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| Subir Roy: It's been cooking for decades | |
| Subir Roy / New Delhi March 11, 2009, 0:59 IST | |
 The excitement and fun in discovering the west that seized me when I landed up in London three decades ago proved a bit shortlived as my flat mate told me matter-of-factly: Since you can’t cook, you will wash the dishes. I didn’t cross the seven seas to wash dishes, I thought ruefully. So I did the next best thing, decided to learn how to cook. And thus began a long journey, full of life’s highs and lows, that shows no sign of ending.
Like all good pravasi Indians who wanted to preserve their identity, we both decided that English food was absolutely terrible, better continental cuisines like that of the French and Italians was somewhat inaccessible to newcomers like us, and so we would stick to Indian food, as pristine as prepared by our respective grandmothers. Our earliest memories were of grandmothers who were always widows and vegetarian and made the greatest vegetarian khanas in the world that gave the lie to the notion that Bengalis knew only how to cook and have fish curry and rice.
In replicating pure Indian cuisine, we were greatly helped by the utterly fascinating Indian-run stores in Southall where we trouped once a month to pick up the best and most fragrant of spices. We had never seen such good Indian spices in India and another friend made it a point to take home for his mother some of those spices on his annual holiday. The round-the-world journey the spices thereby made bore testimony to the words ‘export quality’ used so often in India in those days to charge a premium on anything that was half any good.
Our bachelors’ foray into cooking was carefully guided by the detailed recipes that came from home via air mail (that was long before the internet came) and was greatly helped by the wonderful device called the oven (they were alien to middle class Indian homes in those days) which hugely saved time. You didn’t have to patiently fry the stuff the way grandmother did before adding the masala, you simply mixed all the stuff together and shoved it into the oven and bingo the aroma was streaming in from the kitchen to the living room giving the flat a very Indian feel.
Though my friend preferred to be vegetarian, I occasionally pined for fish and so learnt from the wives of longer term Indian residents that the herring came close to the hilsa and so all you needed to do was smother the fish in oil and mustard powder, cover it with a bit of aluminium foil, deposit it in the oven and you didn’t miss home khana for the next few days.
The important culinary lesson that I took away from my London days was that the easy way to good or tasty cooking (those days both meant the same thing and there was no separate category called healthy cooking) was to be a bit generous with oil and spices, avoid adding water and cook on slow heat. On my return, my mother told friends and relatives a bit proudly that she had to send her son to London to learn Indian cooking, as it was a given that Indian males seldom ventured into the kitchen in India.
Back in India, the LPG burner made do in the absence of the oven and I stuck to my principle of virtually no water and lots of oil and spices and was gladdened to find that our growing children, well brought up in the strong north Indian tradition of oily cooking, loved the stuff I dished out. Only the wife complained that my cooking took ages and tied up one of the two gas burners for too long.
The great addition to my slim repertoire then was to learn how to cook a reasonably decent mutton rejala. Like all good Indians with a nose for flavour and taste, I abhorred chicken and stuck strictly to mutton. The waiters at Kolkata’s Sabir, famous for its rezala, would not give me the recipe. So I took a friend along who analysed the food we ate and gave me his reconstructed recipe. It turned out to be quite a decent imitation and my rezala was always a hit when friends came over.
But just when I was thinking that I would use the leisure of retirement to add to my cooking repertoire, it has run into headwind. My recent efforts have been to achieve as much taste as possible with little oil and not too much of spices. There is a world of aroma you can extract out of spices by heating a spot of oil and then roasting in it whole spices. The kitchen air will soon be full of the stuff and transform the cooking. This is the healthy way to good eating, I tried to tell the family, but my grown-up children have given my healthy cooking a firm thumbs down. They have flung at me the worst insult which I had decades ago reserved for English cooking. I am mortified by the verdict they passed: These dishes are so bland!
subir.roy@bsmail.in
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