Schools of cooking: bland, aqua, off-the-shoulder...

I remember my aunt’s manicured hands assembling a dish with nary a frosted pink nail chipped

August 17, 2019 04:12 pm | Updated 04:12 pm IST

Getty images

Getty images

Kitchen sounds and their stock of spices and aromatics are directly connected to each other. And therefore to the food that’s fashioned there. Think of a kitchen, especially an Indian one, and then remember the sounds and smells that emanate. My masi , mother’s younger sister, affectionately mocked my mother’s kitchen for its loudness and smells/ flavours.

If dry vegetables were being cooked, you could first detect the fragrance of heating oil, then of a spice, maybe cumin, maybe broken coriander seeds, and maybe turmeric, and then the faint sizzle of a moist vegetable hitting the oil. If it was pumpkin, you could choke from the vapours of a dry red chilli being fried, then relax with the flavours of mustard seeds, fenugreek and nigella. (Unfortunately spelling them in English seems to reduce the flavour.)

If it was a korma, you could smell sliced onions being fried — and they smelt different from chopped or ground. Later there would be the sound of ladles stirring, the odour of frying garlic and ginger, the steamy waft of simmering spices, the tang of yoghurt bubbling; and eventually the scraping sound of masala being collected off the edges, the furious hiss of water being poured into a hot pan, the pounding of garam masala and then the fragrance of cardamom and cloves rising from the curry.

A lot of this was preceded by the thud and crunch of a sil-batta, but even if that were to be ignored, the sounds of the actual cooking announced the process.

Just salt and turmeric

Masi, on the other hand, a great Western cook, did her Indian cooking in non-stick pans and pressure cookers. Her repertoire of spices was basic; this might be an exaggeration, but I think it was limited to salt and turmeric. Sometimes pepper was sprinkled on top. She didn’t need karahis and paltas: you never heard or smelt what was being cooked. Her Western cooking was very 60s, very à la mode, all quiche Lorraine, salads with mayonnaise and picture-perfect soufflés; and her Indian belonged to what Anita, queen of the mot juste , calls the “pat-pat school of cooking”. Ingredients were sautéed delicately in shallow flat-bottomed pans and nudged gently with a wooden spatula.

I remember her set of nesting enamelled metal pans which predated non-stick kitchenware, and her beautifully manicured hands assembling a dish with nary a drop of oil on her clothes nor a frosted pink nail chipped. The meal was light and pretty.

Then there’s the Aqua school of cooking, which my father’s family excelled in. As my mother cruelly said, they believed in “pani ka chhaunk”. I didn’t know anything about cooking then, in my childhood, but I do remember how it tasted. Everything was wet, some shade of khaki, and had no fragrance — I think they added salt, though. Oil was invisible, so I suppose it was healthy. What they did, I think, was to put roughly chopped vegetables all together into a pateela, hold it under a running tap, throw in a pinch of salt, and set it to boil. So potatoes, cauliflower, lauki, carrots, anything, were all cut any old how and “cooked”. The family were great believers in homemade butter, and to this day, my father remembers with some yearning their plain dhuli urad ki dal with no chhaunk but a large dollop of white butter. If you ask me, I could take it or leave it.

An offshoot of the Aqua is what my brother called the off-the-shoulder style of cooking. In this, any dish can be made easily, particularly in a pressure cooker. An aunt of mine would make chicken curry on special occasions and it had badly hacked pieces of chicken, roughly chopped onions that floated around the gravy, “adding texture,” no garlic or ginger and no spices. Turmeric yes, I think. Not even the ornery cumin and coriander. Garam masala? Perish the thought.

The chicken was probably cooked in a few litres of water for a few hours, so the meat was in shreds, floating in the yellow water, and certainly off-the- bone. You could eat it even if you’d forgotten your dentures at home. The same aunt gave me a recipe for gajar ka halwa. She pressure-cooked chopped carrots with water until they were soft. Maybe she dried off the water. Then she sprinkled sugar and grated khoya on top. She said that the entire process took a few minutes.

She asked me triumphantly how I made gajar ka halwa, so I changed the subject because I take half a day. Another favourite of that household is spinach au gratin. To deconstruct, I think they boil the spinach in water, don’t drain it, sprinkle a teaspoon of grated Amul cheese on top and, if economy is in order, it’s paneer, then warm it under a grill. Not a hint of nutmeg, cinnamon or crisped breadcrumbs.

Chilli power

I don’t have a problem with low oil, few spices, and tidy, quiet kitchens that open for business a few minutes a day. But I do object to people cutting meat and vegetables with indifference, regardless of how it affects cooking time. More strongly, I don’t understand why they equate flavour with chillies. Or, to be more accurate, equate spices with chillies. I realise chillies, especially to the uninitiated, can drown out other tastes. But what about other spices? Can the flavour of khada masala, whole spices fried in ghee, or the almost citrusy fragrance of broken coriander seeds, the sweetness of roasted garlic or the garden-freshness of mint be equated with the heat of chillies? So the “justification” for dull cooking with the defence that they don’t use chillies doesn’t wash.

The complete opposite of the bland school of cooking is a dish that I’ve been thinking of for the last few days because its inventor has been on my mind. He said it was the most authentic Kashmiri rogan josh, but because of the delicious liberties he took with it, I renamed it. And if some readers remember this from a column here in 2011, please bear with me. It’s almost as special as Rahul himself.

SUNDAY RECIPE

Rahul Josh

Serves 6

INGREDIENTS

To be stone-ground

20 cloves garlic

2-inch piece fresh ginger

6-10 red chillies, seeded and soaked

10 cloves

8 green cardamoms, outer skin removed

1/2 nutmeg, grated

1 blade of mace

2-inch stick cinnamon

1 tsp peppercorns

1 tsp mustard seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds

Pea-sized lump of asafoetida

1/2 cup mustard oil

1/2 tsp turmeric

1 kg mutton, including meat from foreleg and chops

Salt

1 small onion, chopped fine

2 tbsp yoghurt, beaten smooth

METHOD

1. Grind spices together on a stone sil batta, sprinkling water occasionally, until a smooth paste is made. Scrape off the sil and keep aside. Wash the sil with a little water and reserve the water.

2. Heat oil in a large, heavy bottomed pan and and sauté the ground spices for a couple of minutes.

3. Add turmeric and the mutton pieces; cook over medium heat until brown. Take care to keep scraping bottom and sides of pan and sprinkle a little of the reserved water now and then to prevent sticking and burning.

4. When meat is medium brown, add salt and onion and continue the cooking-scraping process. Add yoghurt and cook till absorbed and lightly browned. The whole process should take almost an hour.

5. Check whether meat is tender. If not, add a little water, cover pan and simmer till done. The final dish should not be watery, so add water as needed, a little at a time.

From the once-forbidden joy of eggs to the ingratitude of guests, the writer reflects on every association with food. vasundharachauhan9@gmail.com

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