Are you being served?

Sometimes a food memoir doesn’t just whet the appetite; it provides food for thought as well

Last night, I devoured Pamela Timms’ food memoir of Five Seasons in Delhi, evocatively if enigmatically titled Korma Kheer & Kismet, in one hungry gulp. Yes, it is a cracking good read, and Pamela’s adventures on the food trails in the grubby bylanes of Purani Dilli will have your gastronomic juices flowing (they certainly made me long for chole bhature at the unearthly hour of 3 am!) in no time at all. But that’s not the only reason I galloped through the book, like a hungry mare racing for the next expanse of green that she could get stuck into. It was also because, despite the many years I spent in the capital, the world that Pamela writes about seemed like a foreign land to me.

Like most New Delhi denizens I have rarely ventured into the chaos of Chandni Chowk. I certainly don’t know where the best Daulat ki Chaat is found, leave alone made (in highly unsanitary conditions; there’s a surprise for you!). I haven’t eaten the korma made by the Ashok and Ashok; in fact, I hadn’t even heard of the shop until I read the book. As a fully-certified jalebi lover, I am ashamed to confess that I haven’t tasted the ones served up at the somewhat literally-named Old and Famous Jalebi Wala. And while I have done the regulation rounds of Paranthe Wali Gali and eaten chaat on a couple of occasions from the roadside stalls in Old Delhi, I would be hard put to tell one food vendor from another.

I suspect that this is true of most New Delhi residents, if you discount those hardcore ‘foodies’ who go on things like ‘food walks’ in their neighbourhoods and beyond. But for the rest of us, Old Delhi is another country. We may pitch up there for some wedding shopping. We may make the occasional trip to show visitors a slice of ‘authentic’ Delhi. And we may drop in to Karims for some korma and biryani during Eid. But that’s about it.

Which is why it seems a little shaming that the person to show us the many delightful faces and places of Old Delhi should be an ‘outsider’ like Pamela Timms, a Scottish journalist, who accompanied her husband, Dean Nelson, as a ‘trailing spouse’ on his assignment as a foreign correspondent in India, and ended up making Purani Dilli her own (and like a canny Scot, got a book out of it, for good measure).

But I guess this is the way of the world, isn’t it? We traverse the globe looking for beauty, adventure, and yes, amazing food, all the while ignoring the treasures that are staring us in the face right where we live.

We save up for years to make a special trip to Florence to gaze at Sandro Boticelli’s masterpiece of Renaissance art, The Birth of Venus, in the Uffizi gallery, but we don’t take a bus ride to the National Museum in Delhi to see the magnificence of Mughal miniature paintings. We spend hundreds of Euros eating at Michelin-star restaurants in France, but we turn our noses up at the delights of regional cuisine available in our own country. We spend a fortune skiing on the slopes of Aspen and Gstaad but we ignore the beauty of Gulmarg, just a few hours away by plane. We marvel at the Grand Canyon in the States, gawp in astonishment at the Niagara Falls, but have probably never heard of the Valley of Flowers in the Himalayas or the Gersoppa or Jog Falls in Karnataka. We romp through the ruins of Pompeii, astounded by the picture of ancient Roman life it represents, but are unaware of the sites of the much older Harappan Civilisation in Gujarat, just a short train ride away.

It is a peculiar sort of tunnel vision, isn’t it, that allows us to obsess about faraway delights while being blind to the beauty all around us?

Not that I am one to talk. I have managed the singular feat of living in Delhi for decades on end without ever having seen the Humayun’s Tomb, the Bahai Temple, or even Dilli Haat. I have spent years in Mumbai without visiting the Elephanta Caves, and the only reason I have seen the Gateway of India is because it is handily situated right in front of the Taj Mahal Hotel. And in Calcutta, where I grew up, the only reason I visited the Indian Museum, was because of obligatory school trips.

And yet, even as I ignored the marvels situated in my neck of woods, I have visited an active volcano in New Zealand, gazed in wonder at the geysers of Iceland, gone truffle hunting in the Piedmont Valley in Italy, huffed and puffed my way up to Machu Picchu in Peru, gone on a safari in Africa, wine-tasted my way through Burgundy, and much, much more.

No, I don’t mean to boast, but just to point out that I know much more about the world at large, than I know about my own city, leave alone my own country. And it took Pamela Timm’s paean to Old Delhi to bring that home to me. She didn’t just give me a sniff of the delicious food on offer just a few Metro stops away; she also provided me with much food for thought. Korma Kheer & Kismet served up with a side of Contemplation; dig in.

That Madeleine moment

We all have food memories that take us effortlessly back to the past

I don’t know about you, but I rather relish the prospect of room service breakfast at a posh hotel. There is something so glamorous about being served on a starched, white table-cloth with a red rose standing stiffly to attention on the side, while a gloved waiter pours you a nice cup of coffee. And what could be more decadent than having someone squeeze a glass of fresh orange juice and cook a nice French toast for you (note to self: must get out more!) first thing in the morning?

Though I usually go for the more sinful options when it comes to hotel breakfasts – bring on the pancakes, the waffles and the parathas – last Sunday I decided to go for the (relatively) healthy option and ordered akuri. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, this is basically Indian-style scrambled eggs seasoned with lots of onion, ginger, tomato, and green chillies, and liberally garnished with coriander. It is usually served with toast but on this occasion the chef sent it with a Bombay-style pau (the kind that makes up one half of pao bhaji).

I stuffed a generous dollop of the eggs between two halves of the pao and popped a generous mouthful in. As the buttery eggs coated my tongue and the ginger and chilli hit the back of my throat, I was instantly transported back in time. With just one bite, I was taken back to my days as a callow, young sub-editor on her first job, who kept herself fortified for the long nights of page-making with a double-roti and omelette sandwich in the ABP canteen in Calcutta.  

And even though the akuri was perfect – just on the right side of runny, creamy and unctuous, at that moment I would have killed for the sandwich of my misbegotten youth, oily junk food though it might have been.

Now, I don’t want to get all Proust – remember his Madeleine? He certainly did – on you on a Sunday morning, but it is strange isn’t it, how some kinds of food suddenly evoke a memory so strong that you find yourself going back in time? Which bring on such a craving that you can’t think of anything other than their taste, their smell, and how you can best replicate them?

Like most people, my food memories are rooted in my childhood. I still remember the taste of those tiny, pink berries that I would tear off the tree in the back garden, having slipped away to investigate the vegetation as my mother undertook her afternoon siesta. If I close my eyes and think back, I can still taste the shingara (that’s samosa to all you non-Calcuttans) and jalebi that used to be my holiday breakfast as a child. The coconut-jaggery prasad that used to be served on Janmashtami has assumed near mythic status in my mind. And nothing tasted quite as good as the churmur chaat that we used to eat during the break in school, with the chaatwallah slipping it under the school-gate like the contraband it was (having been outlawed by the nuns, like everything else that made life worth living).

As you can tell, most of my food nostalgia is Calcutta-related: the puchchkas in front of New Market; the jhaal-muri outside Loreto College; the dosas of Jyoti Vihar; the junk Chinese served up in Chung-Wah, the official canteen of all ABP employees back in the day; the biryani of Shiraz; the rolls of Nizam.  

As they say, you can take the girl out of Calcutta; but you can’t take the taste of Calcutta out of the girl. (And please don’t send me irate letters about how it is now Kolkata; it will always be Cal to me.)

But even if you discount my food memories of Calcutta, there is still a vast swathe of things that I feel nostalgic about.  The home-made idlis that a former colleague would bring to work (paired with the most divine gunpowder and green chutney); the chilli con carne I once had in a Washington restaurant;  the pad Thai served up at a roadside stall in Bangkok.

There is certain pattern to food nostalgia. Britons living abroad often long for a taste of Marmite as a reminder of home. Americans express a craving for steak or the barbeque sauce of their childhood. Italians long for sun-dried tomatoes and a good olive oil. And the French turn up their noses at any cheese that doesn’t stink like the ones they grew up on.

Ask any random sampling of Indians living abroad what they are most nostalgic about and the phrase ‘dal-chawal’ will drip off most tongues. And I can totally relate because when I come back to India after a vacation abroad, the first thing I want to eat is dal-chawl with a nice spicy pickle and lots of roasted papad and lashings of raw onion.

Within India, food nostalgia can be rather region-centric. Rare is the Punjabi who isn’t nostalgic about the kadhi-chawal or rajma-chawal or aloo-vadi that his mother or grandmother made. Bengalis tend to wax eloquent about their fish curries or shukto. Gujaratis bang on about the fluffy dhoklas and the perfect theplas that their Maharajs turned out in their ancestral homes.

As for me, I still fantasize about the double-roti omelette, the shingara-jalebi, and the puchchkas of my youth. And I often wonder if they would taste just as great in real life as they do in my dreams. Or whether remembrance has given them a flavour that they never possessed in reality.