Lucky dip - Cooking the Indian Way

Apologies for the lucky dip. I was busy doing something else after a lunch with a friend and had almost forgotten about the blog. So rather than do nothing at all I thought I would do a quick lucky dip.

And here it is. This was was first published in 1963 but I would have bought it in - probably - either late 1969 or early 1970.

We had just moved to Australia and - shock, horror - there were no Indian restaurants. At that time of our life we dined out reasonably frequently and often in Indian restaurants. We loved the food and they were cheap. But Melbourne had just one Indian restaurant - Phantom India - which I remember as being somewhere near Melbourne University - not very close, not all that cheap or all that wonderful either. And so I had to teach myself to cook Indian food. And this wonderful little book did it for me. I made so many things from that book. Not only did I learn curry from them, but fresh chutneys and breads too. I really should revisit it. It is a very small, very plain little paperback - no pictures and no flowery introductions to individual recipes. Just the recipes. The brief introduction to the book is very matter of fact. There is a brief history of Indian food, a tiny bit about how it is served and eaten and that's about it really. No personal flourishes at all.

So I looked up the authors - authoresses we would have said in my day - and found, that one of them, Attia Hosain was a most accomplished lady - an acclaimed novelist no less. She was also very beautiful as you can see. She must be long dead as she was born in 1913. Her son Waris wrote a rather heartfelt short history of her. For she seems not to have been entirely happy, especially in England - her second home, to which she moved in 1947. You can read it here. And not a really good cook either. he didn't really say why she decided to write this book. Maybe her co-author persuaded her to. And considering that she wrote novels and short stories, you would have thought there might have been more background writing throughout.

“She had to teach herself to cook – for years she could only do boiled eggs and chips with ketchup, but then she learnt and brought out a cookery book in 1967 with Sita Pasricha, on how to cook simply, called “Cooking the Indian Way”. Waris Hosain

Of her co-author I found nothing other than a reference in a Rick Stein book in India when he credits her (Sita Pasricha) with one of the recipes in his book.

It's a very simple little book. The recipes themselves are very, very simple. No page long recipes here. A short list of ingredients - real ones, not bought curry pastes or western substitutes - and an even briefer method. I now feel guilty that I don't use it more. I guess I was seduced by the more glamorous (the books anyway) Charmaine Solomon and Madhur Jaffrey. Even though neither of these ladies are in any way ugly - at least when young - they probably are not quite as beautiful as Attia Hosain.

So what recipe did I choose. Well, there were four recipes to choose from - from the fish section. Two were prawns and since David won't eat prawns I did not choose them - though I was tempted by the Goa prawn curry. One was for steamed fish - not my favourite and the last was for Sour Fish. So here it is. Not even the titles of the recipes are particularly Indian. There is only the occasional Indian term like biryani. Mostly it's purely descriptive. Hence I really have no idea what this would look like. A little like this perhaps - although this is salmon and the recipe specifies white fish. Not so many spices in the pictured recipe either - but sufficiently similar to illustrate I think.

SOUR FISH

1/4 green pepper

2 tablespoons fresh coriander or watercress leaves

3 cloves garlic

1 dessertspoon besan flour

3/4 teaspoon dhannajeera (this seems to be a mix of cumin and coriander)

1/4 teaspoon turmeric

1/8 teaspoon chilli

1/4 teaspoon cummin

3/4 teaspoon salt

4 tablespoons vinegar

1 tablespoon fat

4 fillets of any white fish

Chop green pepper and coriander leaves very fine. Smash garlic cloves. Mix besan flour, green pepper, coriander leaves, spices, salt and vinegar well together, and stir into the melted fat. Apply this mixture to the pieces of fish.

Wrap and seal each pice of fish in tinfoil. Put into a baking tin and place in a preheated hot oven. Bake for 10-15 minutes till fish is soft.

Simple but I bet it's good. I haven't tried this one. Tinfoil! Was it really made out of tin in those days? Maybe I'll look into that tomorrow.

"Good cooks never really know exactly how much of this or that they have used. There is no substitute for the sense of taste. This is particularly true of salt, pepper and chilli. One can never really tell how much to use; it depends very much on individual taste." Attia Hosain and Sita Pasricha

And that's as personal as it gets. I must get it out and use it again. Even my husband remembers it.