Curry Read online

  Curry is not a cliché. Well, maybe it is. The unifying notion of curry as an authentic, homeland-defining collection of dishes that form a cultural touchstone for diasporic brown folks is a cliché, in the same way food-based bonds between people from any culture who find themselves in a new land is a cliché. But curry can’t be trapped. If you push through the cliché, you arrive at a surprising truth: the history of this ever-inauthentic mass of dishes is a close parallel to the formation of South Asian diasporic identity, which is as much of a blend of conflicting cultural messages forced into coherence as Indian cuisine itself.

  Then again, the entire category of food writing comes with built-in nostalgia, a resurrection of remembered meals that, at its best, creates hunger to recreate that experience. When the topic, or the writer, is associated with a certain ethnic background, that act of nostalgia is positioned as a cultural act of looking-back. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik splits the food-literature genre into two categories:

  There are two schools of good writing about food: the mock epic and the mystical microcosmic. The mock epic (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, the French writer Robert Courtine, and any good restaurant critic) is essentially comic and treats the small ambitions of the greedy eater as though they were big and noble, spoofing the idea of the heroic while raising the minor subject to at least temporary greatness. The mystical microcosmic, of which Elizabeth David and M. F. K. Fisher are the masters, is essentially poetic, and turns every remembered recipe into a meditation on hunger and the transience of its fulfillment.

  Food writing is also memoir, at least outside the confines of the newspaper restaurant review. The alimental is elemental to a life story. M. F. K. Fisher’s rapturous descriptions of meals in France are also the story of an adventurous American woman abroad, eating, writing, and living in quaint circumstances with a husband or between marriages. A great portion of Fisher’s and Elizabeth David’s writing deals with food and food experiences in France and continental Europe, an ongoing suggestion to readers that real food was something that existed elsewhere, not in the country of the writer’s origin (America and England, respectively). Fisher’s adventurous trip to isolated restaurants in Burgundy, where she’s served pickled herring that is ‘mild, pungent, meaty as fresh nuts,’ and trout served au bleu, gutted and cooked half-alive in bouillon, ‘agonizingly curled on a platter,’ is as much about the hidden chef and the exuberant server, the sense of being alone and given a unique gift in a foreign land, as it is about the food, which Fisher actually describes in rather quick little clauses, compared to the considerable time given to describing the ‘mad waitress,’ ‘fanatical about food like a medieval woman possessed by the devil,’ and her own sensations of hunger, surfeit, determination, and even fear in the face of an epic meal. There are certainly exceptions to this questing-in-a-foreign-land in each writer’s oeuvre, from Fisher’s paean to Old Mary the cook’s peach pie at the family’s California ranch, to David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery. But Fisher’s rapturous descriptions of French meals and life and David’s landmark recipe books Mediterranean Food and French Provincial Cooking established their reputations and carried a clear message: the truest experiences of eating are out there, là-bas, and the amateur cook’s hopeless task is to try to create the real thing at home.

  In the case of Elizabeth David’s early books and columns, the tasks assigned by the recipes were actually impossible fantasies – many of the ingredients her recipes required, like lemons and eggplant, were near-impossible to obtain in rationed Britain. This narrative of the real, right thing being elsewhere, particularly Continental Europe, has echoed through the biographies and restaurants of many American chefs, even in decades where French cuisine fell slightly out of fashion on the other side of the Atlantic. Both Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential and Bill Buford in his chronicle of life in Mario Batali’s kitchen, Heat, describe chefs turning away from the complexities of French cuisine to the purity of Italian regional cuisine, made properly (which, to Batali, meant made by chefs who had trained in Italy with real Italian cooks with access to old-world knowledge). The supposed cleansing effect that this turn to the authenticity of another country may not have changed American haute cuisine forever, but it certainly impacted the ‘story’ of these particular chefs, bringing notoriety to their cuisine and personas.

  When a food writer is a South Asian immigrant, or even a few generational steps from the plane or boat, another ripple enters. One of the conventions of diasporic food writing dictates that the writer’s identity and self-discovery are implicitly linked to a tracing-back of culinary roots, a finding-out of who he or she really is in the rich smell of a Keralan masala finally nailed. That’s the extra dimension to writing about curry and other ethnic foods: beyond meditating on hunger and fulfillment, writing about curry and India and the real food of one’s ancestors becomes a meditation on personal and familial identity, and its relationship to the place where one grew up, or where one was wrested away from. The inability of the writer to reproduce his or her mother’s aloo gobi often becomes, as if by default, a metaphor for the impossibility of full communication between generations – a metaphor so overwrought it’s now as codified and recognizable as a Noh mask.

  In ‘The Long Way Home,’ a 2004 essay for the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize–winning Indian-American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri contributes to this form of writing that connects family, roots, secrets, and the lost unknowables of the past incarnated in particular delicious dishes. In Lahiri’s case, her mother had learned to cook by witnessing and participating in her own mother’s cooking in Calcutta, learning lessons that she carried to America by, for example, getting ‘down on the floor to pound turmeric or chilies on a massive grinding stone.’ Lahiri’s mother here joins a line of mothers in this food-writing tradition. Like so many before her, she kindly evades sharing their recipes, never records or verbally details them: ‘To this day, if friends ask how she made a particular dish, she cryptically replies, “It’s nothing, really, you simply take all the ingredients and put them in the pot.”’ This reluctance to share methods is perhaps true of many mothers, and extremely common in these nostalgic essays and stories. My mother, thankfully, will give up any recipe, with detailed directions. Lahiri ends up learning her Indian-cooking techniques from a cookbook by Madhur Jaffrey, doyenne of subcontinental cookery books and TV since the early 1970s. In the end, her mother is quietly impressed, taking a photo of the spread that Lahiri and her sister make for their parents’ thirtieth anniversary.

  In 2016, Scaachi Koul contributed to the genre with an essay for BuzzFeed on learning how to cook the dishes of her childhood as an adult, ‘There’s No Recipe for Growing Up’:

  My mom had watched my grandmother cook for years, knew her languages, knew how to pleat a sari or mutter a Kashmiri insult (‘Thrat’) or throw a wedding for her son, 25 years after she moved away. I don’t have any of these secrets, because I was born in North America and raised around white people in a family that wanted to integrate. So it felt important to at least try to remember how my own mom did things.

  Late last week, I called my mom to get a refresher on a few of her recipes. I wanted to make rogan josh, aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower), chicken biryani (chicken and rice), and paneer with palak (spinach). But my mom, like so many Indian mothers I know, has always avoided giving me complete recipes.

  Mothers are an important and authentic part of the curry genre, both cooked and written: not only a source of accessible, cross-cultural nostalgia, but a reminder that there are domestic, comforting aspects to exoticism. The parental link to the homeland, especially for writers with immigrant parents who themselves were born in the West, or who moved to the West at such a young age that their grasp on the old country remains light, questioned by brown people who dismiss their experiences or white people who say, ‘But you seem so white,’ can also have a sinister, minimizing aspect. If mothers are baggaged with the symbolic weight of a motherland and the author’s d
istance from this place and identity, they sometimes aren’t given much room of their own to be intact characters themselves. Mothers are permitted to be mysterious or generous in this system of symbolism, but in Lahiri’s essay, her mother’s pattern of selective withholding becomes her primary trait. And Lahiri, the writer, is burdened with mastering the domestic skill of cooking in order to achieve an understanding and connection with her mother. In Koul’s piece, being able to cook her mother’s food comes to stand in for her need for her mother’s love and presence: Koul manages to pull off cooking a solid meal, catching the intangible scents of her mother’s kitchen while she prepares it, but the meal ‘wasn’t as good because my food, as surprisingly palatable as it was, didn’t include my mom hovering over me with a wooden spoon.’ For these writers, their personal relationships with their mothers overwhelms the symbolic stand-in of mother for motherland, of food and the ability to prepare it properly as a marker of authenticity: but for many readers, this may not be the case – the mother on the page remains a symbolic stand-in for authenticity lost, despite the writer’s labour to own the metaphor, to make it personal.

  In part, these two pieces reflect ways I’ve found myself thinking about my race and family, and even writing about these matters … at least until I stop myself out of fear that I’m replicating an essay that already exists. That this treatment of a relationship between food, family bonds, and a fraying connection to the homeland appears frequently in essays and novels by diasporic South Asians doesn’t invalidate it. An oft-repeated story isn’t a false one: experiences and dishes like the ones described by Koul and Lahiri take place in the kitchens of brown undergraduates worldwide. The two essays above hit many of the same points about authenticity, love, and the unknowability of one’s parents, but stylistically they are distinct to their authors, and there is no sense that the details are anything but true, lived experience. I mean, I’ve had a bunch of those experiences, too: a recipe is given over the phone, but a half pound of burnt onions and candied-walnuts-subbing-for-almond-slivers later, there’s a stovetop of muck that has nothing to do with home, comfort, or good food. Just failure, distance, a sense that something essential has been lost. This is authentic, isn’t it? It’s also relatable, to readers from any number of immigrant backgrounds. So why shouldn’t it be written about?

  It should be, of course. Stories beget similar stories, and they don’t become lies as a result. But endless encounters with one narrative – one that tells us that truth and colonialism are embedded in these family recipes and our failures to cook them – make me wonder why I keep reading this particular story over and over again, and why white and South Asian publics alike embrace it. South Asian food came to major prominence in the West with the explosion of Indian restaurants in the U.K., and the formative wave of South Asian diasporic writers followed soon afterward. When genres and forms have been around for long enough, there comes a point when they risk calcifying: becoming the same stories. This narrative thread, this way of thinking about curry, is one iteration of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently called ‘the single story,’ one over-arching narrative that ‘creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.’

  Thinking about and writing about a food as culturally complex as curry as though it were a marker of an authentic past that is now lost, or a signifier of a broken bond between generations due to geographical dislocation, does a major disservice to how delicious curry is, and to how particular a South Asian diasporic experience can be.

  Let me tell you about two personal curries of note. The logic of this genre dictates that if I describe a beloved dish, I’ll be describing myself, achieving insight into family bonds, reaching back through a sense of the past into a concrete known this-much-is-true exchanged in knowing looks over bites of curry and rice. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll at least emerge with an excellent, usable recipe.

  First, the chicken curry that I make a few times a month, from a now-freehanded recipe liberally adopted from Vikram Vij’s first cookbook, modified by my own tendency to favour coriander and turmeric. Vij built his small, fusion-friendly Indian restaurant in Vancouver into a national brand, eventually opening a wallet-friendly companion restaurant, a fleet of cookbooks and frozen meals, and standing in judgment on Canada’s version of the entrepreneurial pitching show Dragons’ Den. In the restaurant’s first cookbook, written by Vij’s ex-wife, collaborator, and business co-owner, Meeru Dhalwala, this recipe is set up with a brief tale of parents and the diaspora: ‘This was the original chicken curry Vikram’s mom used to make in his apartment when he first opened Vij’s in 1994 and didn’t have the appropriate licences to cook in the newly acquired cafe. This curry is based on a family recipe, except that she added sour cream to make it richer.’

  I take some trendily twenty-first-century licence of my own by throwing in torn-up kale leaves as the curry approaches the end of its simmer: an effective way of vanishing greens under the vivid yellow creaminess of this sour cream–aided sauce, which acts as a subtle delivery model for the red powder hiding deep in the masala. The introduction of sour cream into a curry, by the way, wouldn’t be entertained in the home I grew up in. Yogourt, sure, but not sour cream. I like it and think it works pretty well in this dish, though I often forget to stir a bit of masala into the sour-cream container to bring the temperature up before dumping the whole thing into the pot, which leads to a distastefully curdled appearance that guests are usually too kind to comment on.

  This dish is mine now, based not just on the addition of kale but on one of the great strengths of curry: its flexibility, its demand that you freehand ingredients. The original recipe is precise, down to the ½ tsp ground black pepper. Mine has a handful of black pepper generous enough to blind a bear. These precision measurements, more than any fusion ideas in the book, are perhaps Dhalwala and Vij’s greatest concession to consumer tastes: while curry, and Indian cuisine in general, has always taken in spices and approaches from neighbouring countries and invading empires while continuing to be strongly regionally defined, precision measurement of spices is genuinely foreign. The novelist Julian Barnes, in his short, comic book of essays, The Pedant in the Kitchen, speaks to a longing for specificity that Vij’s recipe serves: ‘cookbook writers, it seems to me, fail to imagine the time a punter takes holding up a trembling teaspoon and wondering if its piled contents are better described as “rounded” or “heaped”; or glossing the word “surplus” in an instruction like “trim off the surplus fat.”’ This reminds me that Vij is indeed being consumer-friendly, not Western-friendly – freehanding is part of the game for chefs and food writers across cultures.

  Even so, it’s telling that imprecision is one of the few true signifiers of authenticity for a dish as inauthentic as curry. The inability to nail down exactly how much of what goes in what is a recurring element of the curry narrative, which Jhumpa Lahiri touches on in ‘Rice,’ another New Yorker essay, this one written in 2009, about her father’s mastery of pulao: ‘He has a reputation for andaj – the Bengali word for “estimate” – accurately gauging quantities that tend to baffle other cooks.’ Part of the intergenerational power of the curry metaphor, the idea that something is lost, lies in the dish’s very flexibility – while pulao isn’t curry, its proportionate measurements are a similarly intuitive affair. In Lahiri’s father’s case, ‘There has never been an unsuccessful batch, yet no batch is ever identical to any other.’ Lahiri speaks of how she’d never dare to attempt it, and that’s a key part of the ongoing story of meaning-burdened homeland foods: that it has something intrinsically of the maker in it, and perhaps of his or her increased proximity to the nation that originated the dish. That it can’t be repeated and is locked in a reality that is purely of the past.

  When I first moved out of the house and my mother realized the depths of my incompetence as a cook, she pinned a sheet of paper to the kitchen wall of my a
partment (not with a pin, but with a toothpick, running the paper through and affixing it to a pre-existing gouge in the drywall) with recipes for the BASIC MAURITIAN and BASIC INDIAN bases of any number of dishes, featuring onions, garlic, a more-or-less identical meld of spices, and in MAURITIAN’s case, ginger. Ginger is almost omnipresent in Indian food, but I’m still surprised for a half second when I run into it in a recipe from Madras or Chennai, due to this piece of paper that is still toothpicked to some area of my brain.