For those of my old readers who
might be flabbergasted to see me reviewing a cookery book, I shall only say,
imitating Sherlock Holmes (who was himself paraphrasing Shakespeare), ‘I trust
that age cannot wither nor custom stale my infinite variety’. Only, a very
great deal of the credit must go to my daughter.
The wheel has come round full
circle. I tried with every fibre of my being to make her an avid reader with an
eclectic palate; now, over the last few years, she has been increasingly
guiding my reading, introducing me to some writers to whom I have grown
addicted, like Madhulika Liddle and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Julian
Rathbone. Not that she actually told me to read a book on cooking, but I had
been rummaging through her ever growing collection when this book, Korma, Kheer and Kismet by Pamela Timms
caught my attention after I had casually flipped through the first few pages,
and I literally devoured it at little more than one sitting, then liked it
enough to write about it here.
Needless to say, the book is much
more than a mere catalogue of recipes, else I would not have bothered: I am
quite a gastronome, but one of the odd few who have never bothered to learn how
to cook the simplest meal themselves, so no reading material could be less
interesting to me than a cookery book as such. I have always shown my profound
respect – not to say awe – of the culinary arts by both being content with
whatever regular meals I have been fed by the women in my life and also paying
back their special efforts with the most fulsome praise I could muster, or at
least bearing up with stoic silence when they occasionally turned out to be
disasters (some people in my family still laugh with guilty wonder over how I
ploughed through a cup of supposed tea where the herb had been mistakenly
replaced by kalo jeere – black cumin
– or a largeish plate of visually appealing pudding that had been untouched by
sugar). This has always been one of my conceits: that if no woman feeds me with
love, there will always be some eatery not too far away which would fill my
belly as long as I have money in my pocket, and if even such things – lately
bolstered by services like Swiggy and Zomato – someday fall beyond my reach, I
shall decide that my Maker has rung the final bell, and be calmly reconciled to
my fate. I have come a long way with that outlook unchanged. But as I was
saying...
Pamela Timms and her husband Dean
are natives of Scotland, both journalists. They came to Delhi experimentally
for a year in 2005, fell in love with this magical city (as I have been over
the last two years) and stayed on till 2015. The book is subtitled Five Seasons in Old Delhi, and the whole
book is unapologetically dedicated to her adventures in the dingy, damp, cluttered,
maddeningly crowded, thoroughly unhygienic, noisy and occasionally dangerous
serpentine lanes and bylanes on and off Chandni Chowk, savouring the vast
variety of mouth watering street food that the city rustles up daily for
pockets deep and shallow, hunting down the creators even at ungodly hours to
watch them work and perchance to wangle some of their secret recipes out of
them, then trying them out at home with her own innovations and improvisations
and jotting down the recipes of those dishes which turned out to be somewhat
better than just successful. All this she has described in the most luminous
and evocative prose that went into, first, her blog Eat and Dust, and finally took the shape of this 2014 book, which
someone like myself – unlikely candidate as I am – can certify as good literature.
Below are a few samples of her writing that persuaded me to make a blogpost out
of it.
Here is a description of what
happens when the much awaited food arrives before a hungry and
impatient crowd of diners in one of those famous hole in the wall eateries that
have been carrying on for generations: ‘...a nervy silence gripped the diners;
then at last the rotis were ready and plates of korma were unceremoniously slapped
down in front of us. Juicy pieces of mutton shimmered in a lake of deep
mahogany sauce – so far removed from the anaemic, gloopy, bland concoctions
that go by the same name in British curry houses as to be an entirely different
species. Armed with pieces of hot, crisp, coriander-laced rotis, we all dived
in. Some immediately started chewing on the bones but most of us made straight
for the gravy. The first taste was an eye-watering blast of chilli heat that
had me spluttering and reaching for the water bottle. This was quickly followed
by layers of more nuanced, elusive ingredients – ‘up to thirty different spices’,
one of my dining companions assured me between mouthfuls – in a devilish pact
with ghee. The meat itself had been cooked long and slow, and fell away easily
from the bone at a nudge from the bread. For the few minutes it took us to
devour our korma, no one uttered a word, and we paused only to signal to the
waiters when more rotis were required. Too soon, we were again staring at empty
plates, this time with no hope of a refill. The day’s korma was already sold
out.’
For those with a sweet tooth, on the
other hand, here is a rhapsody on that ethereal delight called daulat ki chaat, snack of wealth: ‘one
of the great highlights of the winter is a heavenly milky dessert that makes a
brief but unforgettable earthly appearance in the gullies of Old Delhi almost
as soon as the last Diwali firecracker has fizzled. From then until Holi, the
chaat vendors wander through the bazaars, their snowy platters dazzling in the
pale sunshine, as if a dozen small, perfectly formed clouds have dropped from
the sky... the taste is shocking in its subtlety, more molecular gastronomy
than raunchy street food, a light foam that disappears instantly on the tongue,
leaving behind the merest hint of sweetness, cream, saffron, sugar and nuts;
tantalizing, almost not there... the means by which a pail of milk is
transformed into the food of the gods, though, is the stuff of Old Delhi legend
rather than of the food lab.’ And she goes on to narrate the kind of tale that
would fit in seamlessly into The Thousand
and One Nights.
And though this last passage is not
strictly about Delhi and therefore does not really belong to the book, being
about the ecstasy that tasting roadside kulcha and chhole in Amritsar (which
some Indian friends had described to her as the ‘street food capital of India’,
though as a proud Bengali I should have liked her to reserve judgment until she
had toured our own great metropolis) at the crack of dawn brought her, I cannot
resist the temptation of quoting a part of the lyrical description here: ‘I was
wary, but also cold and famished... I broke off a small piece of the bread and
scooped up some of the chickpeas. It took a couple of mouthfuls before I
noticed the extraordinary texture of the kulcha – buttery, flaky shards, as if
the finest Parisian feuilleté had been combined with a perfectly spiced
nugget of soft potato. Then the chhole – melting, nutty, vibrant pulses – spicy
yet soothing. A third element on the plate brought it all together – a sour
tamarind sauce cutting brilliantly through the buttery bread and creamy
chickpeas, making the whole dish sing its heart out... I felt, as M. F. K.
Fisher once did, “a kind of harmony, with every sensation and emotion melted
into one chord of well-being” ’.
Well, if you liked those little
snippets, there’s 166 pages of it. And then, like the perfect topping on a great cake, there are the few concluding pages spelling out the already obvious fact that the writer's labour of love was not really about food but about people who made Delhi 'home' for her. That is what endeared her to me. Go and read the book, and may it give you
the same delight as it gave me. Many thanks, Ms. Timms. I hope you read this
review, and come back and write some more about the India that you have come to
love.
As for me, I am off on another
flight of culinary wonderment with Chitrita Banerjee’s Bengali Cooking, seasons and festivals. Pupu has got me hooked.
