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PHOTO: SHANKER CHAKRAVARTHY

In Chennai to investigate Tamil Nadu’s food traditions and heritage, Canadian Chef Cameron’s meeting restaurateurs, chefs and more traditional guardians of food culture, such as home cooks. He’s also on his never ending quest to rediscover old recipes and thus design new ones. Which makes it very difficult to keep him out of the kitchen. Any kitchen.

“I actually studied to be an International business man with interests in environment studies and developmental studies,” he grins, adding, “My interest in social justice and the environment is tied up with the idea of food being part of a community.” Studying local old-fashioned methods of cooking, he talks of why their essence must be preserved. “In this globalised time we need to find a way to keep these traditions alive. I’m not saying we should not be globalised. It’s about adapting.”

Adaptation really seems to be the core of Cameron’s mission statement. Trained at the prestigious Canadian Stratford Chef School, known for producing ‘thinking chefs,’ he has spent a good part of his professional life adapting food, making it contemporary, stylish and most importantly, relevant to the context it’s served in. A big believer in the significance of mealtimes and the power of food to bring people together, his current foray into South Indian food is as much an attempt to enrich his repertoire, as a quest to document fading recipes and ideas.

“Coorg has coffee, right? And cardamom. So why hasn’t anyone thought of combining the two to create a kulfi?” he asks. Coffee cardamom kulfi might just feature on a future diplomatic dinner menu. For New Delhi-based Cameron who is married to the Canadian First Secretary for Political and Economic Affairs, Ayesha Rekhi, currently creates menus for the Canadian and Australian embassies, as well as the European Commission. And bridge-building menus are his forte. “In a diplomatic setting you need a certain type of — I wouldn’t call it conservatism — but it shouldn’t be too far out,” he says, adding decisively, “It can’t be avant garde.” Stating that “Good food makes everyone pleasant.” The solution is a carefully creative, reasonably conservative yet colourfully imaginative merging of recipes. “I would make perogies (an Ukrainian dumpling) and stuff them with an aloo methi filling. So someone comes and sees that, and its familiar — and at the same time unusual, in a comfortable way,” he says.

This style of cooking was certainly influenced by his previous jobs. He worked in Domus, a restaurant in Ottawa, Canada run by John Taylor, who fanatically promoting local ingredients. “If the vegetable vendor brought us a crate of red peppers from Italy, we would send it back.”

Cameron went on to work at Rideu Hall, working residence of the Canadian Governor General — the ceremonial head of state. “The focus was on promoting Canada — so when we had visitors we would try and do a meal that somehow created a connection between the country they were from, and Canada.” With home grown fruit, heirloom vegetables, more than 400 speciality cheeses and wild ingredients like cloud berries, black locust flower syrup and huckleberries, the chefs often end up creating edible art. “When we had Bhutanese delegates we used Bhutanese chillies and made a chocolate chilli dessert. An Indian menu included ‘woodlands curry using local herbs and wild Canadian ginger.” Or maple walnut kulfi.

In India his inventiveness is not limited to black-tie banquets. He also trains Indian domestic cooks in world cuisine, for not just foreigners but also NRIs or wealthy Indians. “Their palates have changed,” he says, adding that they want their cooks to be able to make everything from risotto to moussaka.

And he just wrapped up work as a food stylist on the film “What’s cooking Stella?” made by Dilip Mehta and co-produced by Deepa Mehta (director of the trilogy “Fire”, “Earth” and “Water”).

Starring Seema Biswas, the plot’s startlingly close to Cameron’s life. “Sometimes uncomfortably so,” he laughs, adding “Deepa Mehta and her brother Dilip are family friends. He used our family as a template: it’s a story about a Canadian diplomat married to a Caucasian Canadian Chef. They come to India with their daughter.” (Cameron and Ayesha have a four-year-old daughter.) Cameron adds, ‘It’s about how he asks their South Indian Cook to be his guru.”

Does a warm payasam sauce with steamed banana pudding follow? Well, you’ll just have to wrangle an invite to the premier. Or an embassy dinner.

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