If you are anything like me, every other Saturday you wake up to an empty fridge. You were supposed to have gone grocery shopping on Wednesday. The dribs and drabs lasted you through the next two days, but only barely. And now, when you have woken up late and cannot bear the thought of stepping out – or for that matter stepping into the kitchen – here’s what we propose you do.
Order in some takeaway (thankfully, with this app and that trap you can manage without cash – which you never seem to have on you when you need it the most) and concentrate on this delectable five-course bookish banquet that we have planned for you, which will induce in you dreams of dinner parties past and future. The pleasures of this long lazy luncheon will compress the weekend and transport you to Monday morning, all floaty and vague, on a peculiar sort of literary bliss.
NB: Unfortunately, you will be so satiated with this culinarily eccentric, geographically mixed-up banquet, your grocery shopping will certainly remain undone over the weekend, and pets/spouses/kids are likely to be annoyed with your single-minded pursuit of private pleasure.
Alphabet Soup For Lovers, Anita Nair
A charming little book, Alphabet Soup is the perfect starter: light yet deeply soul-satisfying, distinguished by the perfect balance in its construction. Thirty-nine year-old Lena is married to suave dispassionate KK, not quite unhappily, not quite happily. They run a homestay – ecotourism is KK’s latest thing – in their estate, nestled among the gorgeous Annamalai Hills. One fine day, into Lena’s serene if dull life enters a srange new guest – Shoola Pani, a south Indian superstar, on the run from his manic life in the city. Sparks fly.
Told partly from the point of view of Komathi, the cook, who has cared for Lena from the time she was a little girl, Alphabet Soup tells a familiar story, through the unfamiliar trope of food. All the way from A (arisi appalam), B (badam), C (cheppankizhangu) to Z (zigarthanda), Komathi filters the high drama of what she witnesses – a late powerful passion that flowers suddenly and transforms her mistress – through the sensuous and tactile process of cooking, something which reminds both her and Lena of the twinned importance and irrelevance of tradition; eventually, what remains is a perfect summation of the middle path.
Breadfruit, Célestine Hitiura Vaite
If it is vegetables that you must eat, then we suggest you bypass the self-important arugula/rucola/parsley conundrum that upper-crust Indians are now facing – along with quinoa and avocadoes – and head far far away. To the genuinely exotic Tahiti, for instance?
Tahitian author Célestine Vaite is perhaps one of the best kept secrets in the Alexander McCall Smith school of writing, that of gentle humour and sparkling female protagonists with a strong sense of community. Breadfruit, her first novel, was published in 2000, and introduces the lovable heroine Matarena Mahi and her somewhat clueless lover Pito (Matarena and Pito later return in Frangipani and Tiare in Bloom).
Matarena and Pito are parents to three children and have lived together for twelve years, but somehow or the other, they never got married. So, in a drunken burst of optimism, when Pito proposes to Matarena, she is thrilled to bits. She acquires a killer recipe for a chocolate cake, plans her outfit and puts together the ultimate music for the wedding night dance, but Pito seems to be unwilling to remember his proposal.
Infused with the warmth of Tahiti and much talk of householding and food, family and love, and winner of the prestigious Prix Litteraire des Etudiants award, Breadfruit will leave you utterly butterly charmed with the perfect analogy it seems to offer in the final analysis, between life (I really mean sex) and the fat resourceful fruit of the breadfruit tree that stands in Matarena’s backyard: sometimes it’ll be cooked bland, sometimes it will be dressed up and spicy, but either way, you’ll crave more. Bursting with nutrition, Breadfruit is the perfect virtuous side-dish with your rice and chicken curry – and it’ll make you chortle your way happily through the pages.
On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast, Edited by Geraldine Kudaka (With a Foreword by Russell Leong)
“As an Asian American, I have found my sexuality entangled with race. In America, sex and race were my siblings – as close as sister and brother – full of love and hate, familiar and forbidden at the same time,” writes Russell Leong in the Introduction of this unique anthology.
As late as 1995, On a Bed of Rice was the first book of its kind published in America, seeking to challenge the stereotypes that had prevailed for nearly a century around the sexual aspect of the Asian-American experience – Asian women were sex objects, Asian men were de-sexualized and non-virile with small penises, all Asians were straight and most sex had within the family was procreative in intent.
Drawing on the idea of “rice” as a unifying theme, right from south Asia to the furthest frontiers of east Asia, the book collects literary erotica from first-generation, second-generation and third-generation Asian writers in America who decided to challenge these stereotypes head on, nearly 25 years after the Civil Rights Movement had set into motion various corrective actions that would at least talk about the truths behind the American “melting pot”. Divided into eight parts (“Sexual Awakening”, “Blood Links”, “Embracing the Female Body”, “The Size of It”, “Mating”, “Colours of Love”, “Betrayal and Infidelities”, “Mind Sex”) the book is part humorous, part profound, and entirely original, and will introduce you to a whole gamut of brilliant writers (memoirists, novelists, poets) you didn’t even know of.
The perfect way to sex up your bland carbohydrates, this book is the literary equivalent of a pulao or a yakhni rice. But that’s for you to say.
Chicken with Plums, Marjane Satrapi
The best main courses must surprise the palate, with its unique combinations, and ultimately break the heart a little bit with the ending of the meal. Marjane Satrapi’s Iranian classic Chicken with Plums does that perfectly.
Satrapi is best-known for her two-volume YA autobiography published originally in French, Persepolis. Chicken With Plums is a slender and clearly genre-bending book. It is an account of a week in the life of Nasser Ali Khan, one of Iran’s most gifted tar players, and Satrapi’s Chacha. The year is 1958. The sun has long set on the brief but inspiring period in contemporary Iranian politics when Mohammad Mossadegh was the Prime Minister. Now the Shah is back in power, after a CIA-supported coup ousted Mossadegh in 1953.
In a tragic turn of events, Khan’s beloved instrument has suffered irretrievable damage, and nobody seems to be able to find him a replacement that speaks to his soul. Khan decides to die, and consequently takes to his bed and refuses to eat. In the course of the next seven days, there are curious visitations that occur in that one room and the novel effortlessly plucks incidents from the past and the future, and shines light on the deepest recesses of love and loss, to cast a dizzying bittersweet spell. An absolute winner, it speaks of philosophy and the artistic lot with the trademark economy of Satrapi’s stark black-and-white panels.
Crème Brûlée, Ramona Sen
To finish your long lunch, we can think of nothing cleverer than the newly minted, hot of the press novel Crème Brûlée by Ramona Sen.
Breaking ground in chick lit by casting a man, the lovable Anglophile Aabir Mookerjee, in the protagonist’s role, Sen has spun a delish narrative, so replete with food references that it, ideally, should have included a few recipes at the end (you will go wild trying to guess what on earth the secret ingredient in Thakuma’s posto bora).
Mookerjee has descended from Oxford and opened a terribly stiff upper lip joint on Park Street called E & B (Eggs and Bacon) and when he’s not resisting his mother and the family purohit’s matchmaking attempts, bossing over his waiters in cravats, or trying to turn his personal manservant Mukul into a butler, he is found in the various posh clubs of Calcutta bantering with his best friend Rana Raina. There is a surprising deluge of suitable girls – but none quite right for his nineteenth century predilections. Then a new tea room – and its artful baker proprietress – takes Calcutta by storm, and Aabir’s ex-girlfriend, an English rose with annoying habits, arrives suddenly, so a veritable drama unfolds.
Funny, and full of quirky characters, Crème Brûlée is a love letter to one of the most food-obsessed places anywhere in the world: Calcutta.
