There is something about food books. Every time I read one, I find a thread that ties it to my life. I think that is why we all enjoy reading food books written by people we do not know, and about cuisines that we have never tried. It’s always nice to join the dots that connect us. These thoughts struck me once again when I was reading Nandita Haksar’s The Flavours of Nationalism: Recipes for Love, Hate and Friendship .
I chuckled to myself when I read the introduction. Haksar, a human rights lawyer, recalls how in the early 1980s she had gone to Amritsar to attend her first human rights conference. The food, she recalls, was fabulous: “I loved the dal makhani, and the rotis from the tandoor were soft…” They were almost done with lunch when she overheard a delegate from Andhra Pradesh ask one of the local Punjabis if there was any rasam.
“Having been brought up with the Nehruvian idea that we must appreciate the cultures and cuisines of others, I was outraged… And then I saw the humour in the situation and laughed. That was when I thought I would write a book called Rasam in Amritsar ,” she writes.
Tangy kheer?
I was reminded of a similar incident at a political conference in Chennai in the 70s. There were delegates from Haryana who looked very excited when they saw the buffet table for lunch. “Kheer,” they said, and rushed towards the bowl with the thick, milky white mixture in it. They helped themselves generously from the bowl, and then looked confused when they had eaten their first spoonful. It wasn’t sweet, but sour. It wasn’t kheer, but curd rice.
I shall tell you more about the book in the coming weeks, but right now I am going to focus on a chapter called ‘Meat-eating Brahmins from Kashmir’. Haksar’s Kashmiri Pandit family moved to the plains of what they called Hindustan in the early years of the 20th century. Their cuisine, over time, added flavours from the cities that had become their home — Allahabad, Lucknow and Delhi.
Meaty desserts
Meat, of course, was an essential part of Kashmiri Pandit cuisine. Her father, former diplomat and Indira Gandhi’s trusted advisor P.N. Haksar, was very proud of the vast variety of meat dishes of Kashmiri cuisine — “Rogan josh, pasandas, goli, koftas, kabargah, chuste (goat’s intestines), gurde kapure (goat’s kidney and testes), bheja or brain”.
“In fact, there was even a dessert cooked with goat’s meat called khubani, which means apricot. I remember tasting it at a wedding when I was a small child and the memory has stayed, not so much of the taste, but of the idea of a meaty dessert,” she writes.
That reminds me of a meat dessert the northern plains are known for. I first had mutanjan at a wedding. A Muslim friend’s son was getting married, and the table was laden with delicious meaty dishes. Among them was the sweet dish, cooked with rice, mutton and sugar.
The food that I grew up on, of course, was vastly different from what Kashmiri Pandits ate. There was, however, one connecting thread — ghee or oil. Our diet in western Uttar Pradesh was vegetarian, tempered with dollops and dollops of ghee. Likewise, Haksar recalls reading in an old recipe book written by a Kashmiri chef that if the oil on top of a dish was not one finger deep, it was not a proper Kashmiri dish.
“As I grow older, I sometimes long to taste our traditional Kashmiri food. Sometime the longing is almost painful. It is not only the food, but also the smells from the kitchen that I long for…”
I know what she means. Sometimes (just sometimes, mind you) I feel that way about ghee-laced urad ki dal.
The writer likes reading and writing about food as much as he does cooking and eating it. Well, almost .
