My friend Krishna is a much revered climate scientist, but I admire him more for the jambalaya that he occasionally cooks for us. It’s a delicious Louisiana rice dish cooked in broth, with all kinds of vegetables, meat, and fish. I love it — and had been salivating over it ever since I heard a song called ‘Jambalaya’.
‘Jambalaya, crawfish pie and fillet gumbo,’ the song — written by American country singer Hank Williams, and performed, among others, by Fats Domino and Creedence Clearwater Revival — goes. Gumbo, as you might know, is another Louisiana dish, a thick stew full of the good stuff.
Porcupine pie
I had been thinking about songs and food for a while, ever since I read that Neil Diamond had announced his retirement from touring. I was immediately reminded of a puzzler of a song that became a big hit when we all wore bellbottoms and chains with ‘peace’ lockets around our necks.
The song was ‘Porcupine Pie’, and I read recently that American comic Tom Scharpling had called it the worst song in the history of mankind. I’m not too sure about that though, because I quite like the lyrics, enigmatic though they may be:
‘Porcupine pie, porcupine pie, porcupine pie/ Vanilla soup, a double scoop please/ No, maybe I won’t, maybe I won’t, maybe I will/ The tutti fruit with fruity blue cheese.’
I like the words not because I’ve ever eaten a porcupine pie, but because I’ve been a closet fan of the tutti frutti ice cream, ever since I had my first bite of the mixed-fruit dessert at a restaurant called the New Nanking in New Delhi, way back in the sixties. The ice cream figures in Little Richard’s song of the same name, too. ‘Tutti Frutti, aw rutti,’ he sings — repeating it several times!
Quite a few of the English songs I grew up on have something to do with food. Many instrumental numbers, too, have a link with food. If you were listening to radio in the ’70s and ’80s , you couldn’t have missed a peppy number called ‘Popcorn’. The instrumental was such that it made you think of corns popping in hot butter.
Fruits, for some inexplicable reason, tend to figure in songs and titles. An instrumental number that I am greatly fond of — Herbie Hancock’s ‘Cantaloupe Island’ — always evokes an image of a ripe and juicy melon. And Harry Belafonte’s ‘Day-O’ conjures a picture of dock workers loading bananas on boats through the night, waiting to be counted in the morning so that they can go back home.
‘Come, Mister Tally Man, tally me banana/ (Daylight come and me wan’ go home),’ he sings.
I guess food figures more often in songs that have their origins in the fruit-and-fish rich Caribbean islands. Belafonte’s ‘Jamaica Farewell’ says ‘akey rice, salt fish are nice’, and I am sure they are.
Hindi songs, strangely, aren’t quite imaginative when it comes to food. Roti figures in a few songs, as does ‘channa jor garam’. A young friend tells me about a song that I am happy to say I haven’t heard.
‘ Idli appam sambhar khao, Quick Gun Murugun ke gun gao ’ — eat idli, appam and sambhar, and sing paeans to Quick Gun Murugan, it says. Well, I don’t know about the second part, but certainly endorse the first half. Let’s have some idli, sambar and appam. And while we are at it, let’s listen to some fruity tracks.
The writer who grew up on ghee-doused urad dal and roti, now likes reading and writing about food as much as he enjoys cooking and eating. Well, almost.
