Curry Page 4
The word individual comes up alongside authentic as a differentiating factor necessary for any Indian restaurant. With store-bought curry pastes and frozen samosas in the kitchen, the Curry Lounge can’t be either, as Ramsay proves by having a tasting in which every dish on the menu is cooked for a blindfold test, and dishes are revealed to be indiscernible from each other. Gordon takes chef Khan to a South Asian grocery and fishes for details on his past, finding out that Khan is from Rajasthan, and his first great culinary influence is his mother’s korma: ‘Not the korma we make here, the sweet one.’ Khan agrees to make his mother’s lamb korma as the special that night. ‘A new dish you can’t get in any run-of-the-mill curry house,’ Gordon tells the staff and audience. ‘Simple, authentic Indian cuisine.’ This dish is the foundational example for the restaurant’s future, along with Ramsay’s usual Kitchen Nightmares tenets of avoiding the microwave, cooking fresh, and so on. This drive to resurrect the authentic, starting in the chef’s homeland and zooming in to his own family home, disregards the complicated and culturally mixed history of korma, adapted as it was from a dish brought to the country by the Mughal Empire, the one-time historical combatants of the Rajput rulers.
The remaking of former pharma worker and current Curry Lounge owner Raz as Chef Patron Arfan Razak, Chef Raz, is a fascinating by-product of the Kitchen Nightmares appearance. The restaurant’s business did turn around, and Raz is one of the few U.K. or U.S. Kitchen Nightmares participants who hasn’t derided his appearance on the show as a terrible mistake. Though he appears to spend no time in the kitchen in the episode, Raz has since re-envisioned his identity and public image, as a 2012 show reel (likely fishing for further TV appearances) shows.
‘We’re probably more famous for having Gordon Ramsay in our restaurant,’ says Raz, ‘but since then, we’ve moved on in our own right … and one thing I’ve learned from Gordon and our customers is what we serve in the restaurant is real Indian food, cooked like my mom and my gran and I cook it, in the restaurant, in the home. And that’s what I’m really passionate about, is to bring real Indian cooked food to the kitchen table of people at home.’
Raz, whose family is from Pakistan, goes on to demo a tandoori salmon, starting his recipe with a story about his grandmother using her skills as a marinator to disguise fish – which the kids hated – as chicken. He explains that he didn’t go to cooking school, and everything he learned in the kitchen was gleaned from his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, and a teenaged summer he spent in Pakistan: ‘With no electricity, no gas, and relearning how to cook Indian food, or what I call Punjabi food, on a gas stove, and bits of wood.’ This incredible melding of terms – Pakistan, Punjabi, Indian – speaks not only to the vastly complicated recent history of the divided north of the subcontinent, but to the difficulty of positioning oneself as authentic in the world of Indian food while still cooking crowd-pleasing classics.
Raz ends his pitch by restating his drive for showing people how to make ‘proper food,’ and using television to do so, making a transparent bid for entry-level celebrity-chef status. His complete lack of presence as a cook in the original Kitchen Nightmares episode is never addressed, nor does he allude to it in any interviews after the fact: the elision of his executive chef Khan from the picture is accomplished through edited cuts of the Kitchen Nightmares footage in the show reel.
The authenticity lesson that Chef Raz seems to have gleaned from Gordon Ramsay is not necessarily how to make a restaurant more authentic, but how to make an Indian more authentic. By adopting the narrative of a family spent absorbing cooking lessons from the matrilineal line, by making references to specific places (Pakistan), even if they may not jibe exactly with the place name appended to the food he is making, Raz actualizes his business and his persona as authentic. But the first step, the Ramsay step, was to prove his engagement with the cuisine by positioning himself as the cook, not just the owner. To enter the narrative of curry and authenticity, you have to pick up that wooden spoon.
Raz is an interesting case: his bid to appeal to the masses through his Create Your Own Curry menu is replaced, by his own admission, with a bid to appeal to the masses by proving himself to be the real thing, by showing that his food is the real thing: just how his mother and grandmother and great-grandmother used to make it.
For Indian expats with memories of the country that aren’t taken from the remembrances, stories, and writings of others, nostalgia is a different affair than it is for first-gens like Raz and me. Critic, novelist, and creative writing professor Amit Chaudhuri’s 2013 memoir Calcutta: Two Years in the City is his chronicle of the place where he was born and spent many months during his primarily Bombay-raised youth. He returned to Calcutta to care for his aging parents, and much of the book pits nostalgia based in the carefully maintained artifices of Chaudhuri’s Indian youth against the contemporary city where he finds himself. Rooted in his everyday routines as a young man in that superheated metropolis, his particular old-country nostalgia deviates from the majority of novels and cookbooks looking back at India. Really, reading Calcutta felt parallel somehow to my infrequent moments of nostalgia for Kelowna, when I feel like driving to the pierogi place where my friends and I had lunch a couple days a week in high school, or remember the attic where we had endless, terrible guitar jams. Chaudhuri’s remembrance of Calcutta is specific to himself and to details of the city’s past, not the imagined qualities of purity or exoticism so often found in stories (or menus) about homeland nostalgia.
In food terms, the ‘continental’ dishes at a particular restaurant (including prawn cocktail with coleslaw) are what Chaudhuri thinks of when he summons the Calcutta of his youth. The truth that he looks for in his return to his hometown has something to do with the modern cosmopolitanism of the city he grew up in: what he defines as a ‘self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.’ There’s vagueness there, but I get it, especially when Chaudhuri compares his lost Calcutta to the time he spent in unpredictable New York in 1979.
Big, dirty cities and the bad things that happen in them are also closely related to our idea of authenticity. That’s part of what small-town kids like me look for in large cities, especially when you grow up a colour other than white in a place that is only white: you want the anonymity that a truly modern place offers. I thought I was vibing with Amit as I read Calcutta, puzzled as I was by his relationship to the city’s food: his interest in it is social, historical, but rarely gastronomical. But when he’s describing a meal he buys for a poor child, vegetable chow mein, ‘“chow” as it’s called in Calcutta, the commonest, most munificent street food,’ he ends his description of the meal with ‘I myself have never tasted it.’ In a work of reportage, this seems like a betrayal. But Calcutta is primarily a memoir, and Chaudhuri’s class alienation from the poor and their habits is on full view, as is his carefully maintained distance from tourists, with their roving curiosities for street food that he thinks couldn’t possibly be as delicious as we hope it should be. But he never tries it.
That chow mein is a crucial street meal in Calcutta speaks to the crush of cultures and influences that converge in immigrant-rich cities. ‘Chinese food has long been Calcutta’s favoured foreign cuisine: it belongs to the eternal, and now paradoxically lost, childhood of the Bengali middle class,’ writes Chaudhuri. In this city, sweet corn soup, prawn cocktail, and kochuris coexist in urban spaces, perhaps not at the same table, but frequently in one day’s worth of snacking. The compressing and absorbing capacities of curry, its ability to borrow Persian techniques, to take up Caribbean chilies and add in fluxing elements to cater to visiting or native tongues, is an acquisitive talent shared by the cities I love to live in and visit. Calcutta, as Chaudhuri describes it, is a city that tastes of its complex history, but is too busy, developing, and cosmopolitan to notice.
Ethnic cookbooks like Mark Bittman’s 2005 The Best Recipes in the World, and others with similar titles (Around the World in 450 Reci
pes, Global Kitchen, and variations on A Cook’s Tour), promise access to the different cultures and countries from your own kitchen. Cities hold this same promise: access to the world through eating, as long as you’re willing to leg it or pay a few cab fares. In Toronto, I have the option of booking expert tour guide and Sri Lankan émigré Suresh Doss, who drives small groups around the exurban area of Scarborough, where the restaurant selection parallels the ethnic makeup of the people who live and work in the city. Karon Liu, the Toronto Star’s food writer, describes the final stop on his tour with Doss: ‘There’s a place for sushi, East African-Indian, Lebanese pastries, Filipino takeout, kebabs, Chinese and pizza. It’s Toronto’s multicultural makeup encapsulated in a single-storey plaza with ample parking.’ It’s a type of access that Chaudhuri, as nostalgic as he is for the dirty cosmopolitanism of Calcutta’s past, seems to have little interest in exploring upon his return to the city.
His disinterest in finding urban food experiences that would strike non-Indian readers as the proper kind of authentic is perhaps due to the cheapness of ingredients and domestic labour. Staple dishes are prepared for him at home by servants, for a minuscule portion of his U.K. writing and teaching income. Sujan Mukherjee, a hotel chef, gives Chaudhuri insight into what Calcutta’s citizens want from his kitchen: ‘“People here don’t want local produce when they come to a five-star hotel,” he tells me. “They want something from far away.”’ Nostalgia for the past doesn’t manifest on the restaurant plate for Calcuttan diners, apparently – an authentic Indian eating experience is meant to be had, and go unnoticed, at home.
Chaudhuri’s chapter dedicated to food in Calcutta directly addresses curry-relevant cooking only in a section where he describes the lost purity of the cuisine at a Chinese restaurant he’d visited the year before. When a dish he enjoyed is completely changed on his second visit, he summons the chef for an explanation, and gets it:
‘Indians not liking those subtle flavours so much. They’re saying what is this ice cream, it’s not sweet. When American or Chinese visitor come, I making food more Chinese way.’
‘Then you should have made it more Chinese way for us,’ I said, barely able to contain my frustration.
‘I’m not knowing, sir,’ he responded wistfully. ‘Next time.’
If, indeed, there is a next time. ‘Kormaisation’ is what this process, integral to Indian cuisine, might well be termed: a suffocation of individual ingredients in the interests of the sauce poured over it, the result of a dozen impossibly unlike condiments brought to a simmer and then turned into this all-purpose national deluge. It’s what had happened to the prawns. That chic, suggestive, but eventually vulnerable taste had perished only a year after it had arrived here.
Chaudhuri’s aristocratic, even snobby, behaviour in public spaces is jarring to read for someone who’s never been part of a certain type of elite: he does acknowledge that the servant/master relationship common between Calcuttan classes is unfair, but says this relationship is only a more personal incarnation of global inequities that he has little control over. His outlook is also singularly colour-blind when it comes to himself and the people he dines with: expecting the chef to distinguish his sophisticated, individual-ingredient-recognizing palate from the mass of Indians who were fans of the ‘all-purpose national deluge’ of sauce, Chaudhuri seems unaware that when he sits down, he doesn’t look Chinese or American. He’s just another upper-class brown man who expects a certain brand of perfection for the rupees he’s about to lay down.
I’m not sufficiently humourless, nor blind enough to excellent prose, to dismiss Chaudhuri’s funny and righteous slam of sauce-rich curries that taste not of any particular spice or ingredient, but of big, dominant flavours: sweet, hot, sour, tangy. It’s the signature of a bad Indian restaurant in the West: the sauce is just a different shade of tikka masala sauce, ladled from a row of Subway-like ingredient buckets labelled with a spiciness index. The deliciousness of a particularized foreign cuisine being bowdlerized to suit the Calcuttan palate is an amazing, natural flip of the evolution of curry, and a strong suggestion that ‘kormaisation’ isn’t something that was done only for British eaters. Tastes, and dishes, are meant to change, even in the old country.
Calcutta’s lack of stability as a place and a past can be applied across India, as it can across any rapidly changing nation in the West. Life in the old country isn’t any more static than it is in the new world, particularly when that old country has been an international hub for centuries, as complex and rich in history as any of its foreign occupiers and current trading partners. Chaudhuri doesn’t find the city that he left: any diasporic subject, or first- or second-generation Indian-Westerner, won’t find a country arrested in an imagination-flecked past: only a roiling variety of shifting cities, villages, and a country dense with the past and future of a billion people.
Writing about the worldwide outbreak of turmeric lattes in 2016, Food52’s Mayukh Sen talks about how he couldn’t be angry about this ‘hideously awful’ drink’s co-opting measures, as it is as ‘foreign to [him] as it is to Gwyneth Paltrow.’ The sheer difference in taste between what’s in his mug at Upstate Stock, a café in Brooklyn, and the drink he grew up knowing as milk with holud, the Bengali word for turmeric, is so vast that it doesn’t register as a theft.
Intriguingly, Sen recounts that the rise of the turmeric latte wasn’t tied to a Western yogic stretch for the authentic healthy alternative remedies of India. The ‘lifestyle media,’ publications ranging from Elite Daily to Bon Appétit, didn’t touch on the fact that stirring turmeric into milk goes back hundreds of years in a certain subcontinental country: it was presented as a tasty, healthy innovation in the hot-drink world. Lifestyle and food writers of Indian origin didn’t want to let this pass, presenting a CliffsNotes history of the beverage in several online pieces, with Mic deputy food editor Khushbu Shah offering this as a concluding note: ‘There’s nothing wrong with enjoying something delicious from another culture. The problem grows when credit isn’t given where credit’s due.’
Sen rightly points to what was missing in this backlash: a sweeping lack of specificity. In these articles explaining the origin of the turmeric latte, this variant on what is called in Hindi haldi doodh, ‘[t]he drink was simply “Indian,” a rhetorical device far too generous and nonspecific.’ He goes on to talk about the
limitations of the ways in which we talk about Indian food, like in the manner food that’s primarily eaten in northern Indian has become a de facto representative of Indian food writ large. It’s a power dynamic bolstered, innocently and accidentally, even by those people who are primed to discuss this drink best: those in India and its diaspora.
The ‘power dynamic’ Sen refers to here is particularly interesting: it’s the Western narrative that has power, I believe he means, and Indian and diasporic writers of Indian origin are backing it up. Diasporic subjects join the discussion promoted by the Western ‘we’ because they haven’t taken note of the minimizing consequences of reducing ‘Indian food’ to a set of dishes that is Northern Indian. But perhaps the writers of these articles, the ones who claim India as their homeland, are indeed North Indian. The American-restaurant dominance of their dishes may seem a matter of course for them simply because they’re not properly versed in the wider cuisine of India.
Or – for the diasporic ones like me, the ones at a farther remove from India than Mayukh Sen, whose parents emigrated from West Bengal – perhaps restaurants shaped their conception of what Indian food is in combination with what was cooked in their homes. The catch-all nature of the term Indian food is as non-specific and potentially offensive as Chinese food encompassing Hakka and Szechuan, or Italian food spanning Neapolitan cuisine and Sicilian – but in the diaspora, it does mean something quite specific, just not specific to India. It’s what Indian food became out here, in the understanding of the West, a West partially constituted of the products of diaspora, including India’s offcuts who ended up in indentured
servitude or clerical postings abroad, like my great-great-grandparents in Mauritius. The term Indian food may be inaccurate, but it’s not tyrannical: it represents a collective, shared brown identity that the products of the diaspora have uneven access to, a collection of modified dishes that touch on shared experience. Just because it’s not authentic doesn’t mean it’s fake: the idea of an encompassing homeland, presented as a recognizable cuisine, can be comforting even if it fails to be accurate or entirely inclusive.
Sen’s discussion with Indian cookbook and cooking-show maven Madhur Jaffrey is another wonderfully telling slice of a cross-generational quest for the authentic. Jaffrey, mentioned earlier as Jhumpa Lahiri’s textual kitchen instructor in the arts of Indian food, has been a visible face of Indian cookery for the Western home since the mid-sixties. When Jaffrey talks to Sen about Indian food not having yet had its American moment, he replies that he doesn’t understand what she can mean, evidenced simply by the incredible proliferation of Indian restaurants, even if most of them do serve specifically North Indian food. Jaffrey clarifies:
She wasn’t talking about that Indian food. Little did I know that this woman, six decades my elder and from a completely different part of India than that of my parents, was, in fact, talking about the Indian food I always knew. It’s the food that’s spiritually similar to what Rinku Bhattacharya writes about in her Spice Chronicles: bhaate-bhaat (quite literally, rice and rice), maacher jhol (fish curry), dishes crafted by hands like my mother’s, more hearty and less rich than the ones you’d find in most Indian restaurants.