Cooking Thai and Chinese

THE FOOD CLUB

One of my (many) hobby horses is to tell if a Chinese meal has been cooked by an Indian national or a Chinese national. It's not difficult.

Indians "" even those who are trained in Chinese kitchens "" can't help adding that extra bit of oil or chillies to the food, even when it's not called for. And the cornflour syndrome is a dead giveaway every time.

Indian nationals who are Chinese chefs will always remain Indians at heart. Gravy is grist to our mill. And when we cook Indian food, an extra dollop of spices makes it better. It's the opposite with Chinese (particularly Guangdong) food, where less is more.

Then, there's the inability to control the fire "" the first lesson that a Chinese chef in China learns. Chinese food is cooked in seconds and fractions of a second, on fearfully hot woks. Indian food is famously cooked on dhimi aanch.

Talk to any Chinese national cooking in India, and he'll more or less confirm all this for you, but foodie friends hate me for my snobbery. So, I'm glad that chef Manish Mehrotra agrees with me.

He's the presiding deity of India Habitat Centre's Oriental Octopus, and he has been cooking Thai and Chinese food for close to 10 years now. He is the only Indian national I've met who disproves my pet theory. Having studied Thai food in London's finest restaurants, he has studied the cuisines of Shanghai and Hong Kong in those cities.

What he says is a revelation. "In Indian catering colleges, the brightest students specialise in Indian or Western cuisines. The former so that they can head for London to work in Indian restaurants there, and the latter so that they can be employed on cruise liners."

According to chef Mehrotra, the oriental kitchen in hotels and major restaurants is quite often headed by chefs from South-east Asia as much because of the usually modest salaries they command, as because of the paucity of local talent.

He goes on to add that while Thai food does have its parallels with Indian cuisine "" think curries and spices that include turmeric, coriander seeds and jira "" Chinese food requires a whole set of rules, the foremost of which is that each dish has a single taste, or two tastes, as opposed to Indian food that has a melange of spices.

There are exceptions though. Thai phat boong fai dang is closer to Chinese stir-fries than anything else. It's only considered successful if fire enters inside the wok for a second.

Here's how it happens: Combine morning glory leaves, half a cup of stock, yellow bean paste, sliced fresh red chillies, oyster sauce, pepper and sugar in a bowl. Heat oil in a wok till smoking point. Tip the contents of the bowl into the wok and watch the flame erupting.

If none does, you've done something wrong. And of course if you've set the entire kitchen ablaze, you've done something really, really wrong.