Tame takeaway
A food travelogue that never quite lives up to its vindaloo claim. Anoothi Vishal on a Scottish-Indian’s journey.
Described as a “vindaloo of a book”, Indian Takeaway, One Man’s Attempt to Cook His Way Home, begins with an interesting enough premise. Hardeep Singh Kohli, the middle son of an Indian family in Glasgow, who “loves many things in life — but none more than food”, decides to travel round India in serach of his roots.
It’s a familiar enough theme. But Kohli decides not just to travel and sample local cuisines — because, after all, here is a food travelogue, if you like — but to also cook up Scottish (and British and bastardised European) dishes for various people he meets en route. These range from a qualified chef at a five-star hotel (Kohli is charmingly unsure about cooking for a trained and competent professional) to a humble fisherman on the beach (who provides him with the freshest of ingredients, luscious crabs and other seafood), to the inhabitants of a yoga school who ask him to cook a vegetarian (Scottish!) meal, to “socialites” in Delhi..
Some of these cross-cultural encounters are entertaining enough. But only some. For despite its early promise, the book graduates into a rather dull read with a cast that never quite comes to life, clichéd descriptions of India, the inconveniences and oddities, and not just insufficient material on Indian cuisines that Kohli encounters, but even insufficient passion, which defeats the whole point of the book.
But first the redeeming bits. One of the most engaging episodes comes by way of Scottish stovies, Kohli’s favourite at school-meals, homely like the rajma-chawal in the Punjab, a simple, satisfying dish that Kohli loves but shies away from preparing for a five-star audience. “But suddenly, I am meek, compromising and irresolute. I can’t cook a plate of stovies in a five-star hotel for an internationally trained chef and his team. It would be mental.” What the author lands up cooking instead is “something really poncy and European”— chicken breast cooked in an Indian pesto that uses hung yoghurt instead of cheese.
The diners grunt in approval or derision — Kohli doesn’t quite know but decides to “err on the side of optimism”. It is descriptions such as these, not to mention the passion that Kohli exudes about the humble stovies that liven up the text. But such interludes are rare. You sense Kohli’s true love for food, but mostly it is Scottish food that he is already familiar with.
One of the points of reading a book such as this would be to participate in armchair culinary adventure. The problem here is that the author’s enthusiasm for straying into the unfamiliar and the unknown when it comes to food doesn’t quite ring true.
Apart from his mother’s cooking — described in aromatic detail, a fusion of what’s available in an alien country, her own instinctive knowledge, and culinary tradition — Kohli doesn’t know enough about Indian cuisines. But that is no excuse for not finding out. “A cornucopia of seafood” that he delights in on the beach is described thus: “Fish curry in a rich tomato and onion sauce tempered with curry leaves, mustard seeds and chilli, cooked to perfection; king prawns in a sweet tomato sauce… and shrimps, fried in chilli, salt and pepper.” Many Indian preparations can be described as such; and while these may satisfy a Western audience, the Indian reader must ask: Could he have not found out at least the recipe names?
Kohli’s take on India is obviously the outsider’s. It may have been interesting, was it not for details that many before him have written about: Train rides and autorickshaw rides, TV screens with Bollywood heroines, signs on trucks, Maruti cars and taxis, rickety taxis, Delhi’s best mithais (including the rasagulla and rasmalai!)… haven’t we heard all of that before? His life in Scotland that he describes is more entertaining. But to write about that, he may as well have never stepped out of home.
INDIAN TAKEAWAY
One man’s attempt to cook his way home
Author: Hardeep Singh Kohli
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 285
Price: Rs 295