Indian Takeaway

by Hardeep Singh Kohli

  My Yorkshire hero Paul returns with a rucksack that now clinks with the music of beer. A big bottle of Kingfisher each, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper; not quite cold enough but hey, it is beer and it isn’t warm. The restaurant is not fully licensed so we are offered opaque coffee mugs to drink our beer out of: anything rather than betray the true nature of our beverage. My mug has images of American Football Stars on it, with the word ‘Stamina’ printed on the handle. Little do I realise the prophetic promise of my mug.

  A further twenty-five minutes pass, over and above the initial negotiated twenty-five minutes. Still no pork vindaloo. The beer is warm now but thankfully almost finished. I look at the American Football mug. ‘Stamina’. I wish I had more. My surly moustachioed waiter shuffles back almost noiselessly to inform me that there is no pork vindaloo, because there is no pork. There has never been any pork. The restaurant is officially pork free. He has been lying to me, and so early in our relationship. He could have easily crossed the road to one of the many pork-abundant restaurants and passed the dish off as his own. But no. There is to be no spicy vinegar pig for me. I am too tired to fight and his English is nowhere near robust enough for my multi-clausal reasoning and contingent arguing.

  Instead I order squid in coconut. And a watery vegetable curry. It comes, I swear, I conquer. This is my first Indian meal in India. It doesn’t augur well for the journey ahead; it isn’t the most delicious of meals, but even so it makes me realise the vast chasm of flavour and taste that exists between our food in Britain and the food of India. If a palate is so very accustomed to spice-tingling sensations, sensations that occur even in the most average of curried squid dishes, it is difficult to promote the comforting warmth of mashed potato and stewed lamb. Sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter will inevitably seem bland when compared to a dish that requires eighteen spices and five flavourings. Even though my first meal on my quest has been a very average Indian meal, would this average meal be more flavourful than even the finest British food that I could conjure? It’s not rocket surgery to work it out. Even if I managed to pull off the finest shepherd’s pie ever to be created outside the western world, with the creamiest, richest mash atop the most delicately cooked and adequately seasoned lamb, replete in its own earthy and enriched sauce, I could still very easily fail. Miserably. I banish such thoughts and haul myself back to the airport. I have a plane to catch, some food to cook and myself to find. It’s time to start my journey in earnest. I have landed but I have not yet arrived.

  Food is a massive part of my life. When I’m not cooking it, I’m eating it; and when I’m not eating it, I’m thinking about it. I plan my life around meals. I will schedule meetings in certain parts of London to enable me to slip into a specific café or restaurant for a specific meal. I love food; and for its sins, food loves me. There is no one event, no one occurrence that I can look back on and use to explain the prominence of food in my life. When someone once asked me why I was so obsessed with food, I thought a moment, struggling to find a coherent answer. And then it dawned on me; it had only taken me thirty-eight years to realise that, as a child, the only aspect of being Indian which wider society seemed to celebrate was our food. To say Glasgow likes Indian food is inaccurate; it doesn’t like it, Glasgow loves it. And my experience of this love as a boy in Glasgow seemed to be true of life in every other British city. It’s bizarre when you think about the impact Indian food has had on British culture. The smallest town or village more often than not has a little Indian restaurant or take-away, often run by the only Indian family in the area. Even the racists who hated the fact that my parents’ generation had come to Britain still liked our food. It was the only aspect of being Indian that garnered any positivity.

  Ironically, despite this plethora of restaurants around us, we never ate out much as kids. We were the offspring of immigrants. The single biggest expense in my parents’ house was school fees. Still, to this day, I have absolutely no idea how my parents ran a house, fed us, clothed us, took us on holiday and paid the mortgage. And paid the school fees for three boys. Randeep, more commonly known as Raj, is my elder brother. My younger brother, Sanjeev – Sanj, Sniff, Yich, Barbecue Fingers – has a myriad of nicknames and a heart of gold. And I was the tricky second child; the difficult one. The prima donna. They have a phrase for it in Hindi: ‘beech wala’. It translates as ‘the one stuck in the middle’. And I did feel very much stuck in the middle. I was not bestowed with the gifts and love that a first-born son enjoys in an Indian house; neither was I the cute, good-natured baby, the son that they really wanted to be a daughter. I was the misunderstood, James Dean-like presence in the progeny. I was also, admittedly, a right pain in the arse. I was intransigent and eloquent. There’s nothing worse than a snotty child with the linguistic dexterity to give oxygen to his irrationality.

  None of my failings, innumerable though they were, changed the fact that my parents would marshal their very limited financial resources and were able somehow to make them go a long way. Both my parents worked: my mum in the shop; my father long and irregular hours as a teacher in a List D school (the D stood for Delinquents). It was a glorified borstal. His days and evenings, weekends and public holidays were spent whiling the hours away with rapists, armed robbers and murderers, all of whom shared one single defining quality: they were under the age of eighteen.

  And yet, even though we didn’t cuddle up in the lap of luxury I never felt that I went without. We had what we needed. And what we didn’t need, thanks to the fiendishly fiscally astute way my mother planned weekly meals, was anything more than one night of dining out a year. So that’s what we got. A little tandoori restaurant in Elmbank Street in the heart of Glasgow, the same street on which years later I would meet the woman who would become my wife. The name of the place escapes me. Glasgow in the seventies was only just starting its love affair with Indian food, a love affair that would blossom and burgeon into a full-blown, lifelong romance. And it all seemed to start at this anonymous little place just off Sauchiehall Street.

  We would never have gone out to eat food that Mum could have made at home. That would have been pointless. Why pay over the odds for home food? But Mum didn’t have a tandoor and no matter how good her spicy yoghurt mix, no matter how well she balanced the chilli and the lemon, no matter how infused her chicken became, it never ever tasted like it had come out of a clay oven.

  So we went to this little place and gorged on tandoori food. I remember it being delicious and my father being very excited about it. I didn’t quite understand why he was so happy eating red chicken; it was only years later that I fully comprehended how much my dad missed the food of the Punjab, the food of his home. We ate there every year on my dad’s birthday for a few years until the place burnt down. Perhaps the victim of over-eager cooking.

  Sauchiehall Street was very much in my mind as I arrived in Trivandrum late at night. It’s another twenty-minute cab ride from the airport to the hotel in Kovalam. The contents of my mind could not have jarred more dramatically with the scenery around me as I walked across the runway to the terminal building. I was entering the tropical heat of southern India with its palm trees and sand, while in my mind I saw the postcards of palm trees and sand behind the bar of that small restaurant in Elmbank Street. The plane had started its journey in Bangalore, a place I would be visiting at some point soon, and had stopped at Cochin to fill up with more passengers all heading for the final stop, Trivandrum. Even though night was upon us, the temperature was only one notch below oppressive. I wonder how one deals with such heat all day and all night long?

  This was the beginning of my quest. Once my journey started, I would have to give myself over to the complete travelling experience. I would have to make do with whatever mode of transport, whatever accommodation and whatever people were available. I realised that this was the last moment I had total control. I could parachute myself into deepest darkest India to test my culinary resolve in the most unforgiving of circumstances, the mos
t intense of arenas: a small rural village a dirt-track away from western civilisation where ancient Indian cooking traditions have developed over millennia; a verdant cove of Indianness, untouched, unspoilt, unaccustomed to the strange vagaries of the western palate. I could have done that. Or I could have booked myself into a glorious five star Taj health and wellness spa. Guess what I did …

  It seemed strange all those years later to be in the Taj Green Cove, a five-star hotel in India, when little of my childhood was spent anywhere but at home. And this hotel was a rather extreme version of opulence. Set in acres of tropical forest the accommodation was a series of chalets, nonchalantly scattered over the side of a small hill, overlooking the azure blue Arabian Sea below. This was one of those places where one forgets one is in India and is sure to have entered paradise. Perhaps this was the new India, the international globe-trotting hedonists’ India?

  One of the main reasons I came to this hotel was because they offered a Sadhya meal, a ‘Big Feast’. Nothing too subtle in that translation. It originally offered sixty-four courses of vegetarian food, eight varieties of eight different curries. Sixty-four. And then a further eight desserts. Nice. Traditionally served on a banana leaf, dishes are served with almost mathematical precision, each area of the leaf having a designated curry type. One is meant to sit cross-legged on the floor to eat. As the maître d’ and head waiter and sommelier accompanied me to my table, I felt a little self-conscious at the thought of my oversized arse having to somehow negotiate its way floorward. Luckily the hotel had dispensed with that requirement of the Sadhya meal and I allowed the waiter to lay my crisp, white linen napkin across my lap. I appeared to be the only diner in the beautifully appointed dark-wood dining room. The smell of jasmine drifted on the air.

  A banana leaf sat before me, nearly three feet wide and eighteen inches in depth. It had already been adorned with mango pickle, mango chutney, salt and a banana. It was like the start of a surrealist food gag. Then the onslaught arrived. Wave after wave of rice, daal, vegetables, more rice, papads, daal, yoghurt, coconut rice, more papads … I don’t know about you, but I can eat loads. Really. Within an hour and a half I was languishing under my own body weight in lentils, yoghurt and vegetables. Languishing, but not yet happily full, not yet content in the stomach department. Finally dessert arrived. Only three of these, each sweeter and richer than the other. I was replete. Good and proper.

  I stole myself off to my room. I had planning to do. I had to decide on a meal to cook for the executive chef, Arzooman, and his crack team of sous chefs. I lulled myself off to sleep that night with thoughts of beautifully roasted chunks of lamb in an anchovy and garlic sauce and found myself dreaming about creamy, buttery mash and perfectly seasoned broccoli with a tangy hollandaise sauce.

  The following evening I wandered through that same dining room, nodding familiarly to the maître d’, the head waiter and the sommelier. This time I continued past my table and beyond the door that separates the world of the guest from the world of the kitchen. I had been told that I had the run of the kitchen; it was a massive hotel and having read through all the various menus for all the various restaurants and clubs I had appraised myself fairly well of the ingredients available. I couldn’t help but feel nervous. I had no excuses, nowhere to hide. Arzooman knows what good food tastes like. And the thought of being back in a commercial kitchen was both thrilling and terrifying, hampered as I was with English as a first language. That and the fact that I knew all the staff would look at me like some freak of nature.

  ‘Why does the slightly overweight Sikh man from Britain want to come and cook British food in our kitchen?’ I could almost hear them asking.

  I didn’t have a ready answer.

  For a moment I’m genuinely not sure why I am here and what I am doing. What do I seek to achieve by cooking for these people? Are they any more likely to understand British life after a plate of my food? Did Glaswegians feel any more knowledgeable about the history and culture of India after a chicken bhuna and a peshawari nan, with a side order of aloo gobi? And it’s not like the food I am cooking will be anywhere near the standard of the food Arzooman cooks. I steel myself, reminding myself that it’s only food. What have I got to lose apart from my credibility, my reputation and my way on a journey that has only just begun. That calms me right down. I head down to the kitchen.

  I’m handed a purple apron that clashes terribly with my pink kurta top. My attempt to articulate this fashion faux pas is greeted with stony silence by one of Arzooman’s sous chefs. It’s going to be a long night. And suddenly I realise that Arzooman has dedicated his entire continental kitchen to me: a kitchen completely open to the public gaze, a kitchen where my every mistake can be publicly witnessed. Marvellous.

  I remind myself that if this evening goes badly and I manage to cock the whole thing up, lose a finger and poison a commis chef, then I am entitled to plead the defence of valiant failure, repack my wheely case and return to Britain. I explain my quest to Arzooman. He understands that I want to travel the country of my forefathers, that I wish to explore my heritage and free my mind of the preconditioned opinions I had of India as I was growing up. He is also very acutely aware of the tension that exists in my dual identity, but seems perfectly comfortable with my sense of Britishness and Indianness. Perhaps that is because he has travelled much of the world; he trained in Chicago and Switzerland. He knows something of being an outsider. The only thing he doesn’t get is my desire to cook British food.

  ‘It’s bloody hilarious, man!’ he says after I poke and prod my way through his superficial politeness.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘Listen, man,’ he explains. ‘These guys, Indians, are obsessed with food, but only Indian food. I cook hundreds of meals here every week and they are mostly eaten by foreigners. Indians rarely come and eat here. Which is fine because we are an international hotel.’

  I take a moment and look around the restaurant. It is early, he is right. There are very few Indians eating; and those who are here seem to have ordered from the Indian menu. I’m in trouble. Deep trouble.

  This is my first dish in what promises to be a long and winding road through India. The Indians are not well acquainted with British food, less so Scots food. But I have decided that my opening foray into the education of the Indian palate should be something straight out of the heart of my childhood; a plate of food that by its ingredients and history alone tells the story of where I come from, the story of Scotland. I need to be bold, uncompromising, resolute. I must embrace my quest and deliver to Arzooman and his chefs a dish that epitomises all I am, all I hope to be. I will give them stovies.

  You’ve probably never heard of stovies. They are utterly delicious – delicious and quintessentially Scottish. It is a peasant dish, said to have come from the gentry handing leftover meat from Sunday lunch to their workers. The workers would then combine this meat with potatoes and onions, frying the mixture in dripping, thereby creating ‘stovies’. This would last them the week, until the next Sunday. Much like my mum and her two pot method. Every Sunday night my mother would cook one pot of meat or chicken and one pot of daal or vegetable. By Wednesday of that week both pots would be almost empty. So on a Thursday evening both pots were combined giving us innovations such as lamb and cauliflower or chicken and daal. This was the two-pot method.

  The stovies I grew up eating were mince stovies. Another common thread between the Punjab and Scotland is the combination of mince and potatoes. The Punjabis have keema, curried mince with quartered potatoes, the fl oury potatoes mashing down into the rich, spicy, minced lamb which would then be enveloped in a hot buttery chapatti. The Scots love their mince and tatties. We got stovies at school, once a week on a Tuesday. It was my favourite meal of the week; it was also my elder brother Raj’s favourite meal of the week, because it was the only lunch that was bereft of vegetables.

  So I feel stovies somehow speak from both sides of my heritage. And if I am to find myself on this c
ulinary adventure around India I must be bold, uncompromising and resolute. I must be…

  But suddenly I am meek, compromising and irresolute. I can’t cook a plate of stovies in a five-star hotel for an internationally trained chef and his team. It would be mental. How could I possibly convey to them the myriad reasons for what is effectively a plate of carbohydrate-heavy brown sludge that tastes of comfort? I can’t do it. So instead I choose to cook something really poncy and European.

  I pitch the idea of an Indian pesto to the not-altogether-convinced Arzooman. I explain that while it seems part of my culinary journey is bringing Britain and Europe to India, I am also trying to take a little of India back to Britain and Europe. I choose not to even mention stovies. Instead I suggest a pesto with coconut, coriander and paneer.

  ‘Coconut, coriander and paneer?’ The stress is all on the question mark. His face is deeply quizzical.

  He thinks for a moment.

  ‘Not paneer, man. It’s too… grainy. Not smooth enough for a pesto.’

  ‘Oh,’ I respond, trying my hardest to look simultaneously unflustered and knowledgeable. ‘Yeah. Paneer. Too grainy.’