Can ONE MEAL change EVERYTHING you know about food?
IF you forage for every ingredient in pristine Thai jungle… and cook with a Karen hill tribe… YES IT CAN!
If you travel to Chiang Mai in Thailand’s ‘Golden Triangle’, the influence of neighbouring Myanmar and Laos is so strong you can taste it.
Literally.
Eat street food anywhere in Chiang Mai, and you’ll savour the feisty ‘lanna’ cooking that’s unique to the Golden Triangle. Translated as ‘land of a million rice fields’, the ancient Lanna kingdom once spanned the jungles that connect today’s Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. Hundreds of years later, the lanna influence lives on – marrying the distinctive flavours of Burmese, Lao and Thai cooking, and fusing them into something unique.
For choice and inventiveness – and for sheer, foodie ecstasy – there isn’t a city on Earth to touch Chiang Mai
For me, those bold lanna flavours also make Chiang Mai the most delicious city I’ve ever visited.
Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to eat in ‘bucket list’ foodie destinations… including Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, New Orleans, Hyderabad and Kolkata. My god, these cities each do food so well! But for choice and inventiveness – and for sheer, foodie ecstasy – there isn’t a city on Earth to touch Chiang Mai.
The ‘old town’ may be compact (you can walk across it in 15 minutes), but there are edible temptations waiting on every corner. In fact, the logic of street food in Chiang Mai seems to be that wherever there’s a flat space big enough to fit a cart – someone will be cooking there. Food seems to spring up in Chiang Mai as irrepressibly as daisies in a British summer lawn.
With this much choice, where do you begin?
If I were your guide, I’d start by inviting you to head uptown to the foodie paradise of North Gate (Chang Phuak). En route, we’d pick up some sai ua – the deliciously plump, almost circular sausages that bring three unlikely bed-fellows together (who’d have thought that pork, offal and lemongrass would make such a happy ‘menage a trois’?). Derived from the Thai words sai (intestine) and ua (to stuff), this delicacy is unique to Chiang Mai – and fuses Thai, Burmese and Lao cuisine. Essentially, it’s lanna cooking on a stick… genre-defying, bold and in-your-face.
Sai ua… who’d have thought that pork, offal and lemongrass would make such a happy ‘menage a trois’?
Arriving at the food stalls just beyond Chang Phuak Gate, the choice gets giddying. We try a portion of laab – the smokey, cocksure dish that blitzes pork (and sometimes even fish) with a salad steeped in herbs and basil. It shouldn’t work – but it does! Alongside, we try some nam prik ong, a fiery appetiser that mixes dried chillies, pork and tomato into another iconoclastic lanna classic.
Sassy, confident – and supremely streetwise – lanna cuisine is somehow both raw and polished, down-home and complex, edgy and comforting. It’s an edible oxymoron. And a bit overwhelming.
If lanna food were music, it would be as intense as hearing the Rolling Stones… play Sympathy for the Devil… to you and your partner… in your bedroom.
And that’s before we meet the Queen of Chang Phuak Gate, Chiang Mai’s very own Cowgirl! Serving literally hundreds of portions every night of her signature khao ka mu (braised pork knuckle with rice and pickled vegetables), Cowgirl seems not to have aged a day in the five years since I first visited Chiang Mai. Costing just 80 baht, her food will be the most delicious £2 you have spent in your life.
For dessert, we trek 15 minutes south to Chiang Mai gate, and a portion of kanom krok. You can get this lanna/ Lao dish all over the city, but for me the lady who serves it at south gate doesn’t just do it better than anyone – she exemplifies the Thai philosophy of life.
Let me explain.
Using the classic ‘two kettles’ method, Kanom Krok Lady first makes the crispy, waffle base in tiny, conker-sized moulds in a griddle pan. She then fills them with a molten coconut filling… that’s somewhere between a souffle and maple-syrup-drenched pancake. It’s insanely delicious.
And here’s the Thai genius… the giggle-inducing sweetness of the coconut if offset by a dash of salt, and by the savoury topping of your choice (sweetcorn, green onions or taro). For me, this is living proof of the Thai philosophy of sanuk – finding pleasure in everything you do.
Kanum krok… living proof of the Thai philosophy of sanuk – finding pleasure in everything you do.
Whatever the Thais create… a dish, a drink, a temple, a spa… they will find a way to dial up the pleasure it gives you. It’s the essence of sanuk.
And for the dessert we’re about to eat… if that means bending the rules between sweet and savoury to make the dish truly unforgettable… they will do it.
For me, kanom krok is sanuk on a plate.
Enlightenment is yours… for 20 baht… or 50p.
For a final word on lanna cuisine, no foodie journey to Chiang Mai would be complete without a meal at Khao Soy Mae Sai. Where to start?
Maybe with the delicious fact that this street-food restaurant serving main dishes at 50 baht, (£1.25) is Michelin-listed? Or with the fact their chicken noodle khao soy takes a lanna classic – and turns it into taste journey that thrills you with every mouthful. Is it spicy… or sweet? Is it soft… or crunchy? Like every lanna masterpiece, it’s a bunch of foodie contradictions that embrace all of the above. Weeks after eating it, I genuinely still miss their khao soy.
Back to your roots
But here’s the rub… for all its sassy, streetwise genius, the lanna food you’re eating in Chiang Mai has wandered from where it was born… strayed from its roots.
Look up from almost any point in Chiang Mai, and you can see the jungle canopy that stretches all the way to Myanmar and Laos.
My mission was to forage every ingredient of a meal in the jungle, and to cook it from scratch with a hill tribe.
That’s the womb where lanna was conceived.
The raw flavours that thrill your tastebuds at the street stalls are descended from the wild herbs and fruits of the jungle… cooked by the people who live there.
On my first trip to Chiang Mai, I didn’t make the pilgrimage to the jungle.
In 2022, I had to go.
I had to get out of the city, and trek the hills.
My mission was to forage every ingredient of a meal in the jungle, and to cook it from scratch with a hill tribe.
I’d be tasting 100 per cent pure, wild lanna – cooking alongside people with lanna in their veins.
I was hungry to start.
Kicking off with a three-day trek into the jungle, I got my eye in. Travelling with a small, organised group, we lived the jungle experiences that everyone wants to do: showering under a 100ft waterfall; sleeping in a tribal village; riding rapids on bamboo rafts; bonding with elephants.
Thank you Chiang Mai Trekking – and thank you jungle buddies Franc and Linda (France), Pam and Zori (Holland), and Hannah (Scotland) – for a blessed time.
Sacred journey
In fact, our journey was blessed… literally.
Minutes before heading into the jungle, drinking a final coffee in a roadside bar, we heard a buzz on the street below us. Out of curiosity, I left the group and ran to follow the crowds.
Blessed journey… Luang Ta Bun Chuen on his 1,500km trek
Finding my place among the followers who’d queued for hours to glimpse Luang Ta Bun Chuen, I received a blessing as he passed – tapped on the head with a felted stick.
It felt like the whole foodie pilgrimage was blessed.
After completing my first trek, I still had three days in Chiang Mai – just enough to do one more jungle visit.
The lanna wouldn’t let me go.
Our guide from the first trek, nickname ‘K’, understood exactly what I wanted – a march over as much jungle as we could cover, passing through as many types of terrain as possible. We’d forage food wherever we went, and prepare our meal with lanna cooks in a remote tribal village.
For two days, we’d be off-grid. We wouldn’t eat a mouthful of food that didn’t come from the jungle; we wouldn’t use power other than wood we’d gather.
100% pure lanna.
Jungle countdown
Nobody has asked Chiang Mai Trekking for this before.
Modern comm’s kicked in. Jit and Peroon, owners of Chiang Mai Trekking, hit social media to put the lanna jigsaw together.
With 48 hours to go before my flight home – cutting the whole adventure to the wire – K arrived at my guesthouse at 8am on the dot.
K and I would travel north to meet his family in their Karen village, Muang Khong, then trek 18k through the jungle.
We were on.
After a two-hour drive, we reached K’s village. His family were charming. Offering me a drink of green tea grown on their land, his Mum made me a gift of the handmade bamboo cup I was drinking from.
That cup is in front of me now, full of more jungle green tea.
After an hour or so with his family, K and I set off, accompanied by his brother, Kao – carrying just water, machetes and empty rucksacks for foraged food.
Blood brothers
When did it feel like the trek was going to be something special?
A few kilometres into the jungle, I stopped to take a picture of a waterfall. K and his brother pressed on. Within minutes, I was lost.
The path forked and reforked as it climbed steeply uphill. I was following what seemed like the best route, but moving too fast and forcing my way. When I caught up with K, he pointed to my arms. I’d pushed through thorns, and there was blood everywhere.
If the jungle could do this to my SKIN… what could it do to my TASTE BUDS?
Scanning the undergrowth, Kao came back with a handful of Tiger leaves (bai sap hua) which he crushed and pushed into the cuts. The bleeding stopped instantly.
If the jungle could do this to my SKIN… what could it do to my TASTE BUDS?
During a six-hour trek, over rising and falling jungle slopes, we foraged every type of forest.
Following rivers – where we saw footprints of boar and wild dog – we picked the tiny, young leaves of ferns (pak good). On dry, rain-shadowed slopes we picked berries (gi loasa). In lush rainforest we found an aromatic root (yha luong), drank water droplets from sections of liana (tao wa) and nibbled on face-twistingly astringent wild olive (ma co). Approaching the village we found wild fig (ma dua). We had our ingredients.
Approaching the village we found wild fig (ma dua)… we had our ingredients.
As well as being tri-lingual (Thai, Karen and English), K was the perfect foraging buddy. Watching him and Kao gather our meal, what struck me most was the respect they showed to every living thing. When we found the berries, K hunted for a hooked stick to pull the branches gently down from the canopy. What we couldn’t reach, we didn’t take. Not a twig was broken. We took only what we needed.
Towards dusk, we followed an intricate network of aqueducts that trace the side of the hills like arteries – and feed the paddy fields in the rainy season. At the summit, we reached the Karen village where we’d spend the night: a group of a dozen, wooden stilted house, overlooking a river.
Lanna masterclass
As dusk fell, life relaxed. Water buffalo wallowed in the shallows, twitching flies from their face with long black lashes. Smoke curled from cooking fires. Not a glimmer of electric light.
I wanted to sit down, but after an 18km trek, my legs wouldn’t let me.
Relaxing on the slatted terrace of one of the huts, Kao brought me a plastic bottle and a tea cup. The liquid in the bottle was clear, milling around what looked like strips of branch or root.
De-hydrated after our hike, I drank a cupful.
Things changed after that.
The drink electrifies my entire mouth.
The after-taste is sake… but with a touch of Jaeger-bomb, and a thrilling hint of absinthe. I ask what the floating roots are… no one seems to know.
I mime to Kao brother that this is strong stuff. He tops up the bottle with water, and serves me another cup. Diluted, it’s weirdly… somehow… massively stronger. No longer a rice wine, but suddenly a spirit. I almost want to believe in homeopathy.
I’m suddenly, totally happy.
Compared with prudish (peel-it, blanche-it) western cuisine – lana cooking feels as liberating as skinny dipping.
I want to find out more about this strange, lanna aperitif, but the ‘poc poc’ of a stone pestle in a mortar grabs my attention. Kneeling next to the kitchen fire, the lady of the house – Maluemo – is preparing our foraged food.
It’s a lanna master-class.
Everything in the kitchen is either foraged, or pulled from the ground next to the hut.
Whole bulbs of garlic go into the mortar, skin on and roots. A bunch of fresh coriander, again with roots. A fistful of whole galangal, unskinned. Fresh, wet turmeric… dripping orange sweat. Four of the tiniest, most dayglo-green chillies I have ever seen… cooked whole with their seeds. Lemongrass.
Compared with prudish (peel-it, blanche-it) western cuisine – lana cooking feels as liberating as skinny dipping.
Everything gets mashed together.
A pot on the fire is on a rolling boil. When Maluemo wants to lower the heat, she simply draws the burning stick a couple of inches backwards. As instant as an induction hob.
Now there are three pans, on different woodfires.
The river fern (pak good) is stir-frying in a wok. I have no idea what’s in there with it.
The aromas in the kitchen hug you – like hot air licks your lips in a sauna.
The berries (gi loa sa) are boiling in a separate pan.
The mash from the mortar joins a whole banana flower in a third pot, with a bunch of ingredients I haven’t been able to follow.
The aromas in the kitchen hug you – like hot air licks your lips in a sauna.
Eating Eden
We’re ready to eat.
The dish of stir-fried fern smells too good to wait, so I eat some in the kitchen. It tastes like a member of the pak choi family, but literally jumps off the plate with jungle vigour.
We eat the cooked berries by themselves. The taste is as complex, and as sweet… as what?
As a kiss?
Next, we eat the berries together with a slice of raw jungle fig. It’s startling. There is no vocabulary to describe the sensation. The wild fig is as hard and astringent as green peach. Eaten with the soft, kissable berries, it’s an oxymoron of bitter medicine and indulgence.
The outer edge of lanna.
We come to the main course.
Here, we exit the known foodie universe.
For every other mouthful I’ve ever previously consumed, there’s a construct.
It goes like this… “Hello food, I’m a sentient being. You are inert. I eat you. I decide what you taste like.”
It’s a monologue. I’m in control.
The food is a lifeform – camouflaged as food – and it’s exploring my body and mind. It’s eating ME.
But even as I put the first spoonful into my mouth, I realise this is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
This thing is ELECTRIC, VIBRANT, ALIVE.
It’s TALKING TO ME!
“HELLO SENTIENT BEING… WELCOME TO MY WORLD. HOW ARE WE BOTH FINDING THIS?”
The food is interrogating ME.
It’s a lifeform – camouflaged as food – and it’s exploring my body and mind.
It’s tasting ME.
I feel thrilled – and a bit awestruck.
This journey could go anywhere.
On different travels, I’ve eaten peyote with villagers in Mexico, and drunk hallucinogens with Amazon tribespeople in Brazil.
This is different.
This inverts my whole notion of eater and eaten.
For the first time in my life, I AM FOOD.
And the flavour? I can’t describe it.
My notes from the evening read: Is this what love tastes like? Or life?
With each mouthful, questions pour out of me.
It’s the most delicious, reality-altering meal I’ve ever eaten.
By torchlight, I play a long game of marbles with the village’s seven or eight year-old champion.
The marbles look like the hyper-energised, ricocheting synapses in my brain.
Journey home
I didn’t sleep much, but it didn’t seem to matter.
Breakfast, served at the same table as dinner, was extraordinary: chicken with baby aubergines, pork stir fry with crispy skin, fish soup, mango, banana and watermelon.
We did a gentler walk to the final village, Tung Nua.
En route, we eat what’s probably the best picnic of my life: pork laab stuffed into sausage skins, barbecued river fish, nam prik ong, sticky rice.
Before we ate, we each washed our hands meticulously with water we were carrying, and served the food on banana leaves.
Anything we couldn’t eat, we left on the forest floor. Even as we packed up to go, red ants were dissecting the meal, and carrying it away. By morning, the place would be spotless.
Walking through the forest, what did I feel?
A weird and deep sense of union with my surroundings. Not so much looking at the jungle as ‘it’… but a new feeling of connectedness.
‘Us’.
Driving back to Chiang Mai, K stopped to buy us chilled matcha green tea.
It was delicious.
But it wasn’t ALIVE.
It didn’t storm my senses – it didn’t grab me by the mouth… and ask me if I thought I could finish this journey.
I was back in the world of modern, passive food.
Eating would never be the same again.
Thanks to K, Kao, Maluemo, Jit and Peroon, I got to taste the outer edge of lanna.
More than that, I had the humbling experience of understanding that food – in its truly wild state – is a living thing… an equal partner.
In the years to come, I hope there’ll be more special meals.
Nothing will ever touch my foraged lanna jungle feast.
In less than a decade, Will Bowlby – head chef and co-founder of Kricket – has opened three restaurants in London, and taken Indian cooking in the UK in an exciting new direction.
Good Korma has been lucky enough to eat Kricket’s food since they first opened in 2015… in a sea-container. Two of the most delicious dishes I’ve eaten this year were bowled at me by Kricket (spoiler alert… neither was tandoori goat’s nipple). Over a pint in their Brixton flagship restaurant, Mr Bowlby discusses a stunning innings…
GK: Aged 24, you launched a brand-new restaurant in Mumbai, ‘Cheval’. You were the head chef, working in a foreign city, with 20 kitchen staff. There must have been some challenging moments. How did you navigate them?
WB: The restaurant wasn’t actually built when I got there. When they rushed me out to Mumbai, they said it was finished… and it was just rubble floors. But I got my team ready in their chef’s whites. I think the most challenging aspect wasn’t the language barrier, it was probably the customers I was serving. I went to India with the idea of creating the food I knew at the time, which was seasonal French, British, small menu stuff. That all changed very fast. The tickets coming into the kitchen were completely off-menu, the whole time. The moment I got a ticket saying ‘mushroom risotto, but with no mushroom and lots of pink sauce’… I thought ‘what is this?’
GK: After your time in Mumbai, you travelled India for months. I’ve read that the cuisine in Lucknow touched you.
WB: Food in Lucknow has an amazing heritage. On my first night, I had an incredible shami kebab, and a very memorable bhang lassi!
In Brixton, you can feed them anything. We had duck hearts on the menu for ages and they loved it.
GK: Right now, I’m doing recipes from The Lucknow Cookbook. I’m entranced by the recipe for ‘nimish’ that’s made exclusively in Lucknow… where they put the milk in a dish, outside… overnight, in winter.
WB: And it collects the dew…
GK: Exactly!
WB: I put it on the menu here, minus dew.
GK: OMG!
WB: We did it with deep-fried vermicelli pastry and raspberries.
GK: Wish I’d had it! Were there any other cities in India that inspired you?
WB: Old Delhi is pretty amazing. It’s a picture of what you’d imagine India to be, with the narrow lanes and street food. Hyderabad gave me Haleem… one of my favourite dishes. Chennai… I love the spicing.
GK: Have any cookbooks inspired your journey?
WB: Eating India was an inspiration. Chitrita Banerji talks about the history of Indian food, and how far ahead they were in terms of experimentation, particularly in the royal kitchens. They were streets ahead of Heston Blumenthal! Very elaborate, exciting food – especially when you compare it to cooking in this country at that time. That book showed me that Indian food is incredibly progressive and constantly evolving… so why not try to evolve it even further?
GK: In 2015, you opened Kricket… in Brixton POP… in a sea-container. I was lucky enough to eat there, and tweet your menu. I went back to that tweet… and the philosophy of Kricket is all there on one piece of A5 paper… a marriage of seasonal British ingredients, with playful Indian flavours. Where did you get the eureka moment for Kricket?
WB: Living in India, I started to think about the concept… without knowing how to cook Indian food. I saw the incredible variety of what was brought into my kitchen in Mumbai. And they managed to make everything taste very good, no matter what the quality of the raw ingredients. I thought we could we explore the sheer variety and creativity of Indian food… and enhance it with quality ingredients. And that led naturally to the seasons.
GK: I was living in Brixton at the time. Being able to get world class curry in POP blew my mind. What was the vibe like when you launched?
WB: We were simply learning as we went. Me and my business partner – he was on the floor and I was in the kitchen. I’d had several years’ experience in kitchens, but never on my own. So the responsibility was fully on us to do the job. We paid ourselves £1000 a month and spent every minute in the restaurant. Thankfully, it was well-received.
Vivek Singh didn’t have to help me the way he did. If someone says: ‘I want to learn lots from you, and then move on’… not everyone would be as welcoming and as generous him
GK: When did it feel like it might work?
WB: I think we were reviewed by every major publication. More importantly, the people who came through the door came back time and again. People seemed to like the food. And we thought, okay, maybe there’s some legs here.
GK: Before you launched in POP, you worked with Vivek Singh in London. You’ve said he gave you the confidence to cook Indian food. How?
WB: By welcoming me into his kitchen. I was always very honest with him… I said I was looking to launch my own restaurant, and wanted to learn how to use spices. Some chefs might go ‘you’re not worth my time’ but he was very generous. Vivek gave me a job, he let me learn. He’s a very good man.
GK: I’ve had the privilege of meeting Vivek Singh. He’s very generous with his time and ideas.
WB: Vivek didn’t have to help me the way he did. If someone says: ‘I want to learn lots from you, and then move on’… not everyone would be as welcoming and as generous him. I’ll always be very grateful to Vivek.
GK: Kricket seems to have a big commitment to doing the right thing: zero waste in the kitchen; low food miles; happy staff in the restaurant; sustainably-sourced ingredients. Where does that come from?
WB: I think it should all be part of every business plan. I also think Kricket should be a lot better at it. For food provenance and zero waste… like I said, provenance is part of the reason I wanted to start this business. Looking after our people is also very important to us. You want your people to be happy because you want them to do the best job they can. With happy people, it shows in your food.
GK: So, if your team isn’t happy, the customers you can taste it?
WB: You can have a bad meal and really good service… and you might go back to the restaurant. But if you have really poor service and quite a good meal, I think you’re less likely to go back.
GK: I read on Urban Junkies that two of your favourite London restaurants are Bibendum and Ganapati. Both would be in my Top Five. But they’re very different…
WB: I loved old Bibendum… the charm of the dining room, sitting in really comfortable big chairs and eating delicious French food. It’s very indulgent, and when you do it you need to go all out. Ganapati is completely the opposite. I think what they do well is very delicious South Indian food, which isn’t easy to find in London. Very good laccha parathas and malabar parathas.
Haleem is maybe something people need to get their heads around. A savoury lamb porridge isn’t the most appealing of things… but it’s so good
GK: Cheffing can be tough. Long, antisocial hours, constant pressure. What keeps you going?
WB: Two things: the validation of the people who come into the restaurants and say they love the food; and the staff we work with. They’re the ones who drive the business every day. We employ 120 people now, so there’s always going to be a problem somewhere – but the staff make me proud.
GK: What’s the art of leading a restaurant team?
WB: You lead by example. You need to have done the jobs you’re telling other people to do. We don’t have any room in our company for ‘that’s not my job, that’s not my position’. Everyone mucks in.
GK: Are you still London’s only non-Asian owned Indian restaurant?
WB: There might be some street food vendors out there, but in terms of restaurants – perhaps.
GK: I’ve read online that you encourage your people to work for you for a bit, learn and move on. Some London restaurants do it differently, they tie people into contracts?
WB: It’s the natural progression of a chef… and it’s what I did. You learn everything you can, then you look for the next challenge. Even when it’s really hard to lose someone, I’ll always acknowledge it if they want to leave. In terms of what other restaurants do, it’s hearsay, but I think there are environments where they’re not so nurturing… and want to tie you in more.
GK: When Thomasina Myers opened Wahaca… she had some quite challenging stuff on her early menus. There was a beautiful, authentic chilli and chocolate ‘mole’ and it disappeared fast. Have you ever cooked something that the British palate wasn’t ready for?
WB: Haleem is maybe something people need to get their heads around. A savoury lamb porridge isn’t the most appealing of things… but it’s so good. I think people are generally very accepting of what we put on the menu, but it varies by location. In West London, people are a bit more conservative. But in Brixton, you can feed them anything. We had duck hearts on the menu for ages and they loved it.
GK: Did anything you ate in India challenge you… just from the novelty of the ingredients?
WB: I ate grilled, tandoori goat’s nipple. Odd, but good.
GK: You’ve got three restaurants in London… what happens next for Kricket?
WB: We’re about to finish a really challenging year. I think we all started this year with excitement… Covid was in the past, etcetera. Then other challenges came along. I’m proud of the way we navigated 2022, because that was way more challenging than Covid.
GK: How?
WB: The rising cost of everything. The war in Ukraine had a big, big impact on ingredients. So everything costs more and people have less disposable income. That’s been very challenging for the industry in general, and a lot tougher than navigating Covid, believe it or not.
What happens next for Kricket? I’m still keen to grow the company, but in a sustainable way. We aren’t a business that will do hundreds of restaurants across the world. But London is at the forefront of food in Europe, and if we can make it work here, I think we can make it work in Europe… or beyond. Right now, the most important thing is that I make sure the menu keeps evolving… and that it stays true to what we set out to do.
GK: Let’s talk about the menu. I was lucky enough to eat your Game Tasting Menu… in your White City restaurant. The chou farci (stuffed cabbage) was intriguing. You had trompette de mort mushrooms in it, you had summer truffles. What’s the life cycle of that dish?
WB: It’s a fairly good example of what I was taught in the beginning at the Cafe Anglais… and where I am now. I was classically trained… so I know how to make a proper sauce, which I draped over the chou farci. I asked myself what I could stuff a cabbage with… I deliberated on that a lot. The answer was a combination of in-season ingredients like the trompette and truffles. I was going to do it with offal and do a raw kebab, but then I thought a shami kebab fits the bill nicely.
GK: It’s probably the most delicious things I’ve eaten this year!
WB: Thank you. Getting that right that took time. The menu I drove up to Norfolk to shoot the game was very different to the one I came back with.
GAME ON… bowled over by the Kricket tasting menu
GK: Because of the game you’d shot?
WB: Yes, based on what we’d got, but on other things as well. You tend to know in your head if the menu will work.
GK: So, you’re not putting the ingredients together in the kitchen, you’re putting them together in your head?
WB: That’s how I like to work. Everything comes from the ingredients. I like to work from an ingredient… see what’s good right now, and how we can marry them together. It’s all about making the ingredients tell the story we want to tell, and making them relevant to Indian food.
GK: And if people want to cook your chou farci at home?
WB: The shami mix was made with deer shoulder… braised in whole spices and vinegar. Then fold through with cooked channa dal, ground cumin, garam masala and coriander powder. Add diced red onion and fresh chilli… coat with a reduced spiced venison sauce, and top with truffle. Form into balls and place in a pre-cooked cabbage leaf. Roll nice and tight using clingfilm, and steam to order.
GK: From your Kricket recipe book, I’ve cooked the Grilled Sea Bream with Coconut & Coriander Chutney. It’s one of the best dishes I’ve ever cooked! If people do one recipe from your book, which would you point them to?
ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS… Blogger’s attempt at a Kricket classic
WB: I always encourage people to try the Smoked Haddock Kichri. It’s a very comforting dish, and it covers our ethos pretty well.
GK: In 2015, you spotted a gap in the Indian restaurant scene between fine-dining and curry house. If someone’s starting out now, is there another gap to explore?
WB: Of course. Recessions tend to create new ideas, and I’m sure there’ll be interesting people opening up interesting new things. But what that is, I don’t know.
If a visitor from another planet asked me to tell the story of food on Earth, I’d send them to meet Asma Khan.
Asma Khan and team, at the closing Biryani Supper Club – Garrick Street
The story of mankind’s relationship with food is deep, complex and contradictory:
How does food bring us together as a species? When does it drive us apart?
How does food show mankind at our best? And at our worst?
Asma tells the story of food on Earth better than anyone.
On a summer’s evening this year, she held an audience spellbound as she did just that.
If I could have got a spare ticket, I’d have invited the space traveller to join me on July 4th for Asma’s Biryani Supper Club – marking the very last evening in her Garrick Street restaurant.
Standing in a packed room – speaking between courses, without notes – Asma shared her insights into what food is, what it means – and its unique power to drive change.
Over the busy sounds of service, and dozens of people whispering their appreciation of the different courses, these are Asma’s words – recorded with her permission on a mobile phone.
It was a unforgettable privilege to hear her speak, and eat her food.
The space traveller would have gone home happy.
[Momos are served]
“Hello everyone, and welcome to Darjeeling Express.”
“I’m not going to get emotional about it, but this is the final day for us in Garrick Street. It’s a Monday evening, and it’s amazing that so many of you found time to come into Covent Garden for our final supper club. It’s actually deeply moving. It was a crazy idea to do one last meal, because tonight we have to lock up and move all the chairs and everything once you leave.”
“But the food is here, the team is here, and our hearts are full. We’re very grateful for that.”
“Tonight, you’re my captive audience! You want your meal, you’ve paid for it, so you’re going to stay. But I’m not letting you go until you hear me out, because it’s very important.”
“I’m not worried if you like what I’m about to say or if you don’t. Even if you say to yourself… ‘I’m never coming back to this restaurant’… you’ll remember my words and my accented voice.”
“And the next time you sit next to someone who looks or sounds like me on the underground or on a plane, maybe you’ll think differently about them.”
“For me, food and politics are two sides of the same coin.”
“For those of you who are looking a bit surprised right now, you obviously haven’t read much about me!”
“You cannot listen to my music, you cannot wear my clothes, you cannot have any part of my culture… unless you honour and respect me.”
“Let’s take the starter in front of you… the momo. It’s all about politics.”
“How?”
“As lots of you know, Calcutta is home to many communities, including lots of different refugee communities. When the Tibetan and Nepali refugees first came to India, we treated them appallingly. But we loved their momos!”
“It’s the same the world over. In America, they build walls to keep people out of their country… but they eat their tacos!”
“The easiest thing to take off an immigrant is their food.”
“And please don’t think it’s any different in this country.
“Speaking as a Muslim in the UK, I tell you this…”
“You cannot eat my food… unless you’re willing to sit down and break bread with me.
“You cannot listen to my music, you cannot wear my clothes, you cannot have any part of my culture… unless you honour and respect me.
“You dishonour me by separating me from my culture.”
“It takes a big heart to respect and understand an immigrant, to overcome your own prejudice. And unfortunately, we’re all fed this racist garbage by the right-wing media, and even by our politicians. We’re told ‘these people look different, let’s not like them’. The reality is that they’re very brave. They’ve come to this country to escape war and famine, they’ve crossed deserts and oceans to get here. And that’s why we should hate them?”
“So the momo is an example of a dish that’s been stolen by everybody. Calcutta has the only Chinatown in India, where they still segregate the Chinese community behind a big wall. They put the people behind the wall… it’s still there… but the momos are allowed out.”
“And if you go to Calcutta today you’ll find momos everywhere, being made and sold by Indians. We’ve appropriated their food. The people who gave us the momos are still behind the walls.”
“The momos on your table are from Calcutta. When the Tibetans arrived in the mountains of Darjeeling, they made their momos with pork, buffalo meat, or chicken. Prawn momos are what you get in Calcutta because the city is close to the sea and we love seafood. So this is the local twist, and I’m serving you what I grew up eating.”
“In my country, it’s a fact that we mistreat other people’s food, just like other people mistreat ours.”
“When the Puchka Wallah sells to the Rickshaw Wallah, they’ll always add a cup of water for free. This is the poor looking after the poor. It’s what street food is all about for Indians.”
“I need to tell the story of how this works. That’s why I’m serving you a momo.”
“The girls in my kitchen, half of them are Nepali. They’re from both sides of the border, they’re from Nepal and they’re from India. In Calcutta, these girls made momos under very different circumstances. They were young, and they were forced by their families to sell steaming-hot momos to men on buses and trains. Many of them got abused. Momos are a dish of their oppression.”
“I promised these girls that one day I would be something. I promised them I’d open a restaurant, and that I would tell their stories. I told them: ‘Your food will be honoured by those who eat it. It’s not the food that is unclean and it’s not you who are unclean… it’s the people who touched you who are unclean’.”
“I told them that we’d rise together from the ashes. And it’s ironic because this is our last day here in Garrick Street.”
“So, these momos are very classic. The sauce is a smoked sesame and red chilli sauce. It goes off very quickly and becomes super spicy. So the sellers make it on the roadsides literally just before they serve it. There’s a fragrance to the way it’s made. It’s not from a bottle. We’re doing it here the way they do it.”
Menu from Asma Supper Club, 4th July 2022
[Puchkas are served]
“We’re now serving you puchkas, with a filling of black chickpeas and potatoes. The tamarind water, if you smell it, has a kind of pungency… that’s the Himalayan rock salt, it’s sulphuric.
“We’re back in Calcutta… eating Bengali street food. Calcutta is next to the Delta, and when we perspire in that humidity we don’t just lose water, but body salts. If you do physical work in that heat, you suffer.”
“The Rickshaw Wallah, is the person whose bare footprint you can see in the melted tar on the road, because the time they’re the busiest is when the sun is at its height.”
“When the Puchka Wallah sells to the Rickshaw Wallah, they’ll always add a cup of water for free. This is the poor looking after the poor. It’s what street food is all about for Indians. It’s very important to understand the magic around it, the drama.”
“The police would harass the Puchka Wallahs and take money from them. So we locked the police up! And I was the one who did it. On the streets of Calcutta, I’m a hero.”
“If you go downstairs, you’ll see photos of Puchka Wallahs. They leave the slums in the morning with their puchkas, and they need to sell everything otherwise their family doesn’t eat that night. I learned to make puchkas from them. The Puchka Wallahs wouldn’t normally teach someone from my background, but they understand whose side I’m on.”
“I think a lot of us want to be on the right side of history – where you speak up for people and protect them. So when I was in school and college I was a big troublemaker.”
“The police would harass the Puchka Wallahs and take money from them. So we locked the police up! And I was the one who did it. On the streets of Calcutta, I’m a hero. The Puchka Wallahs have never forgotten that I stood up for them, and locked the police up in a house. We didn’t beat them, we didn’t take their money, we just pushed and pushed them into the building. And because there were so many schoolgirls in uniform, they were scared to push us back.”
“So this puchka is really a taste of the Calcutta streets.”
[Biryani is served]
“Every biryani has a story, and every biryani is very personal. It’s something you make to celebrate the gathering of people. And of course it’s the perfect dish to serve here, to end our time in this building, with all of you gathered.
“We’re celebrating with food.”
“And I’m so proud because this evening I’m with the people who inspired me.”
“After the Netflix episode came out, I got 100, 120 messages a day – from Brazilian women, Irish women, women from Colombia, all of them saying: ‘In you, I saw myself’”
“This is Rashmi and that’s Asha. You probably recognise them from Chef’s Table. Asha and Rashmi were both in the film. What I loved about Chef’s Table is that I told Netflix: ‘I want to tell the story of my girls’.
“Not only did Netflix tell the stories of my girls, they put their names and the villages up there. This is what makes it so special. It’s been a journey where I’ve never been alone.”
“I always say that the first home you have is your mother’s womb. After that, we’re all migrants. And just because some people have a different colour skin, we’re called refugees.”
“So, for me, food is all about politics. It’s a battle cry for justice, about my right to be treated equally and for my food to be respected.”
“We were only open for ten days in this restaurant before the country went into lockdown. In those ten days we designed a £95 tasting menu – and everyone told me: ‘No one’s going to pay £95 on an Indian tasting menu!’”
“But we were packed! We sold out.”
“And if you think that food made by western, white people is more elevated, more sophisticated than food cooked by people who look like me… then what does that say about you?”
“When I cook with my team, we’re celebrating something…”
“We’re celebrating the female cook.”
“Because, in every home you go to in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka you’ll find a woman cooking. But in every restaurant you go to, you’ll find a man cooking. There is no space on the commercial stage for women like us.”
“I know people thought that Chef’s Table was a media thing. It wasn’t. It was an incredible opportunity to tell the story of uncelebrated women. After the episode came out, I used to get 100, 120 messages a day – from Brazilian women, Irish women, women from Colombia, all of them saying: ‘In you, I saw myself’.”
“And I realised this is a universal story of the marginalised, those whose food is taken for granted, whose skills and passion are taken for granted… that they will cook, always… for free.”
“How can it be that we’re the only female-founded, all female Indian restaurant in the world? That there’s no one else like us?”
“Many of you are much younger than me, you will outlive me. Even in my death, there’s a message for women… whatever your colour, whoever you are. Be brave! Be very, very brave! Even when I’m dead, you’ll have my story and the story of these women… that you can be something, that you don’t need to conform.”
“And if any of you are in positions of power and strength, then open the doors for people who look different from you. We are just as skilled; just as passionate.”
“All of you have seen my success, but you never saw how many times I was defeated. You don’t see the scars I still carry, the hurdles I fell on and bled. I got up because I knew these girls were running after me. I could feel their breath on me. There’s a poem that when you walk alone, and when it’s so dark, you set fire to your ribs so you light the way and others can see where to go. That’s the story of Darjeeling Express.”
“And I’m sorry if this is more politics than you’d expected. But you should always be on the right side of history. This is how segregation ended in the USA: a woman refused to get off a seat on a bus. Every kind of injustice that happens in the world will end if people speak up. You don’t want to end your life knowing you were silent, and that you helped the oppressor.”
Asma’s dedication of my copy of ‘Ammu’
“Please speak up, be brave. I do a lot of work with the LGBTQ community, we’ve just had Pride. This is a huge in my community as well. I think that all kinds of bias are wrong and we can do something about it. We can talk about it and be brave.”
[Chai is served]
“You’ve enjoyed your dessert, and now an even sweeter thing is about to come… the chai.”
“I tell this to every supper club guest, if you think caffeine is what will keep you up, no… the biryani keeps you up! So have the caffeine!”
“Live your life, stay up all night! Believe me, this is what life should be all about. Just eat, be merry and enjoy all the flavours that life brings.”
“So this chai is quite unique because Asha starts to make it from the morning. It’s cooked for a long time. You will taste the pepper and the ginger. This is not the garbage that you get from Starbucks called ‘chai tea’. And also please, never ever call it ‘chai tea’, it’s like saying ‘tea tea’!”
“How can it be that we’re the only female-founded, all female Indian restaurant in the world? That there’s no one else like us?”
“Every sip should taste different as it cools… and as the other spices take over. And if you have the last bit when it’s cold, you’ll taste a spice that you won’t recognise. It’s a wonderful experience.”
“Please take home all the food you can carry. We have a saying in our culture that every grain of rice has your name written on it and this is your blessing because you were served it. So, please do take any uneaten food and give it to anyone, give it to the homeless.”
“It’s Asha and Monika who are the powerhouse. I’m just the storyteller.”
“Thank you!”
Asma Khan and the blogger
Huge thanks to my beautiful daughter Mia for transcribing Asma’s words.
After a couple of decades of food blogging, I write this post to answer the big questions that still consume me: why do I eat?what does food mean?
This is my truth: great food gives you happiness; sublimefood gives you meaning.
Marcel Proust – 1871-1922.
In arguably the greatest piece of food-writing ever penned, legendary French novelist Marcel Proust evokes how a simple mouthful of cake transports him – in body and mind – to a moment in the past.
For Proust, this single moment of foodie ecstasy would reset the course of his life, and launch him on the 12-year odyssey to write his classic: In Search of Lost Time.
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.”
In any language, in any era, is there a more evocative description of the transformational power of food?
Please read these lines again. Savour their genius.
And if you’re in the mood, please now pick a treat from your kitchen… taste it… and notice the feeling it creates in you. Your snack will be travelling with you throughout this blog.
Back to Proust…
His landmark paragraph (and the mouthful of tisane-infused cake that inspired it) literally re-shaped Western literature. As Graham Greene wrote: “For those who began to write at the end of the 1920s or the beginning of the 30s, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary.”
In Search of Lost Time is, arguably, the greatest novel ever written.
It’s certainly the biggest. Running to 1,267,069 words, In Search of Lost Time is the longest novel in any language. Aged 38, Proust started work on the first volume in 1909, and devoted the rest of his life to completing the novel – creating over fictional 2,000 characters across seven volumes. One sentence in the book – running to 847 words – is quoted as the longest in literature.
So much for the facts.
What marks out In Search of Lost Time is not the vital statistics, but the monumental scale of Proust’s life-changing promise to the reader. As he boldly announces in the title, Proust’s aim is nothing less than to solve one of the central problems of existence: to fix time.
In early volumes of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator confronts the core human dilemma: that the experiences we live quickly lose their beauty, relevance… and even their meaning. To fill the gap, we search for new, more aggressive stimuli – which in turn lose their meaning. As human beings, we’re trapped in this cycle of permanent loss.
Sound familiar?
Searching for an existential solution, the narrator looks for a way to break free of the iron grip of time. Volume by volume, he explores the stimuli that promise to give lasting meaning to our lives: status, fame and love. But he hits a dead-end every time. None of these experiences breaks the endless human cycle of ‘having and losing’. The narrator discovers that status, fame – even love – eventually lose their meaning in life’s rear-view mirror.
(Sorry to break it to you – Love Islanders – this is how it rolls.)
It’s not until volume seven, Time Regained, that the narrator realises it is art itself which holds the key to unlocking time.
As the narrator gradually understands – art has the power to help us see life through fresh eyes, and to reconnect us with everything we’ve lived. Art dissolves the borders of time and enables us to see that all experience is eternally alive.
At the end of Time Regained, the narrator rushes off to write the novel that captures this truth. The book he sits down to write is the one that you – the reader – have just lived: In Search of Lost Time.
By opening your eyes to the transformative power of art, Proust frees you to live in the eternal present. He gives you your past life back.
Driven by the need to share this truth with humanity, Proust devoted the last three years of his life to finishing his masterpiece. Living in a single room, and interacting only with his housekeeper, he slept by day and wrote by night. The final volumes were published posthumously.
It’s epic stuff.
But…
I’m eaten by what the book it could have been!
With a single, editorial tweak, Proust could have transformed In Search of Lost Time into my Bible… into my Users-Guide-to-Life.
If only – instead of looking to art to unpack the essence of existence – Proust had chosen food.
What the hell do I mean?
I mean that In Search of Lost Time leaves me hungry because Proust’s passion – his key to salvation –is art.
Proust is an aesthete: he sees life through the lens of art.
I’m a foodie: I perceive the world through what I eat.
And for me and other foodies, what a book Proust could have written!
Imagine it… the mind of arguably the greatest novelist who ever lived – dedicating seven volumes of luminous prose to exploring ingredient after ingredient, dish after dish – to decode their unique insight into existence.
To remind us, via the prism of food, why we are alive and what life means.
To help us understand our place in the universe.
To give us joy in being.
If Proust had written this book, I would read it cover-to-cover in French, and in translation.
But he didn’t.
And of course, if Proust had written his foodie masterpiece, I wouldn’t need to write this blog.
Brain fodder: Granizio cheese (courtesy of Paxton & Whitfield)
Say cheese
Let me explain.
A while back, I was reading a Q&A with a leading British philosopher. Asked “What is the meaning of life?,” the philosopher answered: “The question, I’m afraid, is meaningless. You might as well ask… what is the meaning of cheese? Cheese has no meaning. Cheese simply IS. Human life has no meaning. Human beings simply ARE.”
While I may agree with the philosopher on the meaninglessness of human life, I challenge every syllable of his assertion about cheese.
Cheese is a universe of meaning!
In her delicious book The Flavour Thesaurus, Nikki Segnit (the Marcel Proust of food writers) opens her chapter on Goat’s cheese with the words: “Like all cheese, the flavour of goat’s cheese is markedly influenced by what the animal has eaten. In a sensory evaluation study conducted in 2001, over two-thirds of the tasting panel correctly identified which one-day-old goat’s cheese had come from pasture-fed goats and which from animals fed on hay and concentrate. For the 20-day-old cheese, the figure rose to 100 per cent.”
Cheese is talking to you!
Tune in, and cheese will tell you the type of animal it came from (cow, sheep, goat – or as with the mouth-watering Cantabrian classic, Tres Leches, all three). Cheese will tell you what those animals ate, how the cheese was made, where it was stored, for how long. And that’s before we add the mind-bogglingly complex story of the living bacteria used to transform coagulated milk into the miracle of cheese (bacteria digest the sugars in milk, producing lactic acid which lowers the pH and hinders the growth of harmful bugs).
With a truly complex cheese like Granizio (please buy and eat it) the meaning gets so rich that you need footnotes to unpack it. Why? Because this cheese blends the raw milk of La Mancha sheep with fresh black truffle. The result is a cheese whose exterior looks like the human brain, hence the local nickname ‘el cerebro’.
Back to Niki Segnit to explain why the special additive of fungus excites the human ‘cerebro’.
“Analysis of truffle extract reveals that it contains traces of male-pig sex pheromones, which is thought to account for the sow’s happiness when dragged about the woods all day snuffling in the undergrowth [for truffles]. By all means make this [Asparagus and truffle recipe] for your date, but if they like it, you might ask yourself what this says about them.”
Eat Granizio, and you are not just eating a cheese of Proustian complexity – you are in conversation with a fungus which has learnt to mimic the chemical signature of a sexually-mature mammal.
For me, this dialogue represents meaning.
Back at the start of this blog, you might have picked a treat from your fridge?
Take a bite.
Your palate isn’t just responding to its taste, it’s translating a thrilling language of micro-compounds – which have the ability to change your mood right now, and to change your life in the longer term.
So, maybe it’s less a question of ‘Say Cheese’… than… ‘Hear what Cheese has to Say’.
History of an obsession
In terms of the full spectrum of the meaning of food, ingredients are the tip of the iceberg.
We haven’t even touched on the depths of meaning that culture, religion, history – and even the individual human hand that’s doing the cooking – can bring to food.
Why am I so obsessed with food?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that different human beings are drawn to different passions. I’ve sat next to friends at classical music events where they are transported to a different plane… and where I’m counting the minutes to the interval (and food). They hear things I am deaf to, they process the experience through a sensitivity I don’t possess.
Music, football, gardening, mountaineering, maths – the list is endless – all can become your lens on life. The moment you live for… the space where you exist in the present, and where you momentarily solve the puzzle of life.
I used the word ‘obsessed’ above. I’m aware that my passion for food can both expand my world – and shrink it:
If I’m eating with other people, I can only truly relax if the food is good. If the food is delicious, I’m catapulted into the present… the meal and the people I’m with are the only thing that exist. But if the food is bad, I am silent and semi-present – caught-up in wondering where the dish went wrong. This is clearly ridiculous¸ but it’s how I am.
If I’m moved to write about or photograph anything – it’s food and the people enjoying it. Other families have photo albums… my beautiful daughter has four volumes of ‘Essential Ingredients’: a prose record over three decades of every important meal we’ve shared as a family – with photos of the gathering, the food, the ingredients and the recipe. Food is captured in these books as a member of our family (at the possible exclusion of human beings).
When I cook, if a dish goes wrong, it feels to me like a moral failure. I am confused… for hours… sometimes even days. This is clearly an overreaction and a waste of energy, but it happens.
As my friends will tell you, I am a nightmare to cook with. I care about every gram, every millilitre. In brief, I take cooking far too seriously. To misquote Liverpool FC legend Bill Shankly on his relationship with football: “Some people believe football [food] is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
Welcome to the curryverse – the metaphysics of curry
Within the universe of food, I am irresistibly drawn to one galaxy: India.
I live for Indian food.
Why?
First, of course, for the taste. From north to south – from the honey-scented filaments of Kashmiri saffron to the smelling-salts of organic Keralan cardamom – I am up for every flavour that comes out of India.
And the rarer, the more off-piste – the better. I have hunted down, and cooked with, obscure ingredients from marathi moggu to dried Sri Lankan fish chips, from mossy dagarful to the taste explosion that is Pondicherry vadouvan. These discoveries expand my foodie universe – please let them expand yours.
Like countless generations before me, starting with Greek explorers – then followed by Arab, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British traders – I am irresistibly drawn to spice.
In his landmark volume, the India Cookbook, Pushpesh Pant writes that Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sailed back from India in 1498 with a cargo of: “1,500 tonnes of pepper, twenty-eight tonnes of ginger, eight tonnes of cinnamon and seven tonnes of cloves.” Working on an industrial scale, Vasco da Gama and co wanted to introduce the genius of spice to Old World palates. I’m just another moth, drawn to the lamp of Indian food. To misquote Bill Clinton: It’s the taste, stupid!
But beneath this outer ‘onion skin’ of taste are countless, inner layers of meaning.
How so?
In my library of Indian recipe books (currently somewhere between 130 and 150 volumes, I’m not sure), there are not just thousands of recipes – but also insights which define my sense of self.
These books are the reason I eat.
For me, no other national cuisine comes close to matching the ability of Indian food to connect you viscerally to time, place – and ultimately to meaning.
My Indian cookbooks are my metaphysical library.
Let’s peel back a layer, and look at ingredients – the what?
In the state of Rajasthan, you may be served a sublime dish called Ker sangri. Named after its two key ingredients (ker berries and sangri beans), the dish brings together two foraged foods, sun-baked in the Rajasthani desert and rehydrated for your dish – months (or up to eight years) later. Cooked together, they taste thrillingly of heat, earth and wilderness. But for a Rajasthani, Ker sangri tastes of so much more. Growing wild in the desert, the berries of the thorny Capparis decidua shrubanddesiccated fruit of the drought-resistant Prosopis cineraria tree are there when no other food can be found. Ker and sangri are the staples that enabled previous generations of Rajasthanis to survive famine. Eat Ker sangri and you are tasting the cycle of feast and famine.
Hundreds of other Indian ingredients tell their own rich stories.
And that’s before you get to the Indian passion for combining ingredients at stunning levels of complexity. Cook and eat a single, ping pong ball-sized puchka from Manneet Chuahan and Jody Eddy’s sensational Chaat, and the firework display of flavours in your mouth is created by 51 individual ingredients! Can any other cuisine match this ability to turn complexity into harmony? Or, as the Indian foodie saying goes, to create: ‘music in the body’?
Time to peel another onion skin – the where?
In my collection of Indian recipe books, some of the volumes I love the most are dedicated not just to the cooking of an Indian state, but to the cuisine of the population of one city – and often the specific religion within that city.
The Udupi Kitchen celebrates the vegetarian food of a single town (Udupi) in the southern state of Karnataka, and its relationship with the local Krishna temple. The recipe for Drakshi Gojju– raisins in sweet, sour and spicy gravy – is sensational!
In the whole of Western cooking literature, is there a serious cookery volume dedicated entirely to the recipes of a single faith, in one small community?
In India, there are dozens. Probably hundreds.
For me, this is genius. With the right book, you have recipes that connect you every point in the annual religious and natural calendars in that community, as well as to every significant point in the human journey – from birth to adulthood.
Cook from The Fragrance of Mango Blossoms, and you are welcomed into the family of Kokanastha Brahmin community in coastal Maharashtra. In her introduction, Sunita Rajwade writes: “At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, Kokanastha food is considered nothing short of perfect… Food and rituals are deeply intertwined in our everyday life. For instance, a person embarking on a journey will invariably be offered three helpings of dahi or sugar by the lady of the house to ensure a safe return. Similarly, in a simple ceremony called drishta kadhne the evil eye is warded off from a person (normally a young child) who may suddenly be drawing attention to himself either by his good health, good looks or just general good luck. The ceremony is performed ideally at sunset by the child’s mother, grandmother, or the oldest woman in the house, who tightly clenches black mustard seeds and salt in both fists and waves her arms in a circular motion over the person three times drawing out all the negative vibes. She then touches the feet of the person, cracks her knuckles and flings the contents of her fist into the crackling fire.”
Sunita’s recipe for Paalakchi dal – lentils with spinach – is a must.
And if you have the appetite, one extraordinary recipe book takes ‘localised cuisine’ to the next (and ultimate?) level. Dedicated to the cooking, culture and philosophy of the Jain community in the city of Palanpur, Dadimano varso guides the reader to a vegan cuisine that avoids harming any living organism (including root vegetables). I have blogged on this stellar book before – and my copy is one of the most precious things I own. I celebrate the fact that Dadimano varso is now available online, and I urge everyone to cook the giddyingly-delicious Jaamfal nu shaak (guava curry).
As you do so, flip to page 406, and you will find – captured in a few sentences – the essence of Jain philosophy:
Jainism is one of the oldest religions of the Indian sub continent. Today too, it remains a living religion.
The Jain ethos states: Ahimsa is Live and Let Live
The motive to refrain and prevent harm through the five senses, to any life; be it humans, animals, plants or the infinite number of organisms that are single-sensed, is the central ethics of Jainism
The guava dish you’re enjoying springs from the Jain commitment to harming no living thing.
No recipe in the book uses garlic or onions.
Cook Jaamfal nu shaak, and you are living a philosophy!
The concept of Ahimsa is said to have deeply influenced Mahatma Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence.
Can you ask more from any cookbook – or book of any kind – than to connect you with this extraordinary depth of meaning?
And yet we peel back another layer – the who?
In the exquisite pages of Spice Sorcery, you discover not just the delights of Muslim cooking in the Kutchi Memon community of Maharashtra, but also the game-changing concept of “haath ka mazaa”. As author Husna Rahaman explains,this phrase translates: “as a special flavour unique to her hand”.
For me, this is a beautiful and important concept: that the essence of the person doing the cooking also becomes an ingredient in the final dish.
Bringing this back to Proust, I think the great novelist would recognise the concept of the pivotal role of the artist/ creator/ cook. For Proust, the artist has a sacred responsibility to decode the essence of life, and to explain that essence in a work of art. With haath ka mazaa, the cook brings his/ her personality, beliefs and experiences to create a dish unique to them.
We are talking about dissolving the barrier between human beings and food.
Taste your kitchen treat again. If it’s handmade, then haath ka mazaa says you’re tasting the essence of the person who created it.
Hungry for meaning: the Greek philosophers
Which brings us to the final, innermost onion skin – the why?
With a topic as vast as food, you might expect more than one truth?
I am sure there are many.
I offer my three personal truths of food:
Creating human happiness
Building a better world
Embracing the infinite
Before I share my metaphysical ‘truths of food’, I invite you on a mini-detour via the great minds of classical philosophy and history.
A decade ago, inspired by some of the simpler, shorter stuff by Plato (Trial and Death of Socrates – a timeless guide to personal integrity – please read it), I kept ploughing through the classics (Herodotus, Homer, Julius Caesar, Plutarch, Suetonius et al). As well as reading these books for pleasure, I was looking for insights from some of the greatest thinkers of all time into the nature of food.
I came away hungry.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics starts promisingly for seekers of truth: “All men desire knowledge” before going on to explain that Law and Medicine are the only paths to wisdom. Great for lawyers and medics – not so good for foodies.
I moved on to read Apicius whose ground-breaking De Re Culinaria (written in the first century AD) pretty much defines the format for the modern recipe book. The neatly laid-out chapters tell you course-by-course how to cook a Roman dinner-party. Sadly, Apicius is silent about the profound human relationship with food.
On a final word on the place of food in the Classics, maybe the most confusing experience of all is reading Epicurus himself – the philosopher who gives us the word ‘epicurean’. Surely the man whose name is now shorthand for fine dining will share important thoughts on food?
Tragically, Epicurus is definitively not a foodie – and has been deeply misunderstood. As a philosopher, he argued that the human senses are key to understanding reality (for example, that thunder and rainbows should be explained by our eyes and ears as sensory phenomena, rather than by our imaginations as divine interventions). Disastrously, his emphasis on the senses has been misinterpreted by the rest of us as a licence for high living (at best) and debauchery (at worst). Read the surviving fragments by first ‘epicurean’, and you’ll see his relationship with food in general (and restaurant menus in particular) is dismissive: “The pleasant life is produced not by a string of drinking bouts and revelrie, nor by the enjoyment of boys and women, nor by fish and the other items on an expensive menu, but by sober reasoning.”
Unless I missed it, the metaphysicists and historians of Ancient Greece and Rome didn’t do food.
Or if they did, they didn’t write about it.
Jumping a couple of millennia, I turned to the work of Renaissance genius Michel de Montaigne (the Proust of philosophers).
As Sarah Bakewell explains in her luminously intelligent book on Montaigne – How to Live, in one question and twenty attempts at an answer – it’s difficult to over-emphasise his impact on the evolution of human thought. Writing in the 1500s, Montaigne unleashed a revolution in self-expression by making his own life the subject of his research. As he says in his prologue: “Reader, I myself am the subject of my book.”
NO ONE had ever done this!
Vloggers, bloggers and TikTokers take note – Montaigne made you and your first-person schtick possible.
Montaigne invented the art of thinking about who you are, and what makes you tick (tock).
So surely, as the man who single-handedly invented the concept of the ‘essay’… and who used it to explore topics as fundamental as ‘On sadness’, ‘On solitude’, ‘On sleep’, ‘On vanity’… surely Montaigne would map the edges of the human relationship with food?
After all, he was Mayor of Bordeaux and he had gastronomy in his blood (the family fortune was founded on his grand-father’s wine and salt-fish business). He also had the CV: Montaigne was a courtier to Charles IX, had travelled Europe, hobnobbed with the Pope, read every classical text known to man, and even owned his own estate and vineyard. If there were a human being to ponder the truth of food, it was Montaigne – and his 1,200 page masterpiece ‘The Essays’.
Promisingly, there is a chapter ‘On drunkenness’ (but no reference to accompanying food). There is even a spell-binding essay ‘On the Cannibals’, in which Montaigne records the customs, insights and lives of three Brazilian cannibals brought to France in 1562. Over the course of 15 pages, he finds the cannibals morally superior in every way to his Renaissance counterparts – and even able to give a lesson to Plato on the purity of the human soul (unsullied by Western influence). The chapter is a masterclass on diversity… centuries ahead of its time.
Montaigne even gives us a tantalising paragraph signposting the importance of food in human life: “The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure; neither the greatest captains nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or science of eating well.”
But that’s it.
Across three books, and 107 essays, the chapter heading ‘On food’ doesn’t happen.
It’s a tragedy.
Montaigne simply wasn’t a foodie.
“Give me the provisions and whole apparatus of a kitchen,” he confesses, “and I would starve.”
(Montaigne’s commitment to honesty is heart-breakingly sincere. In almost the last words of ‘On the Cannibals’, he describes how the group was taken on a tour of Rouen: “Then someone asked them what they thought of all this… and what they had been most amazed by. They made three points, I am very annoyed with myself for forgetting the third.”
So… the Ancients, Montaigne and Proust all stick to their knitting.
In terms of decoding the meaning of food for humanity, they are silent.
But the questions won’t go away…
What can food tell us about the truth of human existence – about our place in the universe?
What can food tell me about who I am?
What are the metaphysics of food?
With a billionth of the talent and insight of the giants on whose shoulders I stand – and with a clear-eyed acceptance that metaphysics is ultimately a sphere beyond reason and proof – I offer my three truths of food:
Creating human happiness
Building a better world
Embracing the infinite
Singh when you’re winning: Vivek Singh (courtesy of Cinnamon Club)
Truth #1 – Creating human happiness
In her ground-breaking book Babette’s Feast, Isaak Dinesen tells the fictional story of French chef Babette. Forced to flee her Paris restaurant and live as a refugee in bleakest Jutland (northern Denmark), Babette suddenly comes into a sum of money – and invests it all in cooking the meal-of-a-lifetime for her new hosts.
Over seven courses of exquisite food, she takes her suspicious group of Lutheran ‘bread and water’ guests (each of whom carries the typical life baggage of missed opportunities, enmities and disappointments) and sets out to heal them with her cooking. As the guests eat, personal differences around the table vanish. In the final scene of the film version, Babette’s blissed-out diners hug and sing together under falling snowflakes.
It’s a lovely story about the power of sublime food to melt differences between people.
Does it happen in life?
If you’re cooking from the recipe books of Vivek Singh, it happens all the time.
By taking Indian food on another exciting step in its journey – combining the finest Indian ingredients and recipes with the modern science of European restaurant cooking – Vivek creates the most sublime food I have ever consumed.
“If Vivek’s recipes use modern, European restaurant techniques,” you ask, “is it still Indian food?”
Absolutely!
Take vindaloo – one of the Indian dishes every Brit has heard of, and so famous it spawned its own pop hit. (When England needed one word to rally millions of fans for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, it chose Vindaloo!)
As a dish – and as a word – vindaloo is a delicious Indian mash-up of the Portuguese carne de vinha d’alhos (meat with wine vinegar and garlic). Cooked up in Goa in the 1500s – as local people mixed local recipes with ingredients brought by the first European traders (introducing wine vinegar to India) vindaloo showcases the Indian passion for ‘fusion’… getting in on the act at least five hundred years before the foodie term was invented.
And if we need more proof of the Indian passion for foodie change, let’s remember that the chilli itself – backbone of Indian cuisine – was imported from the New World in the 1500s. One of the earliest written references to the chilli in India, by composer Purandaradasa (1480-1564) is addressed to the new foodstuff in person: “I saw you green, then turning redder as you ripened, nice to look at and tasty in a dish, but too hot if an excess is used.”
Vivek Singh’s food carries on this exciting, restless tradition of innovation.
And like Babette’s Feast, Vivek’s cooking takes ‘delicious’ to a level that simply transforms mood and moment.
I have hard evidence. With pages of recipe books annotated by friends, I have the day, date and mood of meals we cooked to celebrate the best moments in our lives – and heal the worst. (I owe this habit for annotating books to Montaigne… blessed with a large library, but not a great memory Montaigne wrote notes in all his books to avoid mistakenly re-reading them from scratch).
The hand-written notes in my recipe books mark the peaks of new relationships and the troughs of grief – capturing how we’ve lived real catharsis in these moment… thanks to Vivek’s transformative cooking.
In fact, I have shown Vivek himself these pages. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege to meet him several times, discuss Indian food with him and celebrate Holi with him and his chefs. Vivek was even kind enough to curate one of my trips to India – introducing me to his close friends in Jaipur and colleagues in Varanasi – and creating two of the foodie moments of my lifetime. He is as charming and insightful in person as he is on the page.
Across the four books of his that I own (he’s written others), and the sixty or so recipes I’ve cooked from them, two things stand out for me.
First, that every dish is genuinely, transformatively delicious. Whether it’s a (relatively) simple Bombay scrambled eggs, or challenging Wild boar chops with vermicelli, your palate instantly tells you that the finished dish is perfection. I can only explain this by allusion: eating a mouthful of Vivek’s food is (for me) like looking into the eyes of a Rembrandt self-portrait, or reading a line of Proust. Every dial inside you is switched up to 10. You are consumed with wonder and delight.
Second, there’s Vivek’s sheer attention to detail. Cook his Tandoori grouse with aubergine crushand layered bread, and you journey across seven separate pages of the Cinnamon Club Cookbook, via two marinades and 39 ingredients. It took three friends and myself nearly three hours to cook the meal. Other than eating in Vivek’s restaurant, it is the most perfect dish I have consumed.
I asked Vivek about the role of complexity in his cooking.
“People think I’m adding things to make the dish more and more indulgent,” he said, “but I’m not… I’m really not. I’m simply trying to recreate the excitement I had when I ate that dish for the first time.”
Genius.
If a loved-one is ever in need, I pack one of Vivek’s recipe books and cook for them. Vivek’s recipe does the rest.
And while the great minds of antiquity are mostly silent the power of food to transform the moment and mood, modern science isn’t. A report in The Guardian stated that: “The adage that justice depends on what the judge ate for breakfast may not be far from the truth, according to a study of more than a thousand court decisions. The research, which examined judicial rulings by Israeli judges who presided over parole hearings in criminal cases, found that judges gave more lenient decisions at the start of the day and immediately after a scheduled break in court proceedings such as lunch. The authors of the peer-reviewed paper looked at more than 1,000 rulings made in 2009 by eight judges. They found that the likelihood of a favourable [parole] ruling peaked at the beginning of the day [after breakfast], steadily declining over time from a probabilityof about 65% to nearly zero, before spiking back up to about 65% after a break for a meal or snack.”
Food genuinely has the power to make human beings happier… and judges more lenient!
If the opportunity ever comes up, I’d like to cook some of Vivek’s recipes for those weary Israeli judges, and track the impact on positive parole outcomes.
Maybe you’re feeling a little tired yourself? You’re five thousand words into this blog!
Eat more of your treat.
You will be happier.
Force for change: Asma Khan
Truth #2 – Building a better world
Walking into a tent at the Taste for London festival in 2021, I hear a voice I know well over the PA system.
Asma Khan is talking to the crowd, and they are loving her!
“People who look like me and sound like me don’t usually get to the top of my industry,” says Asma.
BOOOM! As opening lines go, it’s up there! The crowd is already eating out of her hand.
In the promotional blurb, the session promises a close-up with Asma to cook a paneer korma. But from her first words, it’s clear it will be much more. Over the next forty minutes, the cook-alongers not only get a masterclass in a curry classic – they get a guided tour of Indian culture, family life, diversity, fame, Netflix and more!
Pretty soon, the tent is perfumed with the aroma of dozens of kormas on the go, and the unmissable scent of paneer. “Make your own paneer at home,” says Asma, “it’s a life-changing experience. In India, paneer only exists in the Punjab because they have a winter and cows. In Kolkata, if we have a cow, we eat it. It wasn’t until the Portuguese arrived in India that Bengalis learnt to make cheese. It was their only legacy.”
In a few sentences, Asma sprinkles centuries of Indian foodie insights. It’s delicious stuff.
But then her narrative goes up a gear. From micro insights into managing the cooking temperature of a pan, Asma switches to macro insights into Indian culture.
“I love my culture and my cuisine,” Asma tells the crowd, “but I can criticise it. I lead one of the very few all-female chef teams in the West – but also in the East – which I find very sad. In India, the approach to food is based on our patriarchal society… where men eat first, women eat last, and girls eat least. Very often, the men eat alone. It’s a sad fact that I never saw my uncles or grandfathers eat.
“But if you go to any home in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, you’ll find a woman in the kitchen. Women do all the cooking for their families and for festivals, but as soon as it comes to money – the men arrive. Go into an Indian restaurant in the UK, and you’ll find a male chef. There’s nothing wrong with what they do, and they’ve achieved great things, but they went to culinary school and they didn’t learn at home.”
The mood in the tent has changed. People are listening hard.
“The fact is that Indian cooking is done by Indian women… but generations of them have gone to their grave thinking they have no skills. Together with my lady chefs, we want to change the perception of women in Indian food.”
There’s a burst of applause.
When it comes to her own culinary skills and stellar career, Asma is wonderfully self-deprecating. “When I got the email from Netflix Chefs Table,” she says, “I didn’t answer for days. I thought it was a scam… one of those ‘your uncle has died and you’ve inherited a fortune’ numbers. Luckily, I did get back to them in the end.”
She goes on to explain how – trying to move to bigger premises from her Kingly Court restaurant – she found herself in front of countless panels of white males, who all said ‘no’. Despite the huge success of her first venture, with cash in the bank and 18 months of forward bookings, Asma tells the audience how an Asian woman simply couldn’t persuade London landlords to back her.
Until she met the panel of her current Garrick Street restaurant.
“When I realised that I might get the Covent Garden site,” she says, “I told the landlord, ‘You have to give this place to me, not just for me, but for everyone who’s ever felt marginalised in life.”
“If you’ve ever been ‘othered’,” she tells the audience, “talk to me.”
The crowd give Asma a standing ovation.
I’ve had the privilege of knowing Asma – and eating her exquisite food – from the start of her career, with pop-up supper clubs in her Earls Court flat. In Calcutta, I had the pleasure of sharing a meal with Asma and her charming parents.
From the word ‘go’, she has used her dinners – and later her media platform – to share insights, and push for change.
Every human being needs to eat; we are all connected by food.
In the modern world, food shines a spotlight onto other worlds, with their blessings and challenges.
No one is more passionate about using food to build a better world than Asma Khan.
Truth #3 – Embracing the infinite
Maybe, at the close of six-thousand-word blog, you already feel you’ve embraced the infinite? 😊
I’ll be brief.
We are, I believe, living in a genuine Food Renaissance.
Food has suddenly been promoted to the top table of human affairs, and is debated by thoughtful people in all arts and news media. Every newspaper dedicates acres to menus and trestauarant reviews.
After millennia of walk-on parts, food is suddenly in the spotlight.
The time is right to ask ourselves about what food means.
For me, it’s time to share the truth of my curry metaphysics…
Connecting many Indian recipe books is the tantalising golden-thread of the human relationship with the things we eat.
The western mind tends to build a Berlin Wall between us (human beings) and what we eat (food).
Take a close look at the snack you chose from your kitchen… how different are you?
In terms of molecular make-up, you are identical twins!
The human body is 99 per cent comprised of just six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and phosphorus.
Back to our friend cheese – you are made of the same stuff!
All six elements in your body are present in cheese!
Likewise… when Proust ate his tisane-infused madeleine (or tartine) the chemical combo of butter and water mirrored most of the elements in his body.
For food and human beings, there is no ‘them and us’.
In our current, human form we are consumers of other things. In our previous states (four billion years) the elements that make us up have been consumed by countless other life forms.
It’s thrilling!
We ARE food!
The snack you chose from your kitchen is YOU.
Take a bite. You are eating you!
The metaphysical message of food is unmissable.
As human beings, we can only chose to live in harmony with the world – of which we know we form a part.
This simple, radical thought explodes our human-centric view of existence, and puts us in our rightful place – as part of the timeless cycle of recycled energy and matter.
Welcome to the endless present.
Proust, I dare to hope, would approve.
Future perfect
In his final chapter of ‘The Essays’, Montaigne quotes Aristotle’s words from The Metaphysics on the limitless human appetite for truth: “No desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge”.
Montaigne then adds: “but truth is so great a matter that we must not disdain any method which leads us to it.”
Food, I believe, is a source of truth.
Launched by today’s Food Renaissance, future generations will decode the many truths that food has to share with us.
Thank you for reading my Essay.
If you’ll let me cook a curry for you, I will.
My sincere thanks to Asma Khan and Vivek Singh – and to every ingredient that’s helped me to understand why I eat… and stimulated my hunger for meaning.
It’s a sunny July morning in Regent’s Park – and as I pull on my bright green, volunteer’s T-shirt, I get that slightly nervy ‘first-day-at-school’ feeling. I’m at the Taste of London festival as a volunteer for epic charity The Felix Project. So why the nerves? Food is my thing, and The Felix Project promises to connect me with any number of gourmet concessions on the site. Spending a day at the festival should be a blast. But somehow the new uniform gives me that ‘new-boy’ feeling.
After we’ve been briefed, I find myself allocated to running the ‘coat and bag’ stall. But before I can even settle in, a bubbly Felix Project person asks for a volunteer to help run the Celebrity Cookery School. My hand shoots up. I have no idea what I’m letting myself in for, but fame and food sound like rocket-fuelled promotion over the coat stall. I’m led to the Bake-Off style tent that houses the Cookery School, and introduced to the celebrity chef.
“It’s you”, says the voice.
To millions, it’s a voice they know from Netflix Chef’s Kitchen, from BBC R4’s Saturday Live, and from countless other broadcasts.
I’m talking to Asma Khan – celebrity chef, broadcaster, author, entrepreneur and diversity champion!
“How’ve you been?” she asks me.
The fact is, I have dozens of questions for Asma. From almost the start of her career, I’ve had the privilege of eating her sensational food – and learning from her pioneering lead on diversity. Since 2014, I’ve blogged on the early pop-ups in her London home and on her supper clubs at the Cinnamon Club, and eaten with her and her parents in Kolkata. Asma and I even shared lunch on the day of Trump’s presidential win in 2016, to try to make sense of it all.
I ask Asma how she and her family are. The questions that will have to wait are: how does it feel to be one of the world’s most famous chefs? And what’s it like to be the world’s most famous female chef… leading an all-female team?
But the show is about to start. The sold-out crowd wants to hear Asma speak – and I discover she’ll actually be answering my questions as she goes.
“People who look like me and sound like me don’t usually get to the top of my industry,” says Asma.
BOOOM.
As opening lines go, it’s up there! And the crowd are already eating out of her hand.
In the promotional blurb, the session promises a close-up with Asma to cook a paneer korma. But from her first words, it’s clear it will be much more. Over the next forty minutes, the cook-alongers not only get a masterclass in a curry classic – they get a guided tour of Indian culture, family life, diversity, fame, Netflix and more!
And for me, the blogger trading as Good Korma… Asma Khan herself will teach me how to make a good korma. Some stuff is just meant to happen!
First course – foodie insights
But it’s lunchtime, and people have come to eat. Asma kicks off with her korma masterclass. Her audience are gathered around their cooking-stations, with bowls of pre-prepared ingredients. Onions are the first to go in.
“All the slices need to be the same width,” says Asma, “so that they cook at the same speed. For the first few minutes, make sure you don’t lower the temperature of the oil by shaking the pan. You can look, but don’t touch! Resist temptation!”
This is great. We’re thirty seconds in, and Asma is already unpacking the science of curry – as well as explaining why my onions always take so long to fry in the pan! I will not stir them again.
“English onions are full of moisture,” she continues, “but if you’re using Spanish onions… God help you! Add a pinch of salt, to draw the moisture out. And if you ever over-salt a dish, just add a slice of potato. It will absorb the salt – but please don’t eat it!
“If a chef tells you your onions are done in x minutes, then they don’t know what they’re talking about. Watch for the oil appearing at the edge of your pan… that’s when your onions are done.”
This is the real deal. This is the insight of generations of female Indian cooks, shared with a multi-cultural audience in London. It’s what Asma and her Darjeeling Express brand are all about.
Pretty soon, the tent is perfumed with the aroma of dozens of kormas on the go, and the unmissable scent of paneer. “Make your own paneer at home,” says Asma, “it’s a life-changing experience. In India, paneer only exists in the Punjab because they have a winter and cows. In Kolkata, if we have a cow, we eat it. It wasn’t until the Portuguese arrived in India that Bengalis learnt to make cheese. It was their only legacy.”
In a few sentences, Asma sprinkles centuries of Indian foodie insights. It’s delicious stuff.
Main course – fame, diversity and more
But then her narrative goes up a gear. From micro insights into managing the cooking temperature of a pan, Asma switches to macro insights into Indian culture.
“I love my culture and my cuisine,” Asma tells the crowd, “but I can criticise it. I lead one of the very few all-female chef teams in the West – but also in the East – which I find very sad. In India, the approach to food is based on our patriarchal society… where men eat first, women eat last, and girls eat least. Very often, the men eat alone. It’s a sad fact that I never saw my uncles or grandfathers eat.
“But if you go to any home in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, you’ll find a woman in the kitchen. Women do all the cooking for their families and for festivals, but as soon as it comes to money – the men arrive. Go into an Indian restaurant in the UK, and you’ll find a male chef. There’s nothing wrong with what they do, and they’ve achieved great things, but they went to culinary school and they didn’t learn at home.”
The mood in the tent has changed. People are listening hard.
“The fact is that Indian cooking is done by Indian women… but generations of them have gone to their grave thinking they have no skills. Together with my lady chefs, we want to change the perception of women in Indian food.”
There’s a burst of applause.
When it comes to her own culinary skills and stellar career, Asma is wonderfully self-deprecating. “When I got the email from Netflix Chefs Table,” she says, “I didn’t answer for days. I thought it was a scam… one of those ‘your uncle has died and you’ve inherited a fortune’ numbers. Luckily, I did get back to them in the end.”
She goes on to explain how – trying to move to bigger premises from her Kingly Court restaurant – she found herself in front of countless panels of white males, who all said ‘no’. Despite the huge success of her first venture, with cash in the bank and 18 months of forward bookings, Asma tells the audience how an Asian woman simply couldn’t persuade London landlords to back her.
Until she met the panel of her current Garrick Street restaurant.
“When I realised that I might get the Covent Garden side,” she says, “I told the landlord, ‘You have to give this place to me, not just for me, but for everyone who’s ever felt marginalised in life.”
“If you’ve ever been ‘othered’,” she tells the audience, “talk to me.”
The crowd give Asma an ovation.
Haat ka maza
As the tent empties – and after Asma has generously joined fans for the selfies – she serves me a portion of her paneer korma. An Urdu phrase springs to mind ‘haat ka maza’, meaning literally ‘hand fun’ or ‘hand magic’. I’ve read that the saying expresses the unique character that an individual brings to a dish.
Asma’s paneer korma is delicious.
As we eat it, she shares a final insight: “There are thousands of korma recipes, but a korma should never have cumin or turmeric.”
“So,” I ask, “what’s the most important ingredient of a korma?”
“Your time.”
Good korma… indeed!
Some stuff is just meant to happen.
If this has whetted your appetite for Asma’s cooking, her philosophy – and her paneer korma – enjoy all three in her book and at her restaurant.
How a two-thousand year-old recipe taught me about the essence of food
At the point on the map where southern India tapers off in
perfect V, Tamil Nadu sits snugly on the eastern coast.
As a destination, it may not have the instagram-ready,
‘bucket list’ pull of Indian states like Kerala or Rajasthan. But if there’s
one thing Tamil Nadu does better than anyone, it’s TEMPLES. With over 33,000
ancient monuments – some up to 5,000 years old – Tamil Nadu is India’s official
‘Temple State’.
If you’re awarding that prize to India’s biggest single temple – Tamil Nadu wins again. Every book I’ve read lists Meenakshi Ammam in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, as India’s largest and most important Hindu temple.
Over two days in December 2018, I toured Meenakshi Ammam’s
15 acre site with a professional guide. Add the beauty of the architecture to
the giddying height of the 50 metre towers; add the size of the crowds to the visual
intensity of rituals – and you have possibly the most engaging spiritual space
I’ve ever visited.
50 metre stone tower of Meenakshi Ammam
I’ll never forget the ritual of the night ceremony in the
heart of the temple, in which an image of Lord Shiva (in the form of Sundareswarar) was transported in
a silver chariot by temple priests to spend the night in his wife Meenakshi’s
shrine. As incense billowed around us, temple priests welcomed Lord Shiva to Meenakshi’s
shrine – to a chorus of chanting, drums and horns.
I could write several blogs on the sacred buildings of the
‘Temple State’, and the insights they gave me into Hinduism. Countless words
have been written about these world-ranked temples, by people vastly more
knowledgeable than me.
I want to dedicate this blog to humbler, non-sacred buildings
across Tamil Nadu – and their gentle rituals – which became my personal journey.
I want to celebrate the roadside restaurants of Tamil Nadu.
I want to shout out the virtues of these minimalist foodie
palaces… that gave me some of the best food I’ve eaten, and some of the most memorable
food rituals I’ve ever shared.
It was the flame that drew me in. Even in the cauldron of an Indian afternoon, the sight of a wood-fired griddle lured me into my first Tamil roadside restaurant – like a moth.
Stepping into the darkened room beyond the griddle, I could
see two tired wooden tables, and some plastic stools. It didn’t shout:
‘delicious’.
But sometimes, your gut knows best.
It had taken me years to get to this point.
After countless conversations with other cyclists, and clicks
through adventure travel sites – I had finally booked a dream cycle trip: pedalling
from West to East across India.
The details of the trip were important. Starting with a swim
in the Arabian Sea, at Cochin in Kerala, I wanted to cycle across the country
to Pondicherry, and dive into the Bay of Bengal.
Day One: Arabian Sea… 800km to the Bay of Bengal
I’d be connecting two oceans with a bike – and bringing all
my passions together in one hug: India; cycling; sea swimming; and curry. All embraced
in an 800km ride.
If this sounds like a lot for a middle-aged cyclist to do
solo, then I need to ‘fess up: I had help.
Lots of it.
A Keralan friend – Joss, owner of the beautiful Gramam Homestay in Cochin – had introduced me to Thomas at adventure-holiday company Kalypso Adventures. Thomas and I had exchanged emails and itineraries for months. Suddenly finding myself with a fortnight’s holiday – and not able to join any of Kalypso’s planned tours – I took the plunge and asked Thomas to plan a tour around my dates and my itinerary. I’d be the only client on the trip – with a team around me.
If I’d known my Kalypso team would be Shinas and Danny, I
would have chosen the widest part of India I could find – and toured with them
for months. They were the ultimate travel companions.
For this very indulgent trip from Cochin to Pondicherry,
Shinas would be my one-to-one cycle guide, and Danny my dedicated back-up
driver. Two-to-one support… not even Chris Froome gets that.
More about the inspirational Shinas and Danny later.
The site of the griddle was making my mouth water. Standing
with Shinas and Danny at the entrance to the restaurant, I watched small,
yellow flames play under the griddle. I asked what was cooking.
The chef fetched dried palm fronds, and pushed them into the
hearth. In minutes, flames were spilling out of the front – and the griddle was
sizzling.
From the moment the chef spread the batter on the griddle, I
knew this was going to be good.
Dosa heaven…
Dosa!
Two thousand years before dosa became the ‘go to’ dish for every fast food restaurant in the Indian sub-continent, cooks in the ancient Tamil Kingdom invented this brilliantly simple, savoury pancake. Indian food historian KT Achaya dates the birth of the dosa to the first century AD, in the Tamil heartland.
Made from a batter of fermented rice and urad dahl (black
lentils), dosa is on my list of all-time delicious Indian dishes – as well as being
the only one I can’t get close to cooking.
And a dosa was about to be cooked in front of me… in the land
where this dish was born… using a wood-fired griddle technique as old as the
dosa itself.
For a foodie, eating dosa from a Tamil griddle is like a
cosmologist getting a front row seat for the Big Bang.
If you ever find yourself in rural Tamil Nadu, you’ll trip
over one of these roadside restaurants in almost every village. They are a
Tamil institution. Thrown open to traffic at the front, and sometimes to a yard
at the back, they feel like a happy extension to the tarmac. There is sometimes
no pavement; occasionally no door. The restaurant is linked to the road as
happily as a hand joins an arm.
Dodging the cows and puppies that weave through the traffic
in rural India, the first thing you’ll see as you approach the restaurant is
the metre-square black slab of the wrought-iron griddle… flames and wood smoke
below. The sight of a griddle came to make me feel hungrier than any number of
Michelin stars.
For a couple of happy minutes, we watched the cook spread the
batter into a perfect circle, as steam hissed upwards. Shinas, Danny and I then
stepped out of the glare of road into the half-light of the restaurants, and sat
at one of the tables.
The ritual that followed in that restaurant is followed changelessly
– thousands of times a day – in countless roadside restaurants across Tamil
Nadu.
The ‘banana leaf ritual’ went like this….
Banana leasf with idli, sambar and chutney
after a wait of a few minutes, a jug and metal beakers appeared
on our table – followed by a pile of fresh, cut banana leaves. Some time later,
a hand unfolded a section of leaf in front of each of us –with the spine facing
the centre of the table, and the soft palm falling to the edge. If there were any
flecks or blemishes on the leaf, it was swapped for another, and another, until
there was a shiny green rectangle in front of each of us. Shinas and Danny then
filled their right hand from their metal cup, and dotted their banana leaf with
a fine drizzle. It’s a knack. Again, with their right hand, they smoothed the
droplets of water across the waxy sheen of the leaf – then picked it up, and
gently shook the droplets onto the floor.
All in silence.
The banana leaf was our plate for every course we were about
to eat; our right hand our only cutlery. Both were clean, and dust free.
We were ready to eat.
Is there a more perfect way to start a meal?
Soon after the ‘leaf ritual’, someone brought us each a hot,
rolled dosa. Another family member brought over the trinity of sauces served
with this dish: sambar; coconut chutney; pickles. Each sauce was ladled from a
jug, using a tiny spoon.
And the taste!
The taste!
Sambar is the single reason I started to cook Indian food. I first ate it in Glasgow’s Mother India, and it blew my mind. Because I couldn’t find world-class sambar anywhere else after leaving Glasgow, I started to buy Indian recipe books and the ingredients to make it myself. I bought Monir Mohammed’s Mother India recipe book (no sambar recipe, Monir) and have tweeted the chef repeatedly to ask for his help (so far, unanswered). I have pestered celebrity chefs in their posh London restaurant (Vineet Bhatia, I’m thinking of you) and followed their tips. I have got agonisingly close to cooking Mother India’s masterpiece, but never quite arrived.
Eleven years later, sitting in this nameless Tamil roadside
restaurant, I am back in the arms of perfect sambar. The zing of homemade
tamarind sauce meets the soothing balm of fresh drumsticks. It is genius. The
sambar blends perfectly with the coarsely-ground coconut chutney, and firey red
pickle.
All three blend in puddles on my banana leaf. I look at my
hand – fingers coated in sauce – and I realise I have never seen or tasted a
better eating implement in my life. I touch the banana leaf – lending its
subtle flavour to the sauces poured onto it – and know that any other plate,
bowl or dish is an insipid imitation.
This is food at its simplest, most elemental – and most
delicious.
And I’m freed from the nagging voice that talks to me in
almost every dish I eat, in any modern restaurant, in India or anywhere else.
For all the agonising attention to detail of contemporary eating (rare
ingredients, micro-angled lighting, global wine list) I’m nagged by the sense there’s
something missing.
This roadside restaurant shouts the answer: MEANING!
For hundreds or thousands of years, Tamil roadside
restaurants like this have been serving a dish that’s a local to the place as
the earth on which the buildings stands – cooked over wood that grew nearby –
and served on leaves which shaded the village that morning.
Everything is connected, and belongs.
And if you cook a dish for millennia, you get very, very good
at it! The dosa and sambar of Tamil Nadu are breath-takingly delicious. There
is nothing you could change.
Eating this food, I’m reminded of the most-striking visual
art I’ve ever seen: painted 14,000 years ago, one kilometre deep in a neolithic
cave in the Pyrenees. I’m reminded of the words of Pablo Picasso as he left the
world-famous buffalo cave paintings of Lascaux: “Nous n’ avons rien appris.”
Tasting this two-thousand year old recipe, cooked with technology that dates
back to the iron age, I realise that – for me – Picasso’s verdict applies as
much to food as art.
“We have learnt nothing.” In our journey to modernity, we’ve
slowly swapped food that was steeped in place, history and ritual… for something
shallow.
Parata… spun in the air
Like water, oxygen and human skin, food is meant to be elemental, pure, unadorned. Nothing
should get in the way: no cutlery or tablecloth or food fads. The more you mess
with food, Michelin-ise it, deconstruct it – the worse it gets.
We order two more courses, both served on the same leaf:
masala omelette, and Tamil tomato rice. I could write an entire blog about the
tomato rice. Fragrant, but complex; fresh, but with a huge aftertaste. Perfect.
Before we leave, Shinas and Danny showed me the final stage
to the ‘leaf ritual’. Rolling it from both sides, you lift the ends so that the
leafs sags in the centre and becomes a sealed envelope. You then carry the leaf
to the street, and leave it for passing goats or cattle.
The circle is complete. It’s so perfect that I want to cheer.
We ate nine courses between us, and drank six cups of
cardamom tea. The bill came to 300 Rupees (about £3.20).
For an entire week, twice a day, Shinas, Danny and I ate in
these Tamil roadside restaurants. Cycling from 6:30a.m. to beat the heat, we’d
eat breakfast after 9, and then stop again for lunch between 12 or 1.
As soon as we were around those times, I’d smile as the road led to a village, and the smell of wood-smoke promised a griddle not far away. It didn’t matter what we ordered… idlis; biryanis; samosas; vadas; parata. Every mouthful was sublime.
Cassia for sale
With the help of Shinas and Danny, we even got to the point where we brought our own ingredients to the restaurant. Visiting the vegetable and flower market in Madurai, I found a man selling a fresh Indian ingredient I’d never seen before: Senna Auriculata. Native to Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, Senna Auriculata is a canary yellow flower on tiny acacia-like leaves. It looked too delicious to leave behind, and thanks to the skills of Shinas and Danny, we were soon in a roadside restaurant – watching the yellow flowers being plucked, ground and added to the dosa batter – just as the seller in the market had described. Delicious.
Plucking the cassia flowers for dosa batter
Each day had so many highs, it didn’t seem possible that the
next could match it. But it always did.
Just after sunrise, Danny and Shinas would arrive outside
the homestay they’d found for me the day before (nothing was booked in advance;
the homestays were comfortable, friendly places – costing about £20 a night).
Then we’d cycle into the soft dawn light.
In my emails with Thomas, I had asked to be shown: “rural
India, on the quietest roads you can find.” Kalypso more than delivered on that
request. We cycled through fragrant cardamom hills, tea plantations, rice
paddies, jasmine farms and pineapple orchards – sometimes with more
bullock-carts for company than internal combustion engines. The route-finding
was perfect.
Bullock carts sometimes outnumer cars in rural Tamil Nadu
Even when we were hundreds of miles from his home in Kerala,
Shinas seemed to know every twist in the road – and spot the tiny left or right
turn that would take us to the next empty road, with its villages, shrines and
roadside restaurants. Towards the end of the trip, when I asked Shinas, how he
knew the back roads so well across two states – he confided Thomas had given
him two weeks to cycle India from coast-to-coast (there and back) in order to
recce every metre of my trip.
Even better than the route finding, was the warmth that
Shinas and Danny showed to every person we met across India. In the cities and
villages, fields and shops, temples and shrines – they greeted everyone we met
warmly, introduced them to me, and translated. I saw India through Shinas and
Danny’s eyes. It was very special.
Arriving in Pondy: Danny (left) and Shinas (right)
And to answer two simple questions I often get from friends:
No, I never once got sick from a meal in any
roadside restaurant. Although washing facilities were mostly a bowl of water
and cup, hygiene was impeccable.
No, I never felt in danger cycling on Tamil
roads. Shinas steered us to rural B roads, and when we were on highways, the
surfaces were good – and traffic manageable.
Among all the insights that Shinas and Danny unpacked for me in Tamil Nadu, maybe the one that ties all the strands of this blog together – ritual, art and food – is kolam.
Unexplained in any guidebook I could find, kolam is the Tamil tradition of
hand-drawing a symmetrical pattern in front of your house, every day. Before
dawn, a member of the family takes a brush and water – sweeps away yesterday’s kolam from in front of their house – and
creates another. Some, drawn in ground, white rice flour, are simple. Others,
adding bright colours to the flour, are elaborate.
Kolam: created fresh every day – at dawn
Cycling through a Tamil village in the early morning, the
freshly-drawn kolam spring up from
dampened earth like blossoms. For the millions of Hindu women who create them, kolam are an invitation for guests to enter the home, not the least of
whom is Lakshmi, the Goddess of prosperity and
wealth. And according to who you read, the rice-based motifs are also designed
to feed and welcome ants and birds – linking the sacred ritual to the natural
world.
Looking at rows of kolam in the December sunshine, I smiled
at the Tamil genius for connecting things: past and present; sacred and
domestic; food and everything.
If you’re looking for modern Tamil
Nadu, of course, you’ll find that too. From the tech centres of Chennai (former
Madras) to the Tamil movie industry of Kollywood (named after the Kodambakkam
area of Chennai), Tamil Nadu is at the cutting edge of contemporary India.
But for reasons I’m not sure I
understand, it’s the timeless side of the state that talks to me.
In eleven days of travel from west
to east across India, I’m sure I missed many things – and misunderstood even
more.
But as I hope this blog shows, I’m
grateful to Thomas, Shinas, Danny and Tamil Nadu – for an amazing journey, and for
the things that they and the roadside restaurants taught me.
With thanks, also, to friend and fellow
cycle-nut Hemal – who promised to serve me a masala chai when I got to ‘Pondi’
– and did just that.
And a very big thank you to Susanne, who was hit on her bike in London while I was away in India. She selflessly didn’t tell me about her broken arm, and made me promise to finish the journey.
How a soft-boiled egg taught me that all food is a gift
Is there a lovelier, more relaxing thing on Earth than a hot spring?
Of all the surprises the planet has to offer, who’d have thought that one would be a 24/7, open-air bathtub – where hot, crystal-pure water gathers in smoothed rock like a masterpiece of natural plumbing.
God’s hot tub.
And if there is one thing more indulgent than a hot spring, it’s a hot spring in Thailand.
A day’s drive from Chiang Mai, the Tha Pai springs sit in a gentle strip of jungle – where the Thai genius for pleasure takes indulgence to the next level.
As the hot water makes its way downhill, some inspired soul has channelled it into ever bigger, deeper pools. The result? A chain of open-air, organic spas, where the temperature of each pool cools by a few degrees as you descend the valley.
The choice is yours. Each pool has a wooden sign, with gold-embossed letters announcing the temperature… starting at a steamy 36 C, and cooling gradually into the 20s.
(For reference, 36 C is HOT. The International Plumbing Code states: “any temperature above 102 degrees Fahrenheit/39 degrees Celsius can affect a person’s health…”)
Tha Pai is a magical place. Set in pristine jungle, the hot pools are bordered by trees which seem to want to relax into the stream. In places, branches dip below the water like lazy limbs – creating the perfect headrest for your soak.
As part of a two week stay with my nephew – who lives and works in Chiang Mai – Adam and I added a side-trip to Thai Pai. Arriving in the late afternoon, we’d soaked in the pools for a couple of hours: simmering in the shallow 36 degree water before cooling off with gentle laps in the cooler, deeper spas.
It was bliss. Your senses simply said: ‘Yes’
The only thing saying ‘No’ were slightly baffling signs (also gold embossed) reading: “No boil egg”.
We didn’t get it. You couldn’t hope to boil an egg in any of the pools, even at 36 C. Had something been lost in translation? Was this an instruction, or a statement? The signs were everywhere, and we were pleasantly baffled.
Comfortably numb after our hours in the water, we were about to leave when Adam suggested following a path up the hill. He’d seen Thai villagers walking up, and wanted to see where they were going.
It was the discovery of the day.
And for me, one of the discoveries of a foodie lifetime.
Ten minutes from the pools, the path reached a small plateau – less tended than the slopes below – and with a sense that you were off the beaten track. This was somewhere tourists didn’t come.
Several Thai families were grouped around a spot, and even from several metres away – the strong mineral smell told us we were at the source of the spring.
Ten to twelve feet across, and three feet deep, the source was brim full with bubbling water at 100 C. Perched like fishermen around the edge, each family had a bamboo cane reaching into the water.
Following the line of the canes under the surface, we saw – on the end of each – a basketful of eggs.
Of course!
Using the spring to cook nature’s most hermetically-sealed food-source, the villagers were borrowing the energy they needed – and leaving the pure, unsullied water to flow downhill to the bathing pools and their village.
Genius.
In theory, the source would cook anything – veg, meat, noodles, whatever – but any by-products would quickly turn the whole watercourse into a kitchen drain.
By cooking eggs – and only eggs – the villagers and their hot spring can co-exist indefinitely.
Helped by Adam, who speaks Thai, we got to understand the micro business at the source. Young men rent out the bamboo canes and wicker baskets to the families who come to cook. Nothing goes into the water that either doesn’t grow next to it – or could pollute it.
It was a timeless moment. As the evening air started to cool, Adam and I watched the families tend their clutches of eggs with the diligence of mother hens.
Thanks to the generosity of one family, we got to taste our first thermally-cooked meal. Pulling their basket from the water, they handed us each an egg – lopped off the top with a knife – and drizzled it with soy sauce. Standing inches from the boiling water, and wrapped in the smell of minerals, we drank the soft-boiled liquid from the shell.
It was beyond delicious.
The family gave us each another egg. They wouldn’t let us pay. Apologising, they explained they had to leave to get the eggs home for the evening meal.
And then I got it.
For the first and only time in my life, I’d eaten cooked food that had consumed no energy, polluted nothing and left things in perfect balance.
All of the other meals I’ve eaten have taken something from somewhere.
Eating is borrowing.
If this sounds hippy and ‘tree-huggy’, I don’t mean it to. Standing next to the spring at Tha Pai, I came face-to-face with a simple truth:
every time you eat, the planet gifts you part of itself.
I’m sure that the point I’m trying to make about sustainability is implicit in ‘food miles’, veganism and other approaches to eco-friendly eating.
But the thing that blew me away at Thai Pai was the perfect sense of partnership and balance between man and nature: the one-in-a-million combination of a fresh spring and thermal heat producing an endless, controlled flow of boiling water – which cooked the food we ate.
As I said before, it’s the only cooked meal I’ve ever eaten that didn’t require a single man-made calorie to warm it. Not a match, not a flame, not a hob. Nothing.
In the precise moment that I write this, a plane flies over my London flat, mocking the fact that the carbon footprint of my flight to Thailand rubbishes anything that I can do or say about food. I get the irony.
But I am left with the fact that a soft-boiled egg scrambled my head.
I’m lucky enough to be able to buy the food I want. But that doesn’t change the fact that food is a finite commodity.
Today, looking at what I eat, I try to ask myself what I’m doing to look after the planet which provided it.
I don’t have many answers.
In his landmark book, Collapse, Jared Diamond forensically unpicks the implosion of different human civilisations: from Easter Island to the Maya. In every instance, the society collapses because it slowly consumes all of the natural resources it needs to survive.
Diamond is explicitly asking us to look at our own behaviour.
Is it possible for human appetite and the natural world to exist in balance?
At Thai Pai, I’ve seen human beings display amazing humility and restraint to do just that.
But back home, what am I doing to play my part?
First, as often as I can, I try to eat things which have consumed the least energy and resources. I fail often.
Next, I try to remember – as inspired by the generosity of the Thai family – that food is all about sharing. It’s been gifted to you; the least you can do is share it with others. I am slightly more successful at this.
Finally, I ask these questions via this blog:
Is food a commodity that’s ours to take, or is it a gift from our surroundings?
And if it’s the latter, what are we giving back… before it’s too late?
Curry is such a varied cuisine that it may feel infinite…. but is it?
And while we’re on the subject… does infinity exist?
In the distinguished company of Archimedes – and Professor Ian Rumfitt, Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College Oxford – Good Korma travels the path to infinite knowledge.
When Archimedes experienced his famous ‘Eureka’ moment, he was at home, in Sicily - lying comfortably in his bath.
When I experienced my micro-Eureka moment, I was in Chennai Dosa restaurant in Tooting Bec – staring at a glass of Kingfisher.
It was a Saturday evening, and while billions of people were going about their daily lives, I was fretting about my relationship with infinity.
For months, I’ve wanted to write a curry blog, titled ‘A taste for infinity’. I want the blog to explain that part of my love of Indian food is driven by the sheer limitlessness of South Asian cuisine… by the existence of hundreds of original Indian ingredients, captured in hundreds of thousands of cookbooks, cooked via tens of millions of recipes – and interpreted by over a billion Indians.
For me, exploring Indian cooking is like looking at the Milky Way… and I want to share this sense of wonder with other curryphiles.
Even with one hundred lifetimes dedicated to cooking curry, I’d still only be scratching the surface.
But here’s the snag – whenever I sit down to tackle the ‘infinity’ blog, I realise I am totally unqualified to write it. Leaving aside the question of how much I do or don’t know about curry, the fact remains that – as a human being – I simply don’t ‘get’ infinity.
Let me unpack this…
My instinct is that asking a homo sapiens to explain infinity is like asking a snowflake to explore the nature of heat, or asking a kitchen sieve to understand the properties of water. The one is just not equipped to understand the other.
Let’s face it… as a species, we human beings are so gloriously finite!
Am I alone in thinking that the whole of human civilisation might turn out to be a match-flame in a minor galaxy… with a single human life counting for less than a ten-billionth of that flicker? Mankind may hunger for the infinite, but all the evidence is that we are as transient as mayflies.
And even if we were presented with the gift of infinity, would we know what to do with it?
In his magnificent History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, Julian Barnes uses the final chapter Dreams to ask if there is any pleasure, any stimulus, any goal that could sustain a human being through eternity.
If life on Earth were followed by an infinite existence somewhere else – wonders Barnes – could we hack it?
The novelist thinks the answer is ‘no’. Whatever your passion, whatever your thirst for the absolute – Barnes argues that even the intellectual giants of human history would find infinity too much to bear in the end.
The following are the last lines in the book – a conversation between Barnes and his heavenly guide:
‘So … even people, religious people, who come here to worship God throughout eternity … they end up throwing in the towel after a few years, hundred years, thousand years?’
‘Certainly. As I said, there are still a few Old Heaveners around, but their numbers are diminishing all the time.’
Human beings, it seems, just don’t have an appetite for infinity.
The next question is whether human beings have the grey matter to understand what infinity is, or might be?
It’s not obvious.
Here’s a very simple example that I read recently in the press – two smart people debating the nature of infinity. The point they agree on is that numbers are infinite. They also agree that within any group of numbers, there will be a smaller total of prime numbers (e.g. 168 primes up to number 1,000). The point where they fall out is that SmartPerson A is convinced that composite (non-prime) numbers must somehow be ‘more infinite’ than primes. “They happen more often; there’s got to be more of them.”
Smart Person B disagrees, stressing that bothcomposites AND primes are infinite: “There are no ‘big infinities’ and ‘small infinities’. Infinity means infinity.”
For me, their debate suggests than even our simplest instincts about infinity may be wrong.
But does their conversation also point towards a wider question: is infinity simply too big a thought to fit inside human heads?
Oddly enough, Archimedes himself could probably have helped.
The famous physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer (287 to 212 BC) not only gave us the famous Eureka moment – but also built the foundations for a lot of modern mathematics. He anticipated modern calculus, as well as proving the area of a circle via an accurate approximation of pi. And when he wasn’t designing innovative gadgets like the screw pump – and war machines to protect his home city of Syracuse – Archimedes was working on a system for expressing very large numbers.
But I’m more than two thousand years too late to talk to him. And whenever I sit down to write the ‘infinity’ blog, I stop.
Until my micro-Eureka moment in Chennai Dosa.
I am reading a thoughtful, heart-felt piece in the Guardian by Karl Ove Knausgaard ‘What makes life worth living?’ in which the writer praises the nature of everyday objects – in the form of a letter to his unborn baby.
Ranging from the quiet beauty of plastic bags to the solace of beds, Knausgaard delivers some pretty good stuff. And as I read the final paragraph of the last of the seven sections (on Faces), he socks it to me:
“Whatever is human is changeable, it is mobile, and it is unfathomable.”
Eureka!
Just stick the word ‘infinitely’ into that sentence– and I have my answer:
“Whatever is human is infinitely changeable, infinitely mobile, and infinitely unfathomable.”
As human beings, we may not understand infinity as a concept – but we embody it in our infinite changeability and infinite unknowability.
BOOM.
Infinities R Us.
And as an infinitely unfathomable human being, I feel entitled to write my blog on the infinity of curry.
Postscript…
With the blog written, and my finger hovering over ‘publish’ – the Guardian chooses to blow me away with new research suggesting that the number zero (and therefore the concept of infinity itself) is an Indian invention!
Deciphering a parchment document (dated via radio carbon technology to the third or fourth century AD) British scholars have recently proved that a dot on the text is the birth of the concept of zero:
“The development of zero as a mathematical concept may have been inspired by the region’s (India’s) long philosophical tradition of contemplating the void and may explain why the concept took so long to catch on in Europe, which lacked the same cultural reference points.
“Despite developing sophisticated maths and geometry, the ancient Greeks had no symbol for zero, showing that while the concept zero may now feel familiar, it is not an obvious one.
“The development of zero in mathematics underpins an incredible range of further work, including the notion of infinity, the modern notion of the vacuum in quantum physics, and some of the deepest questions in cosmology of how the Universe arose – and how it might disappear from existence in some unimaginable future scenario.”
Not only is infinity legitimate fodder for a curry blog… it turns out that India invented infinity itself!
A brief guide to infinity
Ian Rumfitt, Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, shines objective light on a subjective blog.
“The topic remains difficult. I confine myself to some remarks about the debate between the two ‘smart people’ that Adam recalls reading about.
“Debates of this kind go back to antiquity but a famous example is found in Galileo’s dialogue, Two New Sciences, of 1638. To establish that two finite collections have the same number of members (i.e. the same size or ‘cardinality’), it suffices to show that there is a one-one correspondence between the members of the two collections. Thus, to show that the collection of canonical gospels has the same size as the collection of Brahms’s symphonies, it suffices to pair St Matthew’s Gospel with the C minor Symphony, St Mark’s with the D major, St Luke’s with the F major, and St John’s with the E minor. In Two New Sciences, Salviati (who is the spokesman for Galileo’s mature views) observes that apparently paradoxical results arise when the same method is applied to infinite collections. Consider two such collections: the positive integers, 1,2,3,…; and the perfect squares, 1,4,9,… There is a one-one correspondence between these collections: 1 pairs with 1, 2 with 4, 3 with 9; quite generally, n pairs with n2. Applying the method, then, we infer that the collection of positive integers has the same size as the collection of perfect squares. Salviati, however, finds this result paradoxical, for the collection of perfect squares is a proper part of the collection of positive integers. Every perfect square is a positive integer, but not every positive integer is a perfect square. The result that the two collections have the same size, then, contradicts Euclid’s Fifth Axiom: ‘the whole is greater than the (proper) part’.
“The moral that Salviati, alias Galileo, draws from the paradox is that it makes no sense to assign sizes to infinite collections. In a way, this conclusion makes sense: to call a collection ‘infinite’ is precisely to deny that it has any definite size. In the 19th century, however, the German mathematician Georg Cantor argued that some collections—among them, the positive integers—do not conform to Euclid’s Fifth Axiom. Yes, the positive integers contain the perfect squares as a proper part, but precisely because there is a one-one correspondence between them, the two collections have the same size or cardinality.
“On this basis, Cantor developed a theory of precise sizes or cardinalities, each of which was larger than any of the natural numbers. Respecting the point that ‘infinite’ implies a denial of definite size, he called these cardinalities ‘transfinite’. The cardinality of the natural numbers, which Cantor called ‘Aleph Null’, À0, is the smallest of them. Cantor postulated an unending series of larger and larger alephs.
“Fellow mathematicians were initially sceptical but were gradually won round as it became clear that Cantor’s theory was not only consistent but could be used to solve problems that had been formulated before its invention. However, the series of alephs remains in some crucial respects mysterious. By way of his celebrated ‘diagonal argument’, Cantor argued that the collection of real numbers was strictly larger than that of the natural numbers. He showed, in fact, that the reals have cardinality 2À0. The question then arises where this cardinality stands in the sequence of alephs. Cantor conjectured that it was the next largest aleph after Aleph Null. That is, he hypothesized that 2À0 = À1. However, this ‘Continuum Hypothesis’ has been shown to be undecidable on the basis of currently accepted mathematics.
“Basic questions about the transfinite, let alone the genuinely infinite, lie beyond the range of the methods mathematicians now have at their disposal.”
Vivek Singh’s new hardback may look like a cookbook – but between the mouth-watering recipes, it’s also a spell-binding look at the nature of human connections… and how food is the force that links us all.
In an exclusive interview, Vivek Singh lifts the lid on his spectacular, thought-provoking Indian Festival Feasts.
As she pulls the hardback from the row of Indian cookbooks, the young salesperson bursts into an amazed smile: “Wow,” she gasps, “what a beautiful book!”
It truly is.
Like a paint-spattered guest at a Holi party, the cover of Indian Festival Feasts is daubed in pinks, purples and oranges. Vivek Singh’s new book is a very, very pretty thing.
Hurrying down Piccadilly with my copy, I dived into the first restaurant I came to (a dim sum bar in Chinatown) and started reading. Taking my order, the waitress moved behind me so she could read the book right-way-up. “India,” she said, “so beautiful”. Within minutes, people eating at tables six feet away were craning their necks to see the pages, and waiting for me to turn.
In a lifetime of book-buying, I’ve never seen a reaction like it.
Clearing a space among the dishes for my phone, I type a congratulatory tweet to @chefviveksingh: “BLOWN AWAY by your Indian Festival Feasts. My library of Indian cookbooks just discovered its most important volume.”
My phone pings.
“Oh wow, thank you Adam! Delighted with the praise! How are you keeping?”
After five baskets of dim sum, two portions of chilli oil and a half-bottle of warm sake – I have devoured Indian Festival Feasts from cover to cover. And I am genuinely blown away. Over thirteen chapters, Vivek Singh’s book introduces you to five faiths in India (Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity) and the food that expresses their most important festivals. The thirteenth chapter invites you to share in a Bengali wedding.
As you’d expect from the chef who single-handedly reinvented Indian cuisine in the UK, the book is full of stunning recipes. More surprisingly, perhaps, it’s also full of very personal elements about Vivek Singh himself: his childhood, career, family and friendships. Skipping between the chapters on Holi, Eid al-Fitr, Diwali and Easter, there’s a strong sense that Vivek Singh wants Indian Festival Feasts to share a lifetime’s thinking about how food defines who we are.
Ten days after buying the book, I’m sitting with him in the bar of the Cinnamon Club – together with a copy of Indian Festival Feasts. The author is kindly making time before a busy dinner service to explain the ingredients and flavours of his new book.
Good Korma: Where were you when the first spark for the book came to you?
Vivek Singh: My wife and I had just been to the launch of my book Spice at Home. We were walking home late at night, hand-in-hand, when she asked me if I thought I would write another recipe book. That was the spark.
Every couple of months, I talk to my publishers – and they often ask me about what my next book might be. They pointed out that in media interviews I often go back to the Indian festivals that I enjoyed in my youth. At the same time, Firdaus Takolia, who worked with me then as my PA, started talking to me about writing on Indian festivals.
All those thoughts came together in Indian Festival Feasts. Once that door had opened, a flood of recipes and ideas started to come in from colleagues and friends. The task then became honing all of those suggestions into one book.
Good Korma: What’s your favourite piece of feedback to date on Indian Festival Feasts?
Vivek Singh: My publisher told me: “This is a happy book… a book that really brings people together”.
Good Korma: So how do you want the book to touch people?
Vivek Singh: I’m not really trying to tell people about the religious origins or the purpose of these festivals. The common thread is how the food which is the expression of these festivals has the power to bring people together. The feasts don’t just connect families, friends and faiths – but whole communities, and multitudes of faiths.
Growing up as a child in Bengal, I saw how the food from each festival brought people together to cook and celebrate – Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs. What connects us is so much more than what divides us. That’s what I hope people will take from the book… that food can transcend religion as a connecting force.
Good Korma: That’s a big thought. Why is food so woven into Indian life?
Vivek Singh: Is it something around anthropology…the way that Indian society works? I was very lucky to grow up in a diverse society – and at the time I was growing up, a very significant part of the population was engaged in the full time activity of staying at home and cooking. My mother was a full time home-maker – and in an age before refrigeration and daily shopping, cooking was a way of life. Food is part of the way India lives and breathes.
Good Korma: Looking at Indian Festival Feasts, I don’t feel as if I’m reading about India… I’m actually in India! The noise, the colour, the smells. Did you set out to create something immersive?
Vivek Singh: What I hope comes through in the book is my own experience of India. It’s a complete melting pot of cultures, and it’s the place that shaped me. It may not be everyone’s experience of India – including some of the people growing up there today – but it’s mine.
Good Korma: If a reader wanted to experience one festival, in one Indian city – where would you send them?
Vivek Singh: Hyderabad, for Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha. I remember living and working there, and during those two festivals, Hyderabad becomes meatopia! There are people outside the mosques, distributing food to the whole community – regardless of who’s been fasting and who hasn’t. As I explain in the book, it wasn’t until I worked as a trainee in the Oberoi Hotel that I realised I’d never experienced aromas or sheer passion for food and flavours like the ones I discovered in Hyderabad. The city has all the sights, colours and smells you expect from India – but it has added complexity of the Muslim cooking. Old and new Hyderabad are different universes.
Good Korma: In the first recipe in the book, you mention Litti Chokha as your “inheritance dish” – and describe cooking it over bonfires with your Dad. Have you introduced it to people in your restaurants?
Vivek Singh: Actually, Litti Chokha has never been on any of my restaurant menus – and there’s a reason for that. When you really love something, and it means a lot to you – you’re not prepared to sell it. Some people eating Litti Chokha in a restaurant might get it… but the moment that money changes hands there’s going to be a judgement.
What is Litti Chokha? It’s chapatti flour dough, which is starch… filled with chickpeas, which is more starch. People might look at it and think it’s too rustic, too earthy, too nomadic – and I don’t need that. Not everything’s for sale.
Good Korma: For someone coming to Indian food for the first time, which two recipes in Indian Festival Feasts would you point them to?
Vivek Singh: Mutton Biryani with Dried Fruits, and Kashmiri Spices, and Chicken Butter Masala. Biryani is a regulation dish at Indian celebrations, and this recipe is made even more special with dried fruit and nuts. In the east of India, Butter Masala is the dish that restaurants are judged on – and I learnt to cook this dish from the banquet cooks who catered for the 1,200 people at my sister’s wedding. I’d like to share both dishes with the reader.
Good Korma: In the foreword, you warn the reader that: “not all of the recipes listed in this book are ones that you will immediately fall in love with”, and that some recipes will take years to master. How high were you trying to set the bar?
Vivek Singh: The idea was to represent the celebration, and the specific dishes that express it. I wasn’t looking at a certain level of skill, or at a set of ingredients. As a result, some of the recipes are very straightforward, but others take years of practice… and very few people will go there. That’s OK.
Good Korma: What can a recipe book teach you… and what can’t it teach?
Vivek Singh: A recipe book can teach you the mechanics of putting a dish together, but you can’t teach someone to feel. Feeling is about expressing where the dish is from, and where it’s going. It’s about everything the cook is trying to express in that dish.
Good Korma: The food photography in the book is refreshingly realistic… the food actually looks like food.
Vivek Singh:Indian Festival Feasts isn’t a restaurant cook book – with restaurant-style plating. To create the sense of a domestic feast, we’ve deliberately gone for a home-style look to the food.
Good Korma: In your book, you’ve created a snapshot of India and its festivals as they are today. Were you trying to create a record of the festivals and their food?
Vivek Singh: Things are constantly adapting. For much of the 4000-year history of Indian food, we considered the splitting of milk to be inauspicious, then along came the Portuguese and introduced us to cheese. Today, India’s favourite national dessert is probably rosogolla – made from Indian cottage cheese – even though some people might think it is sacrilege.
My wife and I were having this conversation just last week – that potatoes, chillies and tomatoes only have a 300-year history in India. The food changes constantly – and so will the festivals.
Vivek Singh: India is changing every day – but if you go looking for timeless India, you will find it. I’ve seen so much change in India, but also seen so many things remain the same.
Good Korma: Reading Indian Festival Feasts, it’s touching how you credit whole chapters to friends and colleagues. You credit the chapter on Onam to Rakesh Ravindran Nair, and you christen one dish Hari’s Hyderabadi Kachi Biryani after Hari Nagaraj – both of whom have worked with you for a long time at the Cinnamon Club.
Vivek Singh: It’s my way of acknowledging all the support I’ve had. I’m lucky enough to have my name on the cover, but so many people helped. I hope that crediting my friends helps to make the book more timeless.
Good Korma: Your credit to Firdaus Takolia is pretty unique for an author. You say: “I’m not wrong in feeling that Indian Festival Feasts is as much her book as it’s mine”.
Vivek Singh: Firdaus was involved in Indian Festival Feasts for almost a year and a half. I’d write a chapter, and it was Firdaus who’d send them to the publisher, help with the queries, check the recipes, shop for prop and select the photos. We share the book.
Good Korma: Time and again, Indian Festival Feasts brings the reader back to the connections between people. What has life taught you about human connections?
Vivek Singh: I’ve learnt that simple things like where you grew up and what you do are important. But in this day and age, physical presence and geographical locations do not mean a lot. What means a lot is who you’re connected to, and who’s in your network. For example, I could be having three different conversations with three different people in different parts of the world. I am connected to people in New York, Perth, London and India simultaneously. That’s how connections have changed.
Good Korma:Indian Festival Feasts is full of your personal connections. Does that make it a record of who you are?
Vivek Singh: Yes, the book embraces my family, my friends – and the network and communities I interacted with. These connections are unique to me.
How the Happy Mondays helped me understand the meaning of curry
You think you understand something important to you… a phrase, a concept, an idea.
And then you realise you weren’t even close! Something happens that means you have to start again, rip it up… rethink everything.
I owe the Happy Mondays for helping me rethink what curry means to me.
I’m sitting in a London curry house, March 2017, and the evening is not going according to plan. The name of the restaurant (which I won’t share) promises masala nirvana – but it turns out to be pretty much the opposite. The channa saag is maybe the worst I’ve ever eaten; the chicken jalfrezi squeaks under the fork like polystyrene.
But, hey, it’s still a curry. It’s the end of a long working day… the staff are friendly, the naan is good, and I have a bottle of Kingfisher. I’m happy.
The restaurant soundtrack is playing the classics 90s ‘Madchester’. Years back, my younger brother Tom was a student in the city at the peak of the Hacienda scene, and I rode shotgun with him and his friends for a couple of great nights out. I was probably the oldest person in the room – but no one seemed to mind.
Fast forward 20 years, and as I listen to the Madchester anthems in the restaurant, the stabbing keyboard intro of the Mondays’ Step On suddenly cuts through my bland mouthful of channa saag.
Instantly, it changes my mood.
This is music that inhabits you… music that races down your arteries. You can actually feel the melody tweaking the dials of your internal chemistry – turning everything up.
And that’s when it it hits me… THIS is what the sages of Indian cuisine mean when they describe curry as ‘Music in the Body’.
I’d always thought it was a cutesy, abstract concept… one of those trendy, physical-meets-spiritual thingies (‘Landscape of the soul’ etc). Interesting – but ultimately not connected to anything real.
But the Mondays slammed the lesson home.
‘Music in the Body’ has nothing to do with abstraction. It describes flesh-and-blood, on-your-fork reality.
‘Music in the Body’ tells you- maybe better than anything else – about the sheer, tingling delight of eating great Indian food. Curry doesn’t just thrill your senses… it thrills your being.
Your head, your mood, your heart… curry can and does change them all.
Just like great music.
And THAT is the point.
Thanks to the Mondays, I finally get it…
‘Music in the Body’ describes what would happen if you could actually pour the notes of a banging tune onto your plate… and eat them… swallow them whole! You’d wouldn’t feel the music as something semi-remote… a soundwave – but as a tangible, physical presence that inhabits your physical being. You’d feel the tune descending your throat, and literally coursing through your arteries.
That is what Music in the Body means!
And that physical sensation is what great curry means to me.
(PS. if you can translate what the Mondays mean by ‘you’re twisting my melon , man’ – please explain)