Living By The Knife

Did you notice the revolution? Like all change-the-world movements, it started in the marketplace and gradually crept into our homes, before conflagrating right on our dining tables. It morphed the parathas into pasta, nudged rotis and ratatouille closer together. Reclaiming the kitchen from paid help, the urban Indian began discovering the thrill of verandah barbeques and learning to distinguish between wok and paella (the dish takes its name from the pan). The global had finally become local.  

But, as is natural when a niche trend assumes gigantic proportions, we’ve ended up sacrificing finesse for flamboyance. Size may not matter when it comes to food, but exaggeration certainly does, and the Indian home-chef has been quick to pick up on the restaurateur’s mantra. Somewhere along the way, we’ve started worshipping at the altar of the Norwegian salmon or the Japanese tuna, bypassing the fact that fish from the local market, too, can make for the most astounding ceviche.

It’s a tough admission, but we’re spoilt by the choice at the supermarket. Hung up on the Nigella Lawsons of the world, we believe a ragú sauce comes from a bottle or paté from a tin — just as our children think milk comes from packets. With every self-respecting metro and many of the so-called tier-two towns possessing at least one store overflowing with tinned produce, processed sauces and dinner-table-ready dips — much of it imported, but a few the brainchildren of enterprising local foodpreneurs — we end up losing sight of what exactly it is that makes the home-food experience pleasurable: Preparation, buoyed by the idea of not-too-delayed gratification.  

As a firm believer in the why-buy-it-when-you-can-fry-it principle, I label pestos, patés, dips and sauces the cheat-chef’s passport to panegyrics. They’re fun to whip up, lend themselves to endless improvisations, and, what’s more, they’re awfully quick.

But because it’s so convenient to grab a bottle off a supermarket shelf, few venture into the territory — thereby leaving the field open for you to take a bow when the unmistakably non-commercial, preservative-free taste hits the tastebuds.

Consider patés. It’s one of those achingly elegant starters that you’ll happily pay megabucks for at a five-star when it comes suffixed with ‘foie gras’, but which you can dish up in minutes — and, what do you know, extremely inexpensively. Most butchers are aghast when I ask for chicken liver — it is not considered a delicacy in any Indian community, as far as I can tell — and can’t seem to be able to stuff enough into a bag for Rs. 20. Bring it home, wash it well, get rid of the membranes and other yucky bits, dab dry, sizzle a generous dollop of butter and sauté carefully (this is the tricky bit) so that they are still pink in the centre. Throw in some sherry (brandy will do as well), salt and pepper, bung into the mixie, add some cream for pure indulgence and whiz up. Set the mixture in the fridge for about five hours (add a layer of butter to avoid any skin forming, or simply use clingwrap) and there you have it — a starter that’ll keep them talking till the main course.

Unless, of course it’s time for hummus, another preparation so simple that I’m always surprised people are willing to pay good money for it in a restaurant. A chef friend once told me that no matter if an iced tea is priced Rs. 80 or Rs. 180, its cost to the eatery is around Rs. 2. Hummus comes under the same category: No matter how much olive oil or red chilli they use to dress it up, hummus is, at the end of the day, a function of the mixie. Sure, the nuttiness (from lightly roasted sesame seeds), lemoniness (from judicious use of nimbu) and smoothness (whip it, whip it, whip it — and don’t forget to skin the chickpeas post the cooking) take some perfecting, but that’s just a matter of practice.

From store-bought tomato sauce for pasta to bottled pesto, the urban kitchen and the local market now rise to offer alternatives to every convenience food. And not just Indian-for-Italian either, but food from every corner of the world, from Malaysian to Moroccan and from Caribbean to Korean — though Eastern cuisines (with the possible exception of Thai and not counting the Indian take on ‘Chinese’) continue to be the most difficult to reproduce. And while, of course, you might claim your stove-microwave-oven can’t really aspire to do justice to a Peking Duck, there’s no gainsaying the fact that the greatest cuisines of the world also offer some of the simplest dishes.

So, naturally, we set about trying to make things more difficult for ourselves. On a November day a couple of years ago, the husband and I hit on the idea of a Christmas cake. Now, no one in our families has ever baked one, as far as I knew, and though cake on Christmas in Calcutta is a hallowed tradition, the confection was always sourced from Nahoum’s, the stalwart Jewish bakery in New Market. Come December, and it would arrive, a butterpaper-packed round about eight inches across, a medley of mysterious fruit and flour, imbued deep with the spirit of the season. That recipe, of course, is guarded more fiercely than the formula for Coca-Cola, so I set about creating my own, based on instructions I found in an English newspaper. I blithely substituted hard-to-find ingredients with commonly available ones (only succumbing to adding imported prunes), played around with combinations of fruit, mixed alcohols (rum and cognac, anyone?) and, last year, doubled quantities. Maybe it’s just an extremely forgiving recipe, or perhaps my friends and family have been kind — or maybe it’s just the copious amounts of alcohol that acted as a preservative (though one friend did say she’d been arrested for drunk driving after a slice) but no one’s died yet.

And so it goes on. The cake, now a tradition, and the cooking. We love our restaurants and eating out as much as the next person, and we still make a note of the new place with an offbeat menu (and we swear by packet soups), but we’re enamoured right now of the chemical magic created by heat and enthusiasm and ingredients chopped by our own knives. The Indian kitchen now owns the world.

Image:Hussenot-SoFood-Corbis