Lucky dip - New Indian cookery from 1983
"Like any other cultural process, classic Indian cookery must open its doors to new influences, criticism and experiences, otherwise it will become closed and inward-looking. This stage of change has been reached primarily because of Indians' migration to other cultures where they have acquired an awareness of other cuisines." Meena Taneja
Coincidence again. Here we are, once more, about to talk about authenticity and change. Or should I say innovation? A complete departure from the classical - as Attica is doing with native Australian food.
My lucky dip book is one I purchased back in the 80s. It's a paperback with no pictures. Well lots of cookery books were back then. Even Nigella's first book has no pictures. I doubt anyone would dare produce a cookbook without pictures these days even the cheapies. There's the odd drawing at the start of each chapter in this one, but that's it.
But that's an aside. Love the cover - so bright, so cheerful, so 70s.
I confess I haven't used this book very much. I think I bought it at a point when I thought I had mastered Indian cookery courtesy of Charmaine Solomon, and my little book by Attia Hosain and Sita Pasricha - a book which by sheer coincidence this particular author acknowledges as one of her major teachers - after her mother and aunt. Because I thought I had mastered traditional Indian cookery I thought it was time to move on. And the author obviously thought that it was time for Indian cooks to move on too. In her Introduction she explains her aims and how she hopes to achieve it.
"New Indian Cookery builds on the classic traditional cookery by challenging many of its orthodoxies, its limited or non-use of some materials, ingredients and cookery processes. It proposes new recipes based on personal experience of experimenting with spices and herbs, and cooking with other cuisines, particularly Chinese, Mexican, English and French.
"The emphasis is on dishes where the flavour of the main ingredient, whether it be meat, poultry, fish or vegetables, is enhanced by using appropriate herbs and spices, and cooking with the minimum or no extra fat or water ... I have used herbs and spices selectively to add a subtle, distinct flavour, rather than adding a large array of spices for every recipe - as is the custom in the traditional method. The idea is that no more than two to three spices which are complementary to each other and to the main ingredient be used in any one recipe. This not only increases awareness of the taste but also improves the general appearance and colour of the dish."
Someone with a bold new vision it seems, and I should probably revisit her book. Because in spite of my belief in being ready to move on with Indian food, I don't think I was. And I'm not sure many others are either, even now. I decided I would look into where Indian cooking is at now - both in restaurants and in writing. I am writing about this book getting on for forty years after it was published. So you would have thought, given the massive Indian diaspora throughout the world, that Indian food would have moved on. And it sort of has - in one way, although not so much in the other.
The main way it has changed is in adapting to Anglo tastes. Well that's what they say. What would I know? My only experience of eating Indian food in India was very, very many years ago - 1969 during an enforced stop in Delhi on our way to Australia. I just remember it was delicious but not what it was. Interestingly though, just to show that cultural blending does not always work, we had started out at this particular hotel eating the most appalling English food - the kind of food that promoted England's bad food reputation. But then maybe that's what Indians think of the Indian food that is served up in local Indian restaurants throughout the world, but particularly the Anglo parts of it.
“Most restaurant owners will cook what their diners want and that tends to lead to dumbed-down imitations of the real thing — such as reducing spice levels." Christine Manfield
The proponents of 'authentic' will say that what we eat in our favourite Indian restaurants is bastardised. Not the real thing. But we don't care, we love it.
"The journey from exotic treat to British comfort food, however, has given curry an emotional pull few other cuisines can rival." Homa Khaleeli - The Guardian
We love it so much that the British have actually invented various favourite 'Indian' dishes - chicken tikka masala, and butter chicken being the most famous. You could argue that these are merely adapted rather than invented, but the Birmingham balti style of cooking does seem to be authentically British - well Indian British, as it was Indian immigrants who invented it. Somehow this kind of innovation is not approved of however. I guess it's because it's food eaten by the populace at large in cheap curry houses. Jamie's book on British food features several Indian influenced dishes for example.
"a form of cooking curries which is indigenous to the UK and that does not exist in authentic Indian cooking in India. They are not Indian restaurants in the proper sense of the word." Ranjit Mathrani
But then you have the true innovators. As featured in that lovely film The One Hundred Foot Journey. The Indian chef in France, learns French technique and adapts it to his own cuisine. I think the only example you actually saw in the film was an omelette, but the implication was that he was creating sensational and innovative new dishes that fused the two cuisines together, in a posh Paris restaurant. And I gather this is certainly happening in South-East Asia in places like Bangkok and Singapore, and it is possibly happening here too. I saw that a restaurant called Elichi in Black Rock seems to be doing this. Here is one of their dishes -
But some cooks experiment. Yotam Ottolenghi is an always reliable experimenter - I found a recipe for Indian ratatouille which is a fusion dish.
Meera Taneja herself grew up in India but spent time in many different places in the world, finally settling in England where she had a reasonably successful career teaching and writing about Indian food. This photo is very blurred but it was the only one I could find. Her daughter Preti is a pretty well known author who has just published her first novel to some acclaim. She didn't make it to real celebrity chef stardom, but she did write several books about Indian food. Most of them more 'authentic' than this one. Maybe we have to go through the stage of bastardising a cuisine by changing it to suit our taste, before we return to the 'authentic', so that we can then move on to innovation and fusion. Though alas the innovation almost always seems to happen at the top of the food chain, as it were, first. I should look more into her book and try innovating myself.
"In everything we are, and everything we do, we inherit the past, learn from it, criticise it, define problems and propose new solutions." Meera Taneja
I'll talk about the recipe I found tomorrow. Suffice to say it was for fish, which inspired me to cook fish for dinner tonight - alas not her recipe because it was very heavily coconut and my husband doesn't like coconut.
