Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  My grandmother was not only a remarkable family meal-giver but she was also a restaurateur in Rye, a cobbled tourist trap in East Sussex, in which area once lived, at the same remarkable historical moment, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, and Henry James. Just around the corner from Lamb House, where “the squire” wrote The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, is the birthplace of another Rye writer: Shakespeare’s collaborator, John Fletcher.

  Once upon a time, John Fletcher was spoken of as a family friend, though I’m sure none of us had ever read one of his plays: Two Noble Kinsmen wasn’t on the syllabus at my school. And in Fletcher’s House, a crooked, oak-beamed Tudor building with creaking stairs, my great-grandmother opened the Platonic ideal of the English tea shop, packed with antiques (for sale), Sussex trugs (look them up), musical boxes (wound often), fires (always roaring), and a ghost (rumored but reluctant). This sounds like imagination, but memory assures me that’s how it actually was. The window overflowed with homemade cakes and imported fudge. Those cakes—almond slice, flapjacks, meringues, date slice, sponge cakes of every variety—were made in the kitchen by my mother, and when I wasn’t getting in her way, or killing wasps in the outside larder where the sweet things were kept, or being sent down to pick up the fresh clotted cream when it arrived by train from Devon, or getting the meringue mixture to the perfect consistency, or idly twiddling my thumbs waiting for puberty or Rye Record and Denim to open (whichever came first), I watched her. And then ate the cakes.

  There’s a probability that I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Fletcher’s House. It was there that my grandfather met my grandmother (he left his hat in the restaurant on purpose so he could go back and see her) and through the window that my father saw my mother (he wrote a letter to “the girl in the lilac gingham dress,” asking her to meet him at the sluice gates.) Later, when I somewhat grew up, I worked there on my holidays, spending my first wage packet at my favorite shop, on records rather than the denim: David Bowie’s Lodger, Roxy Music’s Manifesto, and The Cars. I noticed that the cakes were less appealing than the young women of Rye who served them. But I was away at school most of the time. Although the world of tea shops was full of new promise, it would not provide me with a future wife.

  * * *

  So the family was in food; food was in the family. And in Noe Valley, in San Francisco, 1994, family is probably what I, a young professional (of a sort) far from home, wanted: the bright picture of the chicken dopiaza did it for me. It was time to cook. The recipe required onions (obviously, hundreds), potatoes, and chicken, but also cardamom pods, ghee, whole red chilies, garam masala, turmeric, and cinnamon stick—nothing too exotic now, but at the time an “ethnic” store seemed the only answer. I knew one within walking distance, and there I went with my first-ever recipe-based shopping list, entertaining misguided thoughts like, I have to buy that whole thing of cumin just for one teaspoon, and I’ll probably never use it again.

  The first thing that hit me was the smell, so pungent and exotic that it actually wormed within me and caused a sweet, powdery belch. I’ll never forget it: asafetida, an Iranian seasoning with a powerfully strong aroma used (ironically) as an antiflatulent. The scale of the store, the burlap bags of rice and sacks of nuts, the unfussy Ziploc presentation of curry leaves, the bricks of frozen breads, and the buckets of ghee reminded me of the jolly days at the cash-and-carry in Hastings where my grandmother shopped wholesale and I bought that copy of The Everly Brothers’ Greatest Hits on vinyl for forty-nine pence. Indian food stores have brought me not only ever-more-obscure spices but also an immense amount of cheerful children’s jewelry and some wonderful music—there’s always a dusty pile of CDs and cassettes to get your teeth into. On that first trip, I was unable to resist a Bollywood sound track with an amazing cover of a sexy cricketer.

  At home, the cooking took about two hours longer than I had thought it would and the water didn’t reduce properly. I loved the preparation, little knowing that I was surrendering to a life of onion chopping. The ends (the picture!) justified the means: the division and measurement of the spices, their slow frying and satisfactory blending, the dissection of tomato, the onion tears. Immediately I was doing new things: mixing powders to make paste, cutting a tomato from the inside out, squeezing onions through cheesecloth to extract the juice—I felt crafty. The evening was a success. I hung out in the kitchen a lot longer than I might otherwise have done. I probably listened to some good music. The curry was delicious. Conclusion: do it again.

  So for the first time in my life I bought a cookbook, and for the only time in my life, I mail-ordered it from a Sunday magazine at a discount. Thus arrived Camellia Panjabi’s 50 Great Curries of India, the cookbook that changed my life. Originally, it was a large book, issued in 1994 (surely the very week the magazine was puffing it), and the latest edition (2005) is a handy Reader’s Digest–size version that sensibly retains the same format. And what a format!—those magnificent full-color photos illustrating every dish (surely a prerequisite if you want to convert a noncook) with clear instructions beneath precise descriptions of each curry.

  My original copy is now a relic, everything a secondhand book shouldn’t be: bowed, splayed, splattered, unbound, spine nonexistent, contents shaken, corners folded, with extensive marginalia. Certain pages now offer a unique scratch-and-sniff “taster” for each curry, as well as brusque suggestions: “Do this first!” Very few pages aren’t a mess of ticks and crosses, reconfigured for the doubling or tripling of recipes, flecked with gravy of varying colors (often only a Pantone or two away from the shade in the accompanying picture), decorated with a few futile corrections of errata.

  For argument’s sake, let’s say I’ve cooked every curry. I haven’t: the mixed dried fruit curry always eluded me (I couldn’t see the point) and the soya kofta curry was always bottom of the league, close to relegation. It’s all good—the meat dishes, the vegetarian options, the side dishes, the surprises (omelet curry, watermelon curry)—and beautifully written, particularly the introduction (“The Philosophy of Indian Food”), its delineation of the various spices and other vital components (thickening, coloring, souring) of the recipes.

  Currying is a good entrée to cookery because you don’t have to be too careful. There’s a certain finickiness required to sort out the amounts of the spices and the order in which they hit the oil, but once you’re cooking, it’s very straightforward. You mustn’t hurry a curry, though: you stir slowly on a low heat so the spices do the right things. It’s a generous meal both in its preparation and in its presentation, the way the finished dish (witness that original picture) welcomes you in. There’s enough for everyone. If, say, the editor of this anthology rings up the day before the big curry get-together and says, “Is it OK if my father- and-mother-in-law come, too?” you say, “Sure!” It’s a curry. There’ll be plenty.

  So although a good curry does not require endless attention, it does require patience. The upshot, for those who prefer Instant Korma, is that the curry rewards patience. For me, the timing was right. Increasingly, I’d found it hard to make time to listen to music (an important part of being a musician or a human) or sometimes simply to stop working. Cooking became an ideal time to open a bottle of wine, listen to music, tune in and turn off, relax, think. Currying eased me into classical music, not to mention the longer-form rock music (still so needlessly disdained but shortly to be making a massive comeback).

  Curry changed my life, man. Before I got into the slow bhuna, I had never, for example, appreciated Yes, let alone their controversial epic Tales from Topographic Oceans. Actually, the band’s flamboyant keyboardist, Rick Wakeman, who for his own reasons disliked that album, was miserable during the Topographic Oceans live tour of 1973–4—impossible to believe but true. He turned to curry, a story quoted in Chris Welch’s Close to the Edge: The Story of Yes: “It was at Manchester Free Trade Hall and I was sitting there bored rigid. I’d sunk quite a few pints while we were play
ing away and lager does have a remarkable mental effect on people. Normally after eight or nine pints the word ‘curry’ flashes into your brain … The next thing I know [keyboard tech John Cleary] is handing me up a chicken curry, a few poppadoms and an onion Bhaji. In fairness I’d never actually planned for him to go and get a curry … Jon [Anderson] came over … and he did have a poppadom. But I don’t think Steve Howe was very amused.” That was the beginning of the end for Rick Wakeman in Yes, whereas curries were just the beginning of Yes for me.

  The differences between the original and the new pocket-size edition of 50 Great Curries of India are informative. Since it was a photo that first drew me in, I feel bound to note that a few of the pictures have been replaced. I suppose that, rather than their having lost the original plates, the preparation of the new edition prompted, for those putting the book together, questions like, “Does the meat cooked with cardamom look anything like that when you cook it?” Answer: “Nothing like it. I can see tomatoes in this real one.” So they took a new picture. On the other hand, some recipes have been changed but their photos left intact: the Goa pork vindaloo has been replaced (as though by a caring parent who didn’t want you to know your pet had died and installed its brother while you were away at school) by an almost exact replica, a Goa lamb vindaloo, making the new edition completely pig free. A note reads: “This dish is equally good using pork or beef.” Good to know because they didn’t bother to replace its photo. (Are all food photos so deceptive? It could be any meat in there!)

  In the new edition, the signature curry, given pride of place on the back cover, is the white chicken korma—supporting the view of my wife, Abbey, that it is the best. However, the 50 Great Curries are not the same 50 Great Curries. And why would they be, when the favorite dish in England is no longer fish-and-chips? Tastes change. I miss the kebab curry, but perhaps “kebab” nowadays seems a little infra dig—it’s been replaced by the nobler lamb korma pilaf. Lamb with plums (one of the most interesting dishes Panjabi has encountered) had to be included, but what was wrong with plain old, tasty minced lamb with coriander (which I once made with beef by mistake)? It’s hard to regret the absence of the soya kofta curry, however. I’m sure it was the least great of the curries: in my case, equally least, though the mixed dried fruit curry remains. All the changes have, I’m sure, been made in the interests of perfection: the chicken korma with coriander has melted into a green chicken korma, and the red chicken curry is now more specifically a Parsee red chicken curry. Three new shrimp recipes reflect “the growing popularity of seafood in India,” although there is no evidence of the Chinese-influenced chicken Manchurian (the current most popular dish in India, according to Panjabi’s revised introduction, its chicken tikka masala, if you like).

  You notice the little things when you know a book as intimately as I know 50 Great Curries of India. It’s my bible, my Mahabharata, and I’m like some medieval textual scholar, a Magister Theologiae, or one of those crazy friars in The Name of the Rose, except that rather than dying when I touch the ink on each page, I just lick my fingers and move on. Over the past fifteen years of my cookery, various of the curries have become associated with a specific person: Lamb with turnips, with the writer and sex activist Susie Bright; Sindhi curry, with my favorite vegetarian musician Scott McCaughey; chicken korma with coriander leaves, with Bruce Springsteen and his mother, Adele. (I even remember the date of that meal: December 1, 1995, the day after Springsteen’s Tom Joad solo gigs at the Berkeley Community Theater. Oddly enough, I woke the next morning to read in a music blog that Springsteen had jammed with his old friend Joe Ely at a San Francisco club the night before. I knew he hadn’t, but I had to check the mountain of washing up to be sure.) If the Springsteens were to come again today, I’m not sure I’d cook the chicken korma with coriander leaves’ replacement, green chicken korma. It looks a little neon.

  The first meal I ate with my wife (it was our first date: I offered to cook—times had changed) involved a football of yogurt dripping from cheesecloth hung from one of her kitchen cabinets. The meal and the evening were nearly ruined by the arrival—with a bottle of wine and boyfriend troubles—of her friend who sat on the floor directly between me in the kitchen and Abbey in the sitting room. The cooking outlasted the bottle of wine—patience rewarded again.

  My Indophilia did not initially curry favor with Abbey, who, like many Americans, did not favor curry. The standard restaurant version—cubed pieces of meat cooked separately and then drenched in sauce—is simply not very good. It is as far from Indian curry as KFC is from soul food. Before too long, however, she was giving 50 Great Curries to her best friend as a birthday present. M’lud, I rest my case.

  I cooked only curries for a few years, but man cannot live by naan alone, and over the years I graduated to other fussier, no less delicious types of cuisine. It is only occasionally, when I have been brandishing Fergus Henderson’s cookbooks—for example, The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating— a bit too flamboyantly (with, for example, a tongue brining in the bath and some ox knuckles boiling on the stove), that I have pictured my wife as the long-suffering Chief Inspector Oxford, played by Alec McCowen, in Hitchcock’s Frenzy. Oxford’s wife (played by Vivien Merchant) has been on a gourmet cookery course, and she uses the inspector as a guinea pig for her outré creations while they discuss the more gruesome points of the case and he yearns for some meat and potatoes. Mind you, she does help him solve the murder.

  Now, married with two kids, I cook every night. (The evening of writing this essay, some tuna from Rick Stein’s Complete Seafood. I find Stein very good company.) Who could have predicted that cooking for an hour or two, which once upon a time seemed like unnecessary and undesirable extra work, is in fact an ideal way to find peace and quiet? It’s a good time to stop working (on this essay, in this case), to turn on the music, relax, and open a bottle. But nowadays there are the two little children to look after, and one doesn’t want to hide behind the stove as an excuse for avoiding more pressing parental duties, just as my great-grandfather locked himself in the toilet. But it’s nice, while your wife is getting on so naturally with those tasks that are her biological imperative, to carve a place in the center of things, in the kitchen, next to the playroom, banging pans around, getting the odd “certified organic oven crinkle” out of the freezer for the less advanced palate. In fact, one of the advantages of my becoming a cook is that throughout the pregnancies and the births, we never really stopped eating what we liked. Somehow there was always time. And dinner parties are better than ever—we have a kind of Jack-Sprat-and-his-wife philosophy where she does the baking and desserts, in which I have no interest at all. I’m sure that’s atavistic: cavemen didn’t fiddle around with spun sugar.

  When I hear debate about why so many men cook nowadays, I have sympathy for the suggestion that it is because they want to be like their mothers. I like to wake up every morning and have my first thought be: What are we having for dinner tonight? There are things to get from the freezer, stray items to be gathered at the store. But of course, our mothers didn’t follow recipes: they just cooked. Just like their mothers, they knew how. I don’t. I love following recipes. I’m good at it and, to my mother’s amusement, painstakingly accurate. (She didn’t even have measuring spoons until I foisted them on her one Christmas.) I don’t feel the need to express myself beyond the creation of the food itself. I only add or extract something if I feel there has been some catastrophic printing error (“Add two teaspoons of silt.”) If I don’t like a particular recipe, I won’t try to improve it next time. I’ll just move on. If there are two bad ones, I throw the book away.

  Although I don’t understand the science of it, I like the alchemy: the recombination of the base elements in the crucible, the “chymical” wedding or whatever. You’d be surprised at my ignorance of what’s actually happening. It’s all a complete mystery, apart from the function of salt (which makes things saltier). And is there anything better than the sun shining thro
ugh the Mason jars of spices on the shelf? Or anything worse than trying to label the jars?

  When I started to cook, when that picture inspired me to think of cookery as an amusing possibility, part of the appeal was the vision of a future where I could host large, intergenerational dinner parties that would resound with clinking glasses and reckless, interruptive conversation, where no one paid quite enough attention to how much work the chef had done, but he was at least excused the washing up—that species of family get-together that I was so sorely missing in America. And looking back however many years since I first cooked chicken dopiaza, I realize that that’s now exactly what I have. Cities and situations have changed. It just required a lot of patience.

  While writing this, I noticed in Camellia Panjabi’s introduction to the chicken dopiaza recipe, “Bengal is a region where people are particular about their food and many Bengali men cook superbly.” A coincidence, I’m sure.

  “My wife is about to have a baby, so I was wondering if you could make me work late for the next eighteen years or so.”

  Recipe File

  Without getting into replicating any of the major recipes in 50 Great Curries of India, here are three tasty side dishes I’ve simplified and memorized. I once knew the correct amounts of each spice, but no longer. Taste as you go.