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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Unmaking food history
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Unmaking food history

From a 4000 year old Harappan brinjal dish to a 400 year old roast chicken from Akbar's court, our food writer on the backstory of Resurrecting Recipes

(Clockwise from top left) Musamman and pulao; rabbit, marinated with byadagi chillies; Kautilya’s mutton curry; and Farmana-e-Baingan.Premium
(Clockwise from top left) Musamman and pulao; rabbit, marinated with byadagi chillies; Kautilya’s mutton curry; and Farmana-e-Baingan.

I’m not sure when, but at some point in my adult life, I started paying attention to history and trivia. Not in the way that one might pay attention to say, one’s investment portfolio after a colleague has had a heart attack, but in the way that you might pause after reading an intensely beautiful sentence somewhere, turning it over and over in your head, until you think you’ve memorized it (but haven’t).

When I pitched the idea of ‘Resurrecting Recipes’ to Mint Lounge, therefore, I thought I had it all figured out. Food and history. How wrong could I go? (Reaching immediately, of course, for my copy of K.T. Achaya’s The Illustrated Foods of India: A-Z, and Sanjeev Sanyal’s Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography, a new ‘old’ favourite.)

The plan was simple. Drive a spade into other people’s hard work—years of blood, sweat and historical scholarship—fish out the bits that involve some form of cooking, potter about in the kitchen, call a couple of people who actually know about such things, follow your gut and reproduce a dish that could then be triple tested: on me, my partner, and my neighbour’s delightful, if undiscerning, dog, Robert urf Robo. Three times for each recipe.

Turns out, I was about as wrong about the ease of building a fire on the terrace—my first deliberate attempt—as I was about the series. In fact, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

But before I get to the many steeplechases in the kitchen (and terrace), let me dwell awhile on the happy things. Like the leftovers. Of which there was plenty to go around—although I doubt my husband filed that under ‘happy things’ in his head, certainly not after the third round of Harappan brinjals appeared at the table in the same week. (Did I mention I’m allergic to brinjals, and he’s not?)

Shopping was suddenly delightful too. But really, I doubt I would have gone hunting in the city for dead field rats, byadagi chillies, tinned copper handis or decent firewood, for that matter, in the absence of other more palatable incentives—nehari at the obscure Haji Shabrati’s in Chitli Kabr, for instance, or hot chips in Munirka. And I have to say, Delhi didn’t disappoint: coughing up things that I asked for and those that I didn’t; offering up dried stalks of night-flowering jasmine or harsingar at the Allah Banda shop in Matia Mahal, for instance, in lieu of dried cockscomb or mawal, a more common ingredient, usually found in Kashmiri kitchens. Notwithstanding one shop assistant who offered to fetch Orbit gum instead, finding a farm-fed rabbit didn’t prove to be too difficult either (in the frozen crypts of Altitude Store in Mehar Chand Market). The rabbit has since reappeared on the menu on several occasions—once fed to an unsuspecting child who came visiting, speaking lovingly between mouthfuls of roast ‘chicken’ of her two pet bunnies back home in Nepal (Snowball and Fluff, I think they were called).

Of all the other ‘discoveries’ that the research threw up, I’m glad to report that the pabri has now flowered, all purple and pink, confirming my suspicion that it is some form of sweet basil.

***

Now, when I first drew up a list of probable recipes for the series—or in the case of Farmana, deductions from potsherd and dental enamel by Arunima Kashyap and Steve Webber—I quite enjoyed the prospect of working my way backward to open, a crack, doors of pantries and kitchens that no longer exist. Puzzles on paper that would force me each month to locate historical settlements or texts on the modern atlas, using Google Books not Maps. And to read about the origins of everyday ingredients like ginger and cardamom that have long ceased to invoke wonder or admiration, even as we grudgingly allow ready-to-cook pastes and powders to crowd our shelves.

I was hoping the list would be a good mix of the ordinary and the exalted, the ancient and the old. From a plebeian proto-curry cooked in Farmana 4,000 years ago to 400-year-old roast chicken in Akbar’s court. (Since kings and courtiers appeared to be the only ones documenting history, recipes from common kitchens were quite impossible to find.) Apart from these, and a recipe each from Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Somesvara III’s Manasollasa, the original list also included the first printed recipe of curry in English by Hannah Glasse in The Art of Cookery (1747) and chana’r foopoo polau, a rice dish with Portuguese curd-cheese koftas, from the Bengali matriarch Pragyasundori Debi’s two-volume tome, Aamish O Niramish Ahaar (1907). But early on in my research, I realised that the challenge would be greater if I uncovered secrets or forgotten facts separated by four or five centuries at least. Glasse and Debi would have to wait.

Taking pleasure in the fact that a king like Somesvara relished rat, and further suggesting that we eat rat—a practice that is still followed by some of the most marginalized communities across the country—I chose not to dwell too much on the politics of food. A subject that extends far beyond the scope of this project, and perhaps, my now-frayed nerves.

Meanwhile, using the series as a ready excuse to buy more books (How can I not have Lizzie Collingham’s Curry in the house? Wait, is that a Salma Husain? Ooh, Larousse, all paperbacked!), I might have spent all the money that Mint Lounge sent my way, and sometimes, before that, in its anticipation! By the time I learnt the very useful lesson that too many books spoil the broth, the tomes I had bought were already too soiled, or redolent with notes of garlic and patthar ke phool, to return to the shop or pass off as wedding gifts. It was a minor relief then that Google Books, like a gatekeeper from hell, decided to turn down most of my requests with ‘No preview’ or ‘You have reached the reading limit for this book’.

Back on the terrace, learning to start a fire with newspapers (someone forgot to get the kerosene!) was fun, if only in hindsight. As was cooking in earthenware—you have to try it. What wasn’t remotely fun, however, was the failed first attempt at replicating a recipe. Like watching the first roasted chook of Ain-i-Akbari’s mussaman, emerge all golden and gorgeous from the oven, bereft of the bold, bright flavours that ought to have made it more ‘Mughal’ in my book. Blaming the ghost of Abu’l-Fazl for the debacle, and tweaking the recipe to include ‘missing’ ingredients of my choosing though, was pretty damn close to redemption. Because, in the end, history is what you make of it. And gut instincts are just that.

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Published: 09 Feb 2016, 01:13 PM IST
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