Indian Takeaway

by Hardeep Singh Kohli

  Ras Gula: This can be colloquially described as an Indian milk ball. Much as that is factually correct, it barely begins to tell the story of this sweet treat. These little beauties are the by-product of milk that has been split, much in the same way as paneer is made. The solid part of the split milk is kept and blended with cardamom before being rolled again into the ball shape. Meanwhile a pan of water is put onto boil and an excessive amount of sugar is added. The balls are then carefully added to the boiling syrup where they gently cook. The ras gulas are then left to cool and are served with a healthy spoonful of the cooled sugar syrup. Delicious, if a little cloyingly sweet.

  Ras Malai: A variation on ras gula. Ras malai requires the split milk not to be crafted into a spherical offering. Rather the milk solids are more slab-like in their consistency and are drenched in milk that has been flavoured with pistachio nuts and/or almonds and/or cardamom. A personal favourite of mine. Less sweet than either gulab jaman or ras gula.

  Jalebi: A deep-fried fl our-based sweet. The jalebi looks a little like a pretzel and is definitively north Indian, with links with Persian food history. They are normally a vibrant orange colour and very sweet. They too are served with a sugary syrup but in the Punjab they are often served with milk. They are sticky, sweet and lovely.

  Barfi: Yet another condensed milk dessert. Rather than eaten after a meal, barfi is a snack enjoyed with tea. There are as many flavours of barfi as there are flavours at all. Almond, pistachio, saffron, rose water, even chocolate barfi. They are normally bite-sized and served in squares, parallelograms or occasionally rhombuses. These sweets go some way to explain the love Indians have for geometry.

  Kulfi: Regarded as Indian ice cream, but in truth it is frozen milk. Unlike ice cream kulfi is not churned and therefore is dense and complex rather than aerated and light.

  Falooda: This is dedicated to the colour pink and perhaps explains my own love of the colour. A rose-water-flavoured milk is enhanced with sweet vermicelli strands, basil seeds and ice cream. Like jalebi, falooda has strong links with Persia and was more than likely inspired by the Moghul invaders.

  Rovi and I venture deeper into the dark city. It feels a little like Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley; strange characters lurk in shadowy corners, unfamiliar noises can be heard behind every wall and there is the smell of soured milk (maybe that wasn’t in J.K. Rowling’s books …). We have left Paratha ki Gully far behind and are now wandering towards Chandni Chowk. There is a famous old restaurant that started here back in the early part of the last century. Karim’s is regarded by Delhites as the best example of Moghul food anywhere to be found in India. We turn another corner and the road has become smoother and cleaner. We have found it. A placard outside tells me that Karim’s was started in 1913 by Hafiz Karim Uddin. It was initially just a tawa off Kababian Street. A tawa is a flat steel skillet. It comes in a variety of sizes and has a multiplicity of uses in the north Indian house. Chapattis and parathas are cooked on it, small snacks are shallow fried on it, even chicken and lamb can be fried on it. The story suggests that the original Karims was an al fresco cooking experience nearly a century ago.

  Rovi insists that we stop and have a small snack. My heart and my head would love to, but my stomach has other plans.

  ‘Not a great idea,’ I explain to Rovi, patting my distended belly.

  ‘You’re in Delhi, you have a bad belly. Delhi belly!’ He laughs. I can’t help joining in.

  We wander back to the car, enjoying the scene in reverse. Outside one stall a dozen or so men sit on the ground, their hands stretched outward in supplication. Rovi explains that these wretched souls are waiting for someone to bestow a little charity on them. They are hoping that some rich individual might offer the stall holder the price of a meal on their behalf. Begging for food is more likely to meet with success than begging for money. At least the donor has some comfort in knowing that their contribution has been put to good use. I ask that price. Twenty rupees will feed a single man. About thirty pence. I feel physically sick. I think about how much I myself eat, and waste, the money I squander on half-eaten sandwiches and tepid cappuccinos. I leave enough money to feed twenty men but can’t bear to watch.

  Driving around the city at night the traffic is blissfully unaware of the late hour. Delhi is a daunting city, constantly changing. One moment your horizon is wide, filled with tree-lined boulevards and colonial architecture. A couple of left turns later you are in the midst of a medieval town, the imposing buildings blocking the moonlit sky. Urban India never sleeps, but Delhi seems to be urban India on espresso. It has the constant buzz of a city that is constant. Rovi tells me that I was lucky to miss Diwali last year; the traffic was unbearable. People left their cars and walked, carrying gifts for their families to celebrate Hindu New Year.

  ‘It was madness. Unbelievable madness. It took four hours to travel a few kilometres. Everyone was in their car taking presents everywhere.’

  Rovi tells me that as a result of India’s newfound affluence, people have more money to spend. So when it comes to festivals like Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Light which is commonly regarded as their New Year, families decide to shower gifts on each other in a way that seems to embrace the free market more than the cleansing quality of light. This seems a far cry from the Delhi of my dad’s day. Even when I first came to Delhi as a boy you couldn’t get any products that weren’t made in India. It’s difficult to believe now but the only cola drinks you could buy were Indian-owned brands like Thums [sic] Up or Campa Cola. Now India is the bastard child of globalisation: there isn’t anything you can’t get here. It’s midnight and we are stuck in a traffic jam.

  ‘This is the other side of the economic boom,’ Rovi mutters, as irritated as his lovely nature will allow him to get. Of all the consequences of a burgeoning economy very bad traffic is not one I would have ever thought of. Rovi never seems to tire of fetching and carrying and bringing and delivering; for him to complain about traffic things must be bad.

  ‘Thank God for the metro.’

  Delhi is India’s only city to have a subway system and it has been a massive success. Hundreds of thousands of Indians travel to and fro on a daily basis. The sweeping streets of the suburbs are smoothly and efficiently linked to the stone-built edifices of the bureaucratic heart of India. Journey times have been slashed. The train stations and the trains themselves are clean and reliable; two words not readily associated with all things Indian. The mind boggles as to what the state of the roads would be if Delhi didn’t have such an effectively elegant underground system. Delhi feels like another future for India, a future in which Bangalore is already playing a part. Between them it seems as if India will be more than capable of dealing with the unfolding century and the millennium ahead. But I am in Delhi to cook and hopefully also to find myself.

  My plan is simple. It’s a massive place; there is no way I can find a single group of people to cook for that is at all representative of the entire city. Unlike Bombay with its world-renowned association with the movie business, Delhi has everything. Everything and politics. I don’t fancy cooking for politicians, so the next best thing might be to cook a small dinner party for a bunch of Delhi socialites. Delhi is full of old-money Indians; the city teems with the bolder and more beautiful children of the bold and beautiful and it would be fun to meet them. I have a contact from London, a lady with a great name: Lucky.

  And what better to cook than soup? A lovely, traditional Scottish soup. Ever since I bottled it in Kovalam and failed to cook stovies, I have been rather remiss in preparing the food of Britain. What the Delhites need is cock-a-leekie soup. The soft, buttery leeks combining with those that still have some give all melded together in that lovely chicken broth. Everyone knows that any good soup is made better when allowed to sit for a few hours, preferably overnight. A lady called Clara taught me this.

  When I was at university in Glasgow, there was only one place to go and eat, the Grosvenor Café. To say the Grosvenor was a café is l
ike saying Jimi Hendrix was a man who played the guitar; it barely begins to tell the story. The Grosvenor was an institution, a sanctuary, a way of life. I grew up in the Grosvenor, I lived in the Grosvenor, I loved in the Grosvenor but mostly I ate in the Grosvenor. When my wife was my girlfriend, we spent afternoons drinking coffee and chatting. So frequent a visitor was I that in the days before mobile phones, people would phone me at the Grosvenor.

  The Grosvenor was run by an Italian family. The patriarch Renato, his wife Liliana and his sister Clara. There was something called the Grosvenor five-pound challenge. So cheap was the food at the Grosvenor that we students reckoned it was impossible for even the hungriest of us to eat £5 worth of Grosvenor food. To put this into some sort of perspective, back in the eighties when the fashion was terrible and the hair was big, to spend £5 on food at the Grosvenor meant the consumption of an egg burger (a beef burger with an egg), a croissant filled with tuna mayonnaise, two fried egg rolls, apple pie and ice cream and a thing called a ben loars (I don’t really know what a ben loars was but it was named after a small Scottish mountain, that’s how big it was). If you managed to scoff that much carbohydrate, it would cost you eight pence over £5. (I’m not sure I’ve eaten that much food in a day, let alone a single sitting, not even during my Sadhya meal extravaganza in Kovalam.) Not meaning to be boastful, I did hold the record for my time at university when it came to the Grosvenor challenge. I bet you didn’t realise you were reading the story of a man who achieved the high £3.80s early in the winter of 1988. I was a ben loars and an egg roll short of the status of legend.

  I would walk by the Grosvenor three or four times a day between lectures and I remember distinctly one day the most entrancing of aromas emanating from the tiny kitchen. It could only be one thing: Clara’s minestrone soup. Now, I know it was Glasgow and I know it was the 1980s, not perhaps a city or a time redolent of gastronomy, but the Scottish Italian community had been alive and kicking for decades at that point and we were very grateful to them for the food they brought. Chief amongst objects of gratitude was Clara’s minestrone soup. It was bloody delicious. And it came with a roll and butter. I’ve eaten at multi-Michelin-starred restaurants, I’ve eaten with royalty and ambassadors, but there are few things finer than Clara’s minestrone soup with a roll and butter.

  Naturally, upon smelling the minestrone soup, I decided to miss the next lecture and have a bowl of this fine Italian broth. I ordered a bowl. I was salivating at the mere thought of the pasta, tomato and bean concoction. The waitress returned to my table to tell me that there was no minestrone soup. At the same time I saw a bowl of minestrone soup being delivered to the table next to me. Well, you can understand my confusion. I pointed to the adjoining table and told the waitress that their bowl of soup looked deceptively like minestrone. The waitress told me that Clara said I couldn’t have a bowl of minestrone soup. I was hurt. Deeply, deeply hurt. Clara came over. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Do I not get any minestrone soup?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you can have the minestrone soup tomorrow, you can’t have it today.’

  ‘But you’ve given it to them,’ I protested insolently.

  She leaned in and I’ll never forget what she said: ‘They can have soup today, it was made today, but you, you are special, you can only have the soup tomorrow. It’s better tomorrow.’

  And do you know what? I did feel special. From that day on, I always had soup the day after it was made and it always tasted so much better.

  Soup is a rural Scottish staple and I intend to cook it in the heart of an Indian metropolis. It is a beautiful juxtaposition. I should tell Lucky. I dial her number.

  ‘Hi, Lucky. It’s Hardeep here.’

  ‘Hi!’ Her voice crackles with life. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m good. Just got into town. I was hoping to come and cook for you guys tomorrow.’ I am intentionally vague about who she might invite.

  ‘What are you cooking? Something exciting, I hope. I’m a bit of a cook myself.’

  I feel more than a little pressure.

  ‘I have all of Gordon Ramsay’s books, you know.’

  Of course she does.

  ‘So what will you be rustling up? I love all British food, apart from soup. I hate soup.’

  ‘I’d never cook soup in India,’ I say and then laugh just a little too hard. ‘How do you feel about shepherd’s pie?’

  ‘I love shepherd’s pie.’ She sounds genuinely happy.

  ‘Great!’ I say, still trying to work out why I have bottled it. Again.

  My father’s words are yet again ringing in my ears.

  ‘Son, if British food was all that good, then there would be no Indian restaurants in Britain … ’

  I’m feeling vulnerable right now. In Delhi, with all the memories of my childhood, of my dad, I can’t help but feel more than a little foolish. Why am I cooking shepherd’s pie for a bunch of cosmopolitan Indian glitterati who have no doubt eaten at the finest restaurants across a handful of continents? Why on earth would they want to eat my shepherd’s pie?

  I try to remind myself that this journey is not actually about the food. The food is a mechanism to unlock doors to people who might be able to shed some light on who I am. Why would a bunch of Indian socialites come out for an evening’s Indian food? Where is the fun in that? The shepherd’s pie is the quirky enticement, the edge to the evening. I can’t imagine they have ever been invited out for meat pie before. There’s probably a good reason why …

  These socialites are my contemporaries. They are who I might have been had I been born in India and raised here. They are all better looking and eminently more successful than me but they should prove to be an invaluable touchstone to my own sense of self. How similar are these upper-middle class Indians to this middle-class me? I will endeavour to find out through the gift of shepherd’s pie.

  Where do you begin with shepherd’s pie? It’s all about the meat. For my money, there’s only one type of meat for shepherd’s pie and that’s lamb. I’ve arranged to meet Lucky at INA market in the centre of New Delhi. This is widely regarded as the most upmarket of all the markets the city has to offer; it’s where all the foreigners shop. And as soon as you enter you understand why. The place is a temple to imported goods and produce: tahini paste, pastas, pak choi, fresh herbs, even rocket; this is clearly a place designed for European cuisine and is wholly unIndian. Apart from the imported products, most of the market seems to offer seafood. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such amazing king prawns in all my life, some as big as my hand (and I have substantial hands). Beautiful-looking catfish, delicious tilapia, sizeable sea bass, pomfret, lobster and squid. This couldn’t be less like the market in Goa. The range of produce here is mind-boggling and perhaps more refl ective of the fact that Delhi has long been the home to international politicians and business people. Whereas in Goa I struggled to find potatoes, in INA market I can get hold of two types of anchovy paste and a tin of artichoke hearts. Impressive.

  As we walk through this undersea world I can see the meat section ahead. On a raised area two men sit, one with chickens dangling dead and upside down above his head. He plays nonchalantly with a knife as he awaits his next customer. I shall not be bothering him today. My attentions are with the other man who sits cross-legged surrounded by mutton. I manage to get a decent-looking leg of lamb, leaving two sorrier-looking specimens hanging in the otherwise bare room. A tray of offal lies lazily in front of the wooden chopping block.

  The picture is a bit like the early work of David Lynch, with hanging carcasses and blood everywhere. Or perhaps that’s more Peter Greenaway. I order two kilos of lamb leg and instruct the butcher to cut the lamb into cubes. He is accustomed to cutting lamb into cubes for Indian curries, but they are too big for my needs. But I decide against entering into a dialogue with him; in this instance, size really doesn’t matter. (I know many of you will be expecting mince in shepherd’s pie; I, however, am a firm believer of nugget-sized mouthfuls of lamb.
The texture of minced lamb is less interesting than the variegated chunks of gravy-covered delight that, to my mind, makes the finest shepherd’s pie.)

  Now, I have bought meat in three continents on dozens of occasions. I have visited Tokyo butchers and witnessed their art and craft; the meat men of Peru displayed their skills to me, and Khalid at KRK on Woodlands Road in Glasgow is no stranger to me, but in all my travels in all my time I have never seen a man prepare meat the way the butcher at INA market prepares it. Never. He sits cross-legged with the knife lodged firmly between his big and second toe, the sharp edge pointing away from him. The blade is held strong, unmoving, as he pulls the mutton towards him. He is like the human version of a meat-cutting machine in a delicatessen, the sort that shaves slivers of parma ham. The blade does not move as he dextrously cubes my leg of lamb using his two free hands. There’s something fundamentally wrong about a man cutting red meat using his feet.

  Having purchased some carrots and potatoes and a bag of frozen peas (which seems utterly incongruous in India), Lucky and I head back to her apartment. Lucky’s apartment is nothing short of breathtaking. She left London a year ago having lived and loved the city for the best part of a decade. After reading history and English at Oxford she joined the world of publishing. She misses London but what’s to miss? She has a massive three-bedroom apartment with a terrace that itself is the size of a two-bedroom flat in Pimlico, and it is on this terrace we will dine this evening.

  Fresh from the memory of the foot-chopping butcher, I wash the lamb more thoroughly than normal. (Although, he did have surprisingly clean feet, considering.) While the potatoes come to the boil in plenty of salted water, I concentrate on sorting the lamb out. Ordinarily when I’m cooking lamb curry there is nothing finer than marrowbone and cartilage mixed in with the meat. This adds another depth of flavour, another flesh experience to enjoy and devour. Perhaps the acceptability of bones in Indian food is linked to the way in which we eat. We pick up food with our fingers, so we are more able to select flesh from bone. Perhaps that’s why bones seem to work so readily in that form. However, a big bit of bone and marrow in a shepherd’s pie would be an altogether different experience and not a terribly pleasant one. I therefore remove the bones, some cartilage but not all the fat; the fat gives great flavour to shepherd’s pie. I then chop the pieces down further still and fry them in a little olive oil, having tossed them in some seasoned flour.