I grew up in London in the sixties and seventies with a mother who cooked because she had to, not because she wanted to, and a father who never entered the kitchen except to eat. They argued and bickered and my mother never forgave him for bringing her to ‘this cold country’ but they were completely united in one thing – their love for Indian food and the fact that they missed it.
My father talked endlessly of hot, crusty brun with lashings of malai from the top of the milk, which he used to eat at Irani cafes in Bombay then. He drooled at the mere mention of ‘kheema gutli’ and ‘bun chop’, favourites at St Mary’s, the school he went to in Byculla. St Mary’s must have been one hell of a place if you can still remember what you ate there after forty years! He talked about the salt beef his mother used to make when he was a child, and of Christmas cake and the blessed batter which had to be stirred for hours in the days before mixers, food processors, and blenders. He missed kebabs and biryani and balchao and bhel. He missed what he called ‘tart’ – raw mangoes at the onset of summer, imli from the street carts parked outside the school and sour bora or dry ber – brown berries sprinkled with rock salt.
He had very clear ideas about the food he liked and disliked, the nostalgia made all the more potent by the lacklustre of the English table then. He used to make sneak visits to Wembley for chivda and to an Indian butcher, Mr Sheikh, for Indian mutton or goat. My parents disliked British lamb which they found smelly and insipid. My father would wait patiently for my mother to run out of Basmati rice or fresh coriander so that he could drive to Southall (which was quite a long way). Groceries were an excuse to stop at the mithai shop for chum chums, gulab jamuns, and chocolate barfi.
As children, we were well acquainted with a hotchpotch of Indian flavours, but completely ignorant as to the background and history. My mother confused our culinary heritage further.
She grew up in a half-Parsi, half-Goan household in Bombay. You can imagine the chutney of cuisines and cultures there. But it was Bombay’s restaurants that made her eyes sparkle. Bombellis at Breach Candy and ‘Continental’ food at Gourdon somewhere near Churchgate, Chinese at Nanking behind the Taj and Lobster Thermidor at The Little Hut at the top of The Ritz. She experienced Bombay in its heyday in the 1950s, walked to work from Breach Candy to Kemps Corner where she worked in a French company and had a snazzy wardrobe. Her tailor was her best friend and on an average day she looked like a Hollywood star.
When she married my father, the fun continued. The cooks walked in and she never needed to step into the kitchen – not, that is, until she reached England. They were not only united in their love for the Indian table but their dislike of English food. They found it bland, boring and tasteless. They thought the British idea of a sandwich for lunch was laughable and my poor mother, who I’m convinced never really liked to cook, ended up slaving over a hot stove every day.
Consequently, we were brought up on a strange mix of European-looking dishes which tasted Indian and Indian ‘curries’ which began with onion, ginger-garlic and Italian tomato puree. Don’t get me wrong, everything tasted good. It just all tasted the same.
There was no distinction between, say the punch of a Rogan Josh or the subtlety of a fish caldin. It was mutton curry, beef curry, prawn or chicken curry. My mother rarely made fish curry in England because she said the fish had no taste. She opened packets of coconut cream with great finesse, and she soon discovered a miracle marriage-saver called ‘Kashmiri masala’ made by the pickle people, Pataks. This was the answer to all her problems, the cure all and the ultimate ‘must’ in every one of her Indian dishes, whether it was dal, vegetable or pork chops. My father learned to cook in his sixties when my mother began to spend a lot of time playing grandmother to my two boys in India, with much the same repertoire.
Hence, my early memories of Indian food were not very defined and certainly not based on any real knowledge in the intellectual sense. My mother had a great ‘hand’. She made very authentic batata vadas and excellent puris. She always cooked rice in a handi with a tight-fitting lid and placed a tea towel between the lid and the utensil at the end of cooking to absorb any condensation. I have copied her. The rice always comes out perfect. She could never roll a roti to save her life. Neither can I. But she put things together in a matter of minutes and could set an extraordinary table (mainly courtesy Marks and Spencer’s). That’s my British Asian heritage.
After I finished school, I went to Paris for a year to ostensibly master the language. By day I attended the Sorbonne but I really woke up in the evenings and was out meeting friends every night of the week. ‘Cuisine’ was a heavy part of my syllabus and I had excellent teachers – a wonderful and dedicated nanny from Lyon who cooked in the style of Bocuse – classic, traditional French; a photojournalist with a penchant for quick, quality dishes which usually translated into a perfectly grilled lamb chop and a salad; and a host of student friends, all of whom had at least one speciality each.
I also discovered that men cooked quite happily in France, as opposed to the men and boys I knew from the Indian subcontinent who did well to find their way to the kitchen. There was no discrimination between the sexes across the Channel and specifically in the kitchen. Men took pride in cooking and showing off about it. They chose the wine and cheese with awareness. Not surprising since their fathers had probably done the same thing. I had some of the best meals at homes of some of my male friends who opened oysters by the dozen and served perfectly chilled Muscadet along with them. Not very creative, but it took a lot of devotion to open a hundred oysters in one evening. The same bunch prepared excellent onion tart, cabbage stuffed with baby pigeon and could select magnificent cheese.
I was once asked to cook ‘Indian’ in Paris and concocted something which looked like koftas in a masala gravy or what my mother called ‘ball curry’. I had found the famous Kashmiri masala in a grubby Indian grocer near St Denis. It met with great applause.
I became a pretty good cook churning out a handful of Indian dishes, but my culinary education was from the French school of gastronomy. I learned the meaning of the word ‘quality’, how to shop, where to shop, how to avoid supermarkets like the plague, how to pick a perfect Brie, which dressing went with which salad and why and how to handle a leg of lamb. I learned which cut of meat to use for each dish and why the age of the animal was so important to cooking. I was taught well and I was an eager and willing student. When I returned to University in England, the country had become much more cosmopolitan and wiser in matters of food. The British began drinking wine like they were born to it and eating quiche like it was their national dish. I approached all this trendy hype with my nose firmly in the air. I was beyond all the fluff. I had lived in Paris. Nothing could better that.
Excerpted with permission from Masala Memsahib: Recipes and Stories from My Culinary Adventures in India’, Karen Anand, Macmillan.