What'S Cooking On The Backburner

Whenever a publisher needs help with a book on Rajasthan, guess who is involved? Whether it's the writing of the text, or screening it, or helping with pictures, or verifying the captions, yours truly is dragged out as the mascot who can describe the filmi painted walls of Jaipur in colours that would make an autumnal sunset blush. From architecture to wildlife, if there is anything at all written on the state, take my word, it's passed the Singh scrutiny.

Some two years ago, a publisher commissioned me and my wife to write a book on desert cuisine. No sweat, said I, and got down to my part of the task, with stories of the Prince of Wales dismounting from his horse while on shikar in Jodhpur, only to be reprimanded by the state's regent: "I know you Prince of Wales, you know you Prince of Wales, but pig no know you Prince of Wales." There was a lot of good stuff, and before you could say I'm hungry, the text was edited, delivered and turned by the publisher into a dummy.

 

All that remained to be done was the putting on paper of some 60 odd recipes from the family stable. This was the part where my wife came in. Deciding that the family board was not interesting enough, and armed with as much zeal as telephone numbers, she set off for Jaipur, to interview and unearth recipes that were the rarest and the finest. The mother of all recipe books continued with exhaustive research: stuffed hare, my brother-in-law said, was his specialty, though you now have to cook it in an oven, underground sand pits no longer being considered hygienic. For once, even Mom's cooking was worth taking note of. Calls followed, often late at night: was the book over, there was this absolutely divine chutney that just had to be included, did we have pen and paper handy?

Then began the sampling sessions. "I'm doing a book," said my wife, "and checking out the recipes. Come for dinner and be my guinea pigs." Friends were fed rare family secrets and found they couldn't digest them. The Singh table became a groaning board and it required tremendous will power to say yes. Old friends abandoned us, but my wife found newer ones who, impressed at the inner workings of recipe book authors, determinedly propped up their digestive systems with alka seltzers and came back for more.

"When's the book in," the editor took to calling on Mondays. "Another week, darling," my wife would say, "I just have to try this new recipe the maharaja's own khansama sent me from Kota." Or, "I'm having some old notes translated from Marwari, soon as they're here, I'll have the recipes couriered to you." The publisher's calls were angrier: "If you can't do those recipes," he said, "I'll have an office assistant take recipes from a hotel chef and put them in: what's the problem anyway?" "Philistine," my wife would scream, "ingrate." "Why," I'd try and reason out, "he hasn't even sampled your cuisine yet." "He is the publisher," my wife mused, "I'll have him over at the end, when everything is right." Which is the most sensible decision she's made to date.

In these two years, though hundreds of recipes have been tested and mostly rejected, not one has found its way to paper. "That's the easy part," said my wife yesterday, rolling chickpea flour into shapes that even politely can be described only as disgusting (seekhs look equally obscene), "I have to make sure everything is perfect."

I guess, if they've waited two years for the book, they can wait another couple of years or decades.