In most ways, my eager mother was open enough to whatever India had on tap to rate as unconventional. She cultivated oodles of Indian friends—not just for work, but because she enjoyed them—and preferred an apartment in unfashionable Greater Kailash to the American compound. Her gig also took her to nooks of India few diplomats saw, including its jails.
But the food? Not a chance. I was in college back then, meaning our government paid for me to come to Delhi every Christmas. My mother had a good cook named Joseph, who was more or less resigned to wrangling menus that wouldn’t have looked exotic at an Applebee’s in Des Moines. I still remember when she announced that, as a special treat—for him, I think, not us—Joseph was going to prepare us our one Indian meal.
One. He waved me afterward into the kitchen to taste the version he’d cooked up on the side for himself. How he relished my discovery that the stuff he’d served us was as bland as baby food by comparison.
And plus ça change, and so on, Dad. There may be Foreign Service families whose members delight in expertly whipping up the tagines they learned to love in Morocco, but we were never one of those. My kid sis and I once amused ourselves by concocting a guide to the real—and fondly remembered—ethnic cuisine of our childhoods: airline food.
Since there were usually 7-11s nearby in my bachelor years, I didn’t learn to cook or own a single cookbook until I got married at age thirty-two. The big exception—my showcase dish—was fettucine Alfredo, a recipe Forrest Gump could cope with: buttload of cheese, buttload of cream, mix with pasta. Add pepper and nutmeg, and I might get laid.
After I’d proudly made it five or six times, my wife begged me to stop. Wasn’t I getting laid anyway? And—more important—did I want to put that status at risk? If that cholesterol ziggurat were put in front of me today, I’d throw up. If I ever put it in front of her, I’d be wearing a dripping saucepan, like, instanter.
Marriage had also introduced me to a culinary mentor: my new mother-in-law. Raised rural in British Columbia until she headed south as a bride, she’d long since been cosmopolized by Los Angeles, America’s most cosmopolitan city. Her fluency in half a dozen cuisines—India’s more than most, since my wife’s stepdad, Om, hailed from there—wasn’t the only proof.
Not least because it was far from her only skill, Maggie made a life bereft of cooking’s pleasures seem forlorn. Even more than the outcomes, I was smitten by how she went about it: the alternating rhythms of patience and dispatch, the trick bag of adaptable techniques, the logistics of a complicated mise en place. I’d just never understood how simply, nihilism-defyingly happy you could make other people by cooking well.
It also reminded me of a trade I did know by then. How can any writer not love to cook? Maggie, who writes pretty good poetry, will be baffled to learn how often I mentally murmured Michael Corleone’s line in The Godfather, Part II: ‘You’re a great man, Mr. Roth. I have much to learn from you.’
Since she also thought no married couple should settle for call-it-macaroni, cookbooks became our staple gifts. She started us off with baby steps: Jeff Smith’s Frugal Gourmet books, still a gateway drug I’d recommend even if the late Jeff proved to be no wonderful role model as a human being. But soon came the first curveball: Tommy Tang’s Modern Thai Cuisine, emphasis on the ‘modern’.
Tommy was in vogue then. My fellow LA transplant’s signature restaurant was on Melrose Avenue, which may say it all. Even I could guess that dishes this heavy on pine nuts, cream and other Western ingredients weren’t Thai food as it was eaten in Bangkok. Tommy might have liked my fettucine Alfredo.
It didn’t matter. An Asian grocery the size and intricacy of a nuclear submarine was just across Sunset Boulevard from our home. Curry pastes, chili sauce, tamarind—how I loved and still love to soak tamarind for meekrob, rubbing the meat from the seeds in ever darker water before straining the juice—were all at my fingertips.
Within months, I’d floored an intern at the alt-weekly where my wife and I worked by declaring that I’d rather meet Tommy Tang than Mick Jagger. That may have been around when my indignantly pro-Anita piece on the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings won me an admiring letter from Riane Eisler, one of the greatest compliments of my life.
I never met Mick, let alone Riane. But I did meet Tommy, sort of. He did a cooking class at Pasadena’s swankiest supermarket, and that’s why our copy of Modern Thai Cuisine is signed. I remember him marveling at how many pages were already loose and tamarind-stained. ‘For Tom and Arion Hope you’ll enjoy to use it at all times have fun TT,’ the inscription reads, making me suspect he’d had some help with the book’s text. But he did spell my wife’s name right, so bless him. I cook from it to this day.
But Tommy too was a gateway drug compared to two books Maggie gave me later. One was Carol Field’s The Italian Baker, and my Kalamata olive-studded pane Pugliese is pretty fucking fierce. The other was Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking, your cue to start humming ‘Tara’s Theme’ from Gone With the Wind.
Julie, light of my life, fire of my stove. I’ll never get great, Joseph—not like you—but I’m not bad. Maggie herself has praised my Shahi Murgh Badaami, aka ‘Royal Chicken in Silky White Almond Sauce’. Since my mother-in-law doesn’t do unkindness, take that with a grain of Ms. Sahni’s beloved Kosher salt. I still regret that I never worked up the nerve to make it for Om.
Can you appreciate the preposterousness? Unlike most of my co-citizens, I’d been to India. I could have gorged on this food three Uncle Sam–paid Christmases running, giving me a pseudo-connoisseur’s head start. Why hadn’t I asked Joseph about the spicings in his biryani? Had college-age me even known it was called biryani?
It was like learning that you’d spent adolescence surrounded by beautiful girls who really and truly wanted to sleep with you. But there you were playing chess or whatever.
Long gone from Los Angeles by 1997, my wife and I were living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and feeling grateful for superpower backwash. Vietnamese, Thai and Salvadoran restaurants were plentiful in neighborhoods I remembered as whiter than Justin Bieber in my Nixon-era high-school diaspora there. Then Maggie called to say that Om’s niece Maneesha was getting married in Bhopal. And we were all going.
India! I hadn’t been back in twenty-odd years. Plus, I now had a good bead on what to order for dinner. I could return with a newly swaggering sense of what India was all about.
Because I was and am foolish, I’d forgotten that India is always an argument, never a settled thing. And that no other country does either settled things or arguments better.
That disconnect first cropped up when I faced my father-in-law over menus soon after we landed. Hearing me wonder aloud about the restaurant’s lamb korma—I’d made it so many times, and I wanted to learn how my version compared to the Olympics—Om politely typed ‘No’ with two fingers. I hadn’t even noticed the tabletop included an invisible Smith-Corona.
‘I don’t trust meat in India,’ he said, and that was the law from then on. While Om was the least despotic of men, I’d better explain that he was not only a doctor but a renowned one. There may be English majors who envy me because I once got to interview Kurt Vonnegut, and I don’t blame ’em. They’ve got nothing on the way specialists in pulmonary diseases react when I mention that I was Om P. Sharma’s son-in-law.
The reason I never disputed him in twenty-three years is that I’m a uniquely informed judge of my own poor character. I don’t quarrel with people whose stellar one leaves me hungering for their good will.
Until now, though, I’d never seen Om in his Indian role as the family success story and New World dispenser of gifts. If I’d ever speculated that my mild father-in-law might have made an uncommonly thoughtful king—and I may have, since I loved him like an inadequate but loyal knight of Maggie’s samosa-crammed round table—then Bhopal made that image no longer hypothetical.
Though sleeping elsewhere, we spent the three days leading up to the wedding i
n his sister Ansuiya’s small house. As Om greeted delegations of relatives, his octogenarian mother monitored each reunion like a hummocky, misleadingly crumbled-looking fortress. Its main artillery—her eyes—had never run short of ammunition. I still remember how Maggie had to coach me with a murmured ‘Now’ to touch her feet in the traditional gesture of devotion.
The matriarch’s role was to prevent me when I tried, and I’ve never been crazy about that kind of ritual. I’m American enough that self-abasement strikes me as a ceremony best conducted in private. But the measure of how intimidating Om’s mother was is that no one in the family has told me her name to this day. To imply she needed identifying would have been an insult. Because it would have been trivial, nobody told her mine either.
Her main concern, however, was to keep tabs on the procession of solemn female relatives fetching wonderful food until we men lolled about like gorged ticks. Me far more than Om, since he had family politics to negotiate whose cheerfulness-masked complexity might have worn out Richelieu. But while my wife and Maggie kept departing because they’d been included in one or another ceremony preparing Maneesha for her great day, my only job was to be fed to the gills as Om reduced big clouds to small talk.
As his son-in-law, I was automatically part of the settled thing, not the argument. I’ve never been such a conscious beneficiary of sexism in my life, and Riane Eisler’s letter praising ‘Something About Anita’ was still warm. But in India, you learn as nowhere else that great cooking can be a source of pride because it began as a gesture of fealty.
Out of the blue, the France-born and noxious tradition of keeping certifiable great chefs male to identify the endeavor’s importance began to look like one of patriarchy’s more desperate fibs. After Bhopal, I had no trouble understanding why Indian cuisine’s pioneer popularizers in the West—my beloved Julie, Madhur Jaffrey, even, for Christ’s sake, Padma Lakshmi—have all been women. India recognizes their skills as part of the settled thing, and you grab leverage to become part of the argument where you can.
Before we eat, may I say that Om himself had major credentials as a male feminist. One of his foremost mentors had been a woman: Sheila Sherlock, M.D., whose biography he lovingly wrote not long before he died. The women he tutored to begin their own distinguished medical careers are legion. Lots of them spoke and some wept at his multiple memorials. Attending those kept my wife and Maggie boarding planes for several months in late 2012.
Yet Om had tersely expressed his major disagreements with his home country by decamping. Now that he was back, it would have been ridiculous to reproach how the settled things worked by voicing an argument.
What did those hushed women bring? Oh my god. Wonderful palak paneer (just spinach and cheese, but a dish whose delicacy had defeated my lone stab at it back in Arlington). Aloo gobi, which I’d never even tried to cook. Ras malai, aka sweet paneer dumplings in milk sauce. Jalebis, the perfect combination of pretzels and onion rings for those who fantasize about tasting both soaked in syrup by way of being greeted in heaven.
Keep in mind that all this was Bhopal’s equivalent of one polite bowl of trail mix and a perfunctory bag of Doritos during the Super Bowl’s pregame show. Maneesha and her bridegroom Vijay’s wedding feast would be when the real food came out. Since I’m aware of the limits of my powers of description, I’ll refer you to Keats on Chapman’s Homer for the bhindi masala and kali dal—and, oh, biryani—once they plighted their troth.
How obsessed I got with the unseen, humidly fragrant kitchen from which all this was gravely emerging. I once worked up the nerve to ask Maggie if there was any chance they’d let me go back there to watch for a while. Knowing India better than I did, my mother-in-law looked at me with eyes round with horror. It took her a few seconds to muster a tactful way to tell me I’d be embarrassing and humiliating our cooks if she even relayed the request, since they might feel they had no choice but to accede to Om’s bizarre American son-in-law and it would be a scandal. After that, I just shut up and ate my jalebis … like a good boy.
Maggie was wearing a sari at the time. So was my wife, to whom I think it meant more. (It wasn’t her mom’s debut in that outfit.) When our plane out of Bhopal got delayed, my wife burst into tears and stretched out on the floor, her head instantly pillowed by one of Om’s female cousins who kept stroking her hair as she wept. Realizing that her consoler—who didn’t speak English—might mistake her unhappiness for frustration, she kept stabbing the rug with her finger: ‘I want to stay here. I want to stay here.’
My beloved, accomplished, thoroughly post-feminist wife and I have never spoken of that afternoon. I can’t say whether we’re shy about bringing it up or else we just both know.
Then came the miracle we still can’t account for. (I literally just walked into the next room to ask her, and we swapped blank looks before we got back au boulot.) Reaching the airport, we learned the plane had been delayed yet again—and keep in mind, this was long before cell phones. But Om’s sister Ansuiya showed up in the waiting lounge with tiffin. Hearing (but how?) that we were still in Bhopal, this woman past sixty had commanded her future son-in-law, Bunty, to plant her on the back of his much-prized scooter. They rode to the airport through heavy traffic so she could bring us more food.
Once we got back to Arlington, my wife signed up to study Hindi for a couple of years and got pretty good at it. As for me, I went on cooking Julie Sahni’s recipes—Madhur’s, too? Madhur’s, too—and I still sometimes do now. But with a new timorousness inhibiting my enthusiasm, for I have a better idea of what they mean.
Whether I love what they mean or feel dubious about the side dishes now comes in second to knowing I’ll never be part of it. When you’re a Foreign Service brat, you know at some level you’ll never be part of anything. But we all have our fleeting, beautiful moments of hope, and my rogan josh—yes, I do trust meat here in America—is acceptable.
Maneesha and her husband Vijay are doing well. Om died last year in Los Angeles. I never knew what became of Joseph, and my 86-year-old mom still despises cilantro. As for my now widowed mother-in-law, who, like me, may now never see Bhopal again, Maggie came out in 2011 with a book of poetry called Manjil. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that one of the poems in it I cherish most is the one she wrote about me in India.
CARLA HALL is a co-host of ABC’s popular lifestyle series The Chew and is best known as a competitor on Bravo’s Top Chef, where she won over audiences with her catch phrase “Hootie hoo” and her philosophy to always cook with love.
LEEK OF FAITH
Carla Hall
I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, surrounded by the South’s culinary heritage, but it took a trip to Paris to get me into the kitchen.
Today, I cook for a living, but for most of my life, I didn’t know how to fry an egg. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a good cook. My grandmother on my father’s side was a good cook. My dad was a great cook. My mom? Well … three out of four ain’t bad. My mom had no interest in cooking. It wasn’t like she hated it. She just had no idea about it. She had gone away to boarding school at the age of twelve, and then went away for college, and had just never learned her way around the kitchen.
My dad could really cook, but my parents were divorced. Mom worked full time, and so, during the week, when my sister and I were in her care, we all happily lived off of frozen entrees, an occasional roast, and pancakes. On weekends, my father and grandparents would make collard greens, cornbread, smothered pork chops, fried catfish and mac and cheese, and more—food that then, and still today, is the ultimate comfort food for me. But like my mom, I had no interest in cooking the food. I was happy enough to eat it once it reached the table. Except for mastering an apple crisp when I was ten (it was a Girl Scout cooking badge requirement), I stayed pretty well clear of the kitchen.
When it came to college and my early working years, when circumstances forced me to cook now and again, the results were hit or miss. While sharing an apartment in col
lege, my sister and I lived off of Chicken Divine (Kim’s specialty, of baked chicken, broccoli and cheese thrown into jazzed-up cream of mushroom soup) and a passable spaghetti and red sauce (my signature dish; the sauce came out of a jar). If I strayed from the basics, disaster awaited. For my first job I moved to Tampa, Florida, where I worked as an accountant. I once tried to make vegetable soup for a couple of friends. I put four cans of tomato paste into the pot. When I served the meal, my friends gently asked if they could take me out for dinner.
It was a trip to Paris that set my life on a culinary course, but not for the usual reasons. I moved to Paris when I had had enough of accounting. I was twenty-three. I’d modeled in college, so I thought I’d give it a go full time, and I’d visited Paris once before, on an eighth-grade trip. Initially, I lived in a small hotel in the 14th arrondissement. It was a five-story walk-up. My room held a bed, a dresser, a sink, and a small desk with a hot plate. The dormer ceiling kept me from standing fully in some places. Though I was in the gastronomic capital of Europe, you wouldn’t have known it from the way I ate. I dined on peas and tuna straight out of the cans; muesli with powdered milk that I heated up on the hot plate. When I needed groceries, I hit the small convenience store next to the hotel.
It was the meals I had with my fellow models that changed my life. When I arrived, I knew just one other person, Rosalind Johnson, another African-American model. She introduced me to her friends, and started inviting me to Sunday brunches outside of Paris with her friends. It was these brunches that opened my eyes to the power of cooking.
Rosalind’s friends were also African-American, mostly from New York and New Jersey. Though we were surrounded by fantastic French food, everyone just wanted to cook dishes from home—comforting, familiar dishes that I remembered from weekends with my dad and grandparents. Mac and cheese. Chicken wings. Pancakes. Eggs and sausages—all kinds of things. They wanted to make turnip greens, they said, but none of the French grocers sold them. I didn’t even consider helping—I saw my mother doing this whenever we went somewhere, she would just watch. And so that’s what I did. I just hung out and watched and listened, astonished. It was the first time I’d hung out in the kitchen while food was being prepared, and I was enthralled. As the girls cooked, they would say to one another, ‘Oh, my mother does it like this. My mother does it like that.’ I had nothing to offer. I realized that I had no idea what my grandmother did, or what my father did. And I realized for the first time what I’d been missing all those years, and I was determined to make up for it.
A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Page 16