It’s strange what you miss in different places, especially in terms of food. Travelling from one place to another means arriving in the particular culinary pleasures offered by that destination, but it also means that a new sector of deprivation opens up simultaneously. If you happen to be visiting somewhere for a short period, then this is fine: you enjoy the local foodings in all their pomp and peculiarity, and then you move on before the lack of this or that makes itself felt. The problem arises when you go somewhere for a stretch, say, for a couple of months, and bits of your taste-bud operating system begin to experience small glitches.
Within India, coming home to Calcutta, I can find some of the best variations of north Indian dishes, the vegetarian items as well as the biryanis, kebabs and the meat and chicken gravy dishes, but I can never find the perfect naan or lachha parantha that I get in Delhi or its environs. Vice versa, there was no question of getting decent Bangla food in either Delhi or Bombay, barring enclaves like Chittaranjan Park. This much is easy to understand: while some taste-things manage to travel from their home base, others don’t. While some foods drop roots (including supply chains for ingredients that need to be brought from the original territory), others find it impossible (example, think how idli-dosai have become equally ‘authentic’ all over India).
Half a meal
The next thing that’s also more or less understandable is what happens when you carry with you some precious food to eat far away from its point of origin. So, you come home to your warm tropical city and quickly refrigerate the four kinds of French cheese you’ve brought back. You call friends over, they bring wine, bread, crackers, and you open the cheese. There is the pleasure of serving and eating foodstuff that are once again rare, but there’s something missing. Maybe it’s the exact bread that goes with the cheese or maybe it’s the taste of the wine, but you end up feeling that you’ve had a sort of half or three-quarters meal, with bits missing in the middle.
Flip it around and things abroad can get similarly strange. There is the well-worn joke which starts with the question, “Hey, where do you get the best Indian food in Paris?” The answer goes: “Head for Gare du Nord, take a Eurostar train to London King’s Cross, come out and turn right. Drummond Street with its desi eating joints is right there.” Paris may have some of the best food in the world, but a cosmopolitan hub of international cuisine it is not, especially as far as affordable subcontinental food is concerned. If Paris is lacking in this regard, Berlin is even worse. The city is now full of boards proclaiming ‘Indisches Restaurant’, but if you’re a desi, you want to avoid most of these. Spending some time in Berlin, I got lucky: around the corner from where I was staying was a small Indian restaurant run by a Bangladeshi man who spoke fluent, idiomatic Hindi. We struck up a cordial relationship and my friend would make sure the dishes he served me and my companions were as fresh and non-industrial as possible. While far from great desi khana , coupled with my own cooking this was good enough to tide over my home food cravings.
Germany, a cornucopia of food
However, as I kept sternly reminding myself, I wasn’t in Berlin to miss Indian food. Germany has some of the best bread, great cheese and sausages, and, along with the Czechs and Belgians, simply the best beer on the planet. Besides, the huge Turkish presence means a wealth of doner and “kebap” shops; other West Asian and Asian populations provide a whole variety of reasonably priced non-European grub. Added to this, there are, of course, the usual suspects of variously priced burger joints and purveyors of pizza and pasta. If you want a change from the beer, European and non-European wine is widely available at much cheaper prices than in the U.K. and certainly back home. All in all, Berlin (and a couple of other parts of Germany that I visited) is a cornucopia of food and drink. Nevertheless, after nearly two months, I began to feel some some sense of missing that I couldn’t quite place.
Coming back from Berlin to London, one of the first things I found myself buying were sandwiches from the supermarket: egg and cress, bacon, lettuce, and tomato, and even the very German pastrami and sauerkraut . Among the first places in which I found myself eating out were my favourite pizza joints. Despite coming from one of the world’s best pork-producing countries, I found myself loading packets of English bacon for breakfast at home. Soon, I will come away from all this foreign food. At home await both ghastly pizza delivery fraudsters and the wonderfully chilli-hot Chinese sausages from Kalimpong, both extortionately priced Indian wine and the winter gifts of sarson ka saag and missi roti , both the crap psuedo Chinese and Thai food and Gujju Bajri no rotlo and gawl (gur) and the Bong luchi and kosha maangsho . No doubt after a month of so of quaffing aloo parantha in Delhi, or idli-dosai all over the home country, I’ll find myself double missing the sandwiches in London and the lovely, dark bread, cheese and salami in Berlin.
