamils from southern India, to work as laborers. More: [Image: akuppa / CC]

The Naga chilli

Published
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on June 6, 2009
in Food
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Samar Halarnkar considered his chilli tolerance was quite high until he tasted the Naga chilli. He has now no doubt about the ferocity of the world’s hottest chilli. In Mint Lounge:

naga_chilliIn February, I had a taste of the world’s hottest chilli, the Naga chilli, also called the Bhoot Jolokia in Assam (bhoot for ghost, perhaps a reference to its other-worldly fire).

It was, with no exception, the hottest I have ever tasted.

What I had really was just a dab of chilli paste, smaller than a child’s teardrop.

It spread a pleasant fire through my mouth, set off little pinpricks on my forehead, and an afterburn that lasted for 15 minutes. More:

Udaipur Chronicles

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on May 18, 2009
in Food, India and Travel
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Manish Verma at 3quarksdaily

udaipurDuring my recent trip to Udaipur this winter, I became avidly keen on trying out the local Daal Baati Churma, a much savored and popular dish of Rajasthan,and fairly uncommon in most other parts of India. Upon interrogating the locals of the whereabouts of the most authentic version of the aforementioned dish, my husband and I landed in Natraj Restaurant, unbenowst to the world at large, but a rage amongst the locals, and a name that makes even the most nondescript autorickshaw driver glint in seeming recognition of the sublime treatment meted to a salivating palate. We alighted on the auto and it putterred and sputtered off on a bumpy ride towards our destination, meanwhile our driver giving us the low-down on the details of what to expect, amidst other casual converstaion.

“Aapko Udaipur kaisa lag raha hai?” (How are you liking Udaipur?)

“Accha hai, kaafi sundar aur aithihaasik hai” (We like it, its beautiful and historically intriguing).

“Ji, Isko hum Venice of the East kehte hain. Door door se log aate hain. Bahut pyaara shehar hai.” (We call it the Venice of the East. People come from all over here.)

I couldn’t help but smirk at the inherent allegience of the auto driver to his town, something that I recall having missed from most of the autowalahs in Delhi. More:

Padma Lakshmi’s sexy burger commercial

Published
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on May 2, 2009
in Art, Fashion and Food
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Indian scientists told to create a curry fit for an astronaut

Published
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on March 27, 2009
in Food, India, Science and Technology
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Rhys Blakely in The Times:

As part of India’s race to send a man into space by 2015, a team of military scientists has been set a particularly tricky mission: to develop a curry fit for orbit.

Last month India approved the £1.1 billion manned mission, and it wants to give its astronauts familiar foods. The scientists face several hurdles, according to A. S. Bawa, the director of the Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL), which is tackling the task.

“Curry tends to be spicy, high in fat content and uses many ingredients; all these factors present significant challenges,” he told The Times. “We cannot afford the stomach of an astronaut to be strained.”

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An Indian culinary tour

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on March 15, 2009
in Food, India and Travel
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Ashutosh Khandekar savours each tasty morsel of Keralan cooking as he explores the various cultural influences that have come together to shape one of the world’s most complex and inventive cuisines. From The Financial Times:

mapThe Taj Malabar stands on Willingdon Island, wedged serenely between the historic area of Fort Cochin, and Ernakulum, the city’s throbbing commercial district. The hotel has a nautical aspect, facing out over a broad lagoon where water hyacinths grow like weeds. The plants threaten to choke up Kerala’s fertile waterways, but with their lavender-pink blooms also look charming bobbing around the windows of the Rice Boat restaurant. Recreating the interior of a traditional backwater barge, this is a place that takes its setting seriously.

“Keralites like their fish white and soft,” explains one of my dining companions, Sriram Aylur, head chef of the Quilon restaurant in London’s St James’s. The soft-spoken Aylur is one of a select group of Indian restaurateurs who have been awarded Michelin stars.

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Butter chicken in Abu Dhabi

Published
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on March 8, 2009
in Food and Travel
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Hallie Engel in The National:

I can’t resist the butter chicken, a perennial favourite in India and the West. Consisting of rich orange gravy filled with smoky hunks of tandoor grilled meat, it’s an indulgent meal I can never finish in one sitting. While it doesn’t quite match the version I had in Mumbai, it comes close. Raza explains, “We make it the same here as we do in India. It has a classic taste, famous there and all over the world.”

To sidestep the usual bread-and-curry routine, Indian-Chinese is worth a try. When I first moved to Abu Dhabi, I was confused by the sight of wontons and noodles on the menu at Indian restaurants. I decided they must just be offered to placate curry-phobes.

Gilgamesh Kabir corrects me: it was cooks in India’s lone Chinatown, located in Delhi, who created a new type of fusion cuisine: “Chinese food done to Indian tastes: extremely spicy, with ginger, turmeric and onions, basically, Indian food with soy sauce.” Imported to Abu Dhabi, many dishes are native staples in their own right. Ghobi Manchurian, cauliflower fried in a hot, garlicky sauce is to India as chop suey is to the US, born of immigrants to please to locals.

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Asian food for thought

Published
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on March 2, 2009
in Food
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Namit Arora of Shunya’s Notes at 3quarksdaily:

thaliGrowing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option ten times out of ten.

The only times I ate meat was when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton (goat meat) dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration-I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.

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