The usual cheese used in a pesto is either pecorino or parmesan. Arzooman doesn’t use pecorino, parmesan is limited and expensive, and I don’t want to use such a precious kitchen resource. And as I stand face to face with Arzooman I suspect that I may be close to tears. His eyes light up.
‘You can use strained yoghurt, man.’ With that he rushes into the kitchen.
Strained yoghurt instead of cheese? I try hard not to look confused. Confused and ill. This yoghurt strained through muslin sounds similar to something my mum used to make when I was a boy: paneer. My mum would boil milk and then split it, with the addition of distilled vinegar. There’s nothing quite as repulsive as the smell of split milk. Actually there is: split milk solids tied up in muslin. That’s what my mum would do. Once the milk was split, she would pour the entire mixture into the largest piece of muslin I have ever seen, the solids being caught in the muslin and the water draining away. She would then tie the muslin to the tap in the sink and allow every last drop of liquid to escape. Later the paneer would then be chilled and cut into cubes or grated, with its mince-like consistency. Paneer. I often think of this bulging mass of cloth dripping smelly cheese-water over the kitchen sink. And she wondered why we were less than keen to eat it? The fact that the stink of the preparation bore no similarity to the delicious taste of paneer was lost on us children. We simply refused to eat it. And she would shout at us to eat it until we cried. As children we cried over split milk. As opposed to spilt milk.
Thoughts of my mum lead me uncomfortably to thoughts of my dad. I’m fairly sure that if he were with me in this kitchen he would suggest I put down my cooking implements and return to my room for a wee lie down and a gentle thought-regathering session. But alas, my dad is on the other side of the world, the Indian man in Britain while I, the British man in India, am attempting to bluff my way through.
Arzooman is back clutching a small, golf-ball sized white package. ‘Strained yoghurt, man. Use the good stuff.’ He nonchalantly throws the cling-film-wrapped soft yoghurt ball over to me.
I catch it with both hands. ‘Great!’ I say, again trying that simultaneous look of unflustered and knowledgeable. ‘This’ll be great.’
The chicken breasts are slit and a cavity fashioned within them. The breasts are skinless. Ordinarily I would have preferred skins to have remained intact; the skins have so much flavour and they take much more colour than the naked flesh, but ho hum, skinless it is. At the continental cooking counter, visible to the entire poolside restaurant crowd that has slowly started to filter in, I am furiously chopping coriander and grating fresh coconut. Time to blend my Indian pesto. It seems only right and proper that I use coconut, so ubiquitous in Kerala that it featured seven times in seven different dinner dishes from the Sadhya feast the day before. The coriander is fine; my only concern is this strained yoghurt thing. It is like ricotta but less rich and more tart. I would have to balance it somehow.
The pesto is whizzed and turns out to be quite delicious. I try hard to hide my surprise from Arzooman. He tries less hard to hide his from me. I delicately stuff my breasts and close off the holes with toothpicks. The last thing I want is pesto spillage; that’s ugly and unnecessary. My plan is for the breasts to fry and then roast so that the ricotta, the coriander and the coconut will meld and merge and set slightly within the cavity. Generally that’s another good reason for resting the chicken, apart from the fact that rested meat is tastier for allowing the juices to settle back into the flesh.
Meanwhile I have my stock reducing. I pop the skinless chicken breasts into the frying pan, adjusting the timing for absence of skin. As they fry away, I add my wine to the chicken stock. Arzooman has gone away to talk to someone about a banquet for 500 and I ask the humourless sous chef he has given me where the oven is. I’ve turned the chicken and need to finish it off. He points at a microwave and grabs my breasts, so to speak. I have images of exploding pesto bombs and manage to wrestle them back from his over-zealous hands. Arzooman returns and chastises the sous before sending him off with them to the oven.
The breasts spend a few minutes luxuriating in the heat of the oven. I spend the time watching my stock, willing it to reduce. Because that really works: pot watching. Stovies would have been so much easier. They would have had no expectations of stovies. I could have added a handful of chopped green chillies, a soupçon of ginger and a smattering of garlic, and convinced them that it was traditional Scottish fare. When it comes to a stuffed and pan-fried chicken breast with a white wine sauce, there is nowhere to hide.
Plating up time. In a proper kitchen there is a certain presentational pressure. Food has to look good. I gently place my perfectly cooked chicken breast, even if I say so myself, on the centre of the plate. The white wine and chicken stock reduction has been enriched with wonderfully sumptuous Indian butter which surrounds and elevates the chicken. I serve the chicken up to Arzooman and his chefs, not confident to send it out to paying customers. I watch them tuck in with grunts. Since it is nigh-on impossible to distinguish between grunts of approval and grunts of derision I err on the side of optimism: they are grunts of approval. As they eat my chicken stuffed with Indian pesto I ponder what their reaction might have been to a plate of mashed potatoes and mince.
That night I lay in bed worrying about whether this whole trip was a good idea. I had managed to pan-fry a chicken breast and reduce a white wine sauce in a state of the art commercial kitchen with an entire team of chefs on hand and the finest ingredients one could fly into India. These guys ate and cooked, cooked and ate European food every day. And what I had cooked could never really be described as British; it was the bastard child of French and Italian cuisine with a misplaced Indian influence. This was no sort of challenge. I felt indulged by Arzooman, a nice man and a talented chef. I had thought my dish would impress him, I had hoped my quest would inspire him. But he really didn’t get the idea of me bringing my food to India. Maybe this trip was much less about what I was taking to India and much more about the impact India would have on me. That night I can’t say that I didn’t consider packing my bags and going home, the words of my father ringing in my ears: ‘Son, if British food was all that good, then there would be no Indian restaurants in Britain.’
The fact that there are more Indian restaurants than almost any other in the UK did not mean anything as I faced the next stage of my journey. I was leaving the cosseted comfort of Kovalam and heading for the antithesis of five-star India.
The next morning I took my wheely bag and my desire to cook up towards the north-east, to Madras on the way to a small fishing town and a fisherman.
4
OH, I DO LIKE TO BE
BESIDE THE SEASIDE!
It was an easy car ride to the station from the luxurious elegance of the Taj Green Cove. I may have left behind Arzooman and his kitchen, but his words mixed with my father’s and reverberated around the inside of my quickly emptying head. What was I doing? I had a choice. I could simply take a train to an airport and write a book about gardening. Or I could knuckle down and embrace this journey of self-discovery. (So far all I had discovered about myself was that I had a lot of self-discovering to do.)
Trivandrum train station was possibly the quietest railway station I have ever visited in India; I am, however, not complaining. It was lunchtime; the sun beat unrelentingly, no doubt worn out from its day’s shining. All of the eight tracks in the station were full of dark-blue and sky-blue painted trains. Latent expectation filled the air. This felt like my first proper foray into India. The airports had been unreal nexuses into the country and the briefly snatched beauty of Cochin had a slight dreamlike quality about it. Trivandrum felt real.
I couldn’t come to India and not go to Madras. All my childhood I thought Madras was solely the description for a curry. Some chef somewhere had decided that naming a dish after Madras would be a good idea. It could so easily have been a chicken delhi, or king prawn bangalore, or lamb pondicherry. But madras it was, so the name we
nt down in culinary legend: the city that gave us a mild curry. And to be honest, the mild curry is about the most interesting thing about Madras. It would appear to be a quite unremarkable city, given its status as India’s fourth largest city. No one ever raves about how amazing Madras is; there are no stories relating great temples and amazing sights. It is the capital of Tamil Nadu, the state that stretches down the south-east coast of India, subsuming the tip above Sri Lanka. But while Madras holds no great intrigue for the traveller itself, it is a conduit to those ancient temples, stone carvings and spiritual experiences of India. This is the side of India the westerners sought. This was the India that seemed, inexplicably, to answer the questions that these travellers carried with them from thousands of miles away.
My plan was to venture to a small fishing town south of Madras, a place called Mamallapuram, or Mahabalipuram, to give it its proper Tamilian name. Mamallapuram is home to some of India’s most photographed monuments and is a town over-endowed with architectural and religious beauty. It is also a place that was devastated by the tsunami of 2004, the first disaster in modern Indian history when the nation of India refused external aid and attempted to repair itself. As a child the overwhelming images I saw of India on TV were of a nation bent and broken by famine, poverty and natural disaster. India seemed forever to be asking the rest of the world for help, for aid, for understanding. And one might have expected that such requests would have been made after the devastation of the tsunami, the shocks of which were felt on the east coast of India. But this time, India decided that it had the economic prosperity and infrastructural wherewithal to sort out its own problems. India politely refused the aid of the international community and set about saving its own people. Whether India succeeded in its self-sufficiency is a moot point; the fact was that it felt able to make such a stand. This was modern India looking after itself. I wanted to see it for myself.
Break of Journey Rules
Trivandrum Train Station
Passengers holding single journey ticket can break their journey at any station en route after travelling 500km from the starting station. However break of journey will not be permitted short of the station up to which the reservation has been made.
If a passenger seeking a reservation on a through ticket asks for a break of journey en route he must clearly indicate on the requisition form the names of the stations where the break journey is requested.
Reservation in this case will be done up to break station only. One break journey is permitted for tickets up to 1000km and two break journeys are permitted for tickets of 1000km and above. During the break of your journey you can stay two days at the intended station excluding day of arrival and the day of departure.
My train is the 12:30 Anatpuri Express from Trivandrum Central to Chennai (Madras). It may not be significant, but this train seems to be sporting livery of orange, white and green, the selfsame colours of the Indian flag. It looks clean and comfortable. Not so much the lap of luxury but certainly leaning comfortably into the shoulder of luxury. The train seems almost suspiciously quiet. I worry that perhaps there is information that has not been shared with me, some conspiracy that has seen this train cancelled with all the passengers tiptoeing off, unseen, to board another, better, faster train to take them to Madras. Paranoid? Me?
PLEASE PULL UP BACKREST-CUM-BED
DURING 6 A.M. TO 9 P.M. TO AVOID INCONVENIENCE TO SITTING PASSENGERS
On checking the itinerary list chalked on the side of one of the carriages I soon realise that this is the slow train to Madras; it will stop many times and bite off a fresh load of travellers. Rumour has it that we will arrive on the east coast of India sometime around 2 p.m. the following day: just over a day away. I make my way to carriage A1, seat 14, UB. UB stands for upper bunk. This is the sleeper train. I will be sleeping on this train. Hopefully. It will be the first time that I have travelled in an Indian sleeper train since my childhood.
When I was a boy, between 1977 and 1983 my dad brought his three sons to India every other summer. The first visit was whistlestop to say the least. We came for my uncle’s wedding. Time was of the essence. Much of that holiday was a blur. But what I do remember is the train journey.
It was 1979. My family were a family of meagre means. So when it came to flying we had little choice in terms of prospective airlines. In fact for ‘little’ choice read Hobson’s choice: Aeroflot. Even all these years on the name fills me with stomach-curdling dread. Aeroflot was the national airline of the then pre-Glasnost USSR. There are many words to describe the Aeroflot experience, but in my father’s context there was only one epithet worth concentrating on: cheap. And Aeroflot was cheap; substantially cheaper than all the competition, because of course, in Soviet Russia there was no competition. We flew Aeroflot from London to Delhi, having first schlepped ourselves and our not insubstantial luggage down to London on the coach. That’s the other thing you need to bear in mind about travelling to India in the 1980s. India was a closed market, an epoch away from the vibrant free-market booming economy of today. You couldn’t get anything in India. So whenever a relative from ‘Velat’, the west as they call it in the Punjab, came visiting they were compelled to bring gifts, gifts to show how successful their lives had become since leaving India. (There is no irony in the fact that many Indians who left enjoy a marginally lower standard of living outside India than they might have enjoyed had they stayed.) I remember that we had packed our luggage full of chocolate to take to our cousins. My mum had also bought us loads of new clothes to wear. Fancy jumpers, smart trousers and kung fu-style pyjamas. I loved those pyjamas. I still do.
So there we were, our flesh and bone far outweighed by our luggage full of gifts, alighting a plane in Delhi, having spent the entire journey not being able to communicate with the Russian-speaking stewardesses; the only phrase my father knew in Russian sounded like: ‘caca familia?’ which appeared to mean: ‘what is your name?’ A conversation opener no doubt, but rather useless when the stewardesses wore name tags.
That year my dad, Raj, Sanjeev and I – Mum stayed at home to run the shop – landed in Delhi a few days before Christmas and headed straight for a taxi to catch a train to the city of Ferozepure in the heart of Punjab. The Shatabdi Express would ghost us through the night and deliver us home. Home. There’s that word again. My father’s home; my grandfather’s home. As kids we had rarely travelled on trains; in fact prior to that sleeper journey in India, I have no previous recollection of ever having travelled on a train. Not that any other train journey could have prepared me for the Shatabdi. The Shatabdi Express is my dad’s favourite train in all the world, a train lodged in my father’s folklore, a train that carries the Punjabi masses home from the capital to their families in the towns, villages and farms. The Shatabdi Express is the locomotive equivalent of a Sikh: proud, fierce and a little lumbering. The exterior livery of these seemingly massive trains was navy blue with a sky-blue stripe across the lower third. The sky-blue colour motif continued within the interior of the trains: sky-blue vinyl seats, sky-blue floor, sky-blue curtains. We had entered a sky-blue world. The carriages were laid out in two sections. Along one side of the train two benches faced each other, the other side of the gangway had two single seats face on. This was the daytime arrangement. At night the sky-blue world became even more sky blue as the seats morphed into bunks. The eight seated travellers soon became eight supine travellers.
There I was, a ten-year-old boy, more excited than excitement itself at the notion of an all-night train journey, a journey that involved a secret fold-down sky-blue bed. The four of us filled our section of the train with anticipation, as it trundled us along to my grandfather’s house in my grandfather’s town of Ferozepure.
For us it was the most amazing adventure. Even adults find train journeys in India exhilarating. Imagine how my brothers and I felt.
We were jet-lagged and found ourselves, almost by default, in a sleeper carriage at New Delhi train station, having fought our way t
hough the hordes. I could see my dad trying his best to contain his excitement. He hadn’t been back in India for over ten years; since he had left his father had passed away. And now he was going home. I remember vividly being transfixed by the country that slipped by the grated window. I clung on, pulling myself closer in the descending gloom, trying to see more than the light would let me. And later trying in vain to sleep. The noise of people alighting and boarding; men selling snacks; babies crying; friends laughing; old women gossiping. And then morning came, a hazy, grey morning, a morning somewhat unsure of its own credentials. A mist lay upon Ferozepure as we unloaded our luggage from the train, only to reload it on the back of an ox-drawn carriage.
This was the India I first knowingly laid eyes on; a very real India, an unpretentious India. And I think I fell in love with it without even knowing.
Twenty-eight years later I sit alone in an almost identical train compartment, missing my father and missing my brothers. I am joined by a sweet young family. The good-looking young husband stretches his feet across the benches as his wife reclines with someone I assume is her younger sibling; the younger sibling sitting cross-legged atop the bench provides a makeshift pillow for her older, more amply endowed sister. The children sit and play on the top bunks of the adjoining compartment.
At 16.21, nine minutes before its designated time of departure, the Anatpuri Express reluctantly pulls out of Trivandrum train station. Fifteen minutes later we have stopped for no good reason. But this is India; you never need a good reason for anything. You rarely need a reason at all. The hiatus is filled with an army of shabbily uniformed, pungent young boys singing their wares, offering tea, coffee, snacks and sweets.
Indian Takeaway Page 5