Notes on a culinary revolution

Living for at least half the year in England, and eating out quite a lot, I have been developing some heretical ideas about the very desi food I grew up on. In an earlier article in this space a few weeks ago (“The Great Curry Conquest”), I had railed against the lack of innovation in our cuisine. In the same spirit, let me make some suggestions to change the way we eat, while not proposing any radical changes in what we eat.

We need to remember that eating is a multi-sensory experience: tactile (if we eat with our fingers), olfactory, visual and the sense of taste. Thus, a chef who thinks about what he’s doing will try to make his dishes attractive to all these senses. However, when we are cooking at home, we seldom try and touch all these bases, content to prepare a meal that tastes good, but not extending ourselves beyond doing the basics. Mostly, the extra flourishes are a function of time and effort, so we tend to take short-cuts in the domestic kitchen. However, a chef cooking in a good restaurant does not have our excuse of a shortage of time or the necessary skills, and has to come to grips with the higher aspects of fine dining.

These days, even a gastro-pub in England would not dream of just dumping food on a plate, while the top restaurants go to extraordinary lengths to make your dish a work of art. The Japanese are the masters of culinary presentation, and have influenced western chefs enormously in treating ingredients as the components of a painting on a plate. But in the subcontinent, our salans, qormas and daals are slopped on to the plate with little thought to how these dishes look. The only garnish we use is coriander leaves, or tadka on the daal.

The other issue I have developed lately with desi food is that all the dishes are served simultaneously, so when you sit down, there is usually a curry dish, a veggie, a daal, rice, chapatti and hopefully, a salad. Usually, there are more dishes on offer, especially at a party. All these arrive hot, and you take a bit of everything, wanting to sample it all before it cools. This causes the flavours and textures to get mixed up, and because the plates are at room temperature, food tends to cool down quickly. In an attempt to wolf down the food while it’s still warm, we tend to eat too much and too quickly.

When we are entertaining in Devizes, there is one main dish, whether it’s desi or European, and a number of supporting offerings. If there’s a roast, for example, it will come with baked, mashed or sautéed potatoes, and at least one green veggie. The main course will be preceded by a starter, followed by a salad, a dessert, probably a cheese or two, and with coffee or green tea to end the meal. Since everything is not served at once, it gives us time to make sure that each course is served hot if it’s cooked. Last minute touches can be added, and if I’m making a risotto or pasta, I can finish the dish when the guests are actually seated. This way, a meal is a relaxed, convivial affair where one course appears after another. Let me add that we mostly entertain in our kitchen where the table can seat 10 at a pinch. Oh yes, and the plates are warmed before food is placed on them.

So here’s my radical idea: why can’t desi food be served in courses, and some attention paid to the appearance of the dishes? And warming the plates before a meal is easy to do. Obviously, I don’t expect this revolution to begin at home as housewives are often too busy to bother with such niceties. Where a khansama does the cooking, it might not be easy to convince him to change his ways. However, when we eat out, why can’t the manager of the restaurant serve the food in courses?

Here’s how it would go: the starter could consist of small, bite-sized grilled chicken or meat, accompanied with raita. Next would come the rice, served with daal and achar. The curry would be the third course, accompanied with hot chappati. To cleanse the palate, a fresh green salad could be served, and the meal ended with a light dessert. Of course, there could be endless variations, and courses could be added. The point of the whole exercise is for the diner to enjoy each item on the menu, and not mix up flavours and gobble his food.

Traditionally, the four different flavours were sweet, sour, bitter and salty. A fifth taste was discovered by a Japanese researcher around a century ago, and is referred to as ‘umami’, with ‘savoury’ as its closest English equivalent. This is how Ajinomoto, the ubiquitous flavouring agent, came into being. Each flavour is sensed by a different cluster of taste buds on or under the tongue. In classical Chinese gastronomy, a chef works on the yin-yang principle of opposites: sweet is opposed by sour; colours are contrasted; and a soft ingredient is offset by a slightly crisp sensation. These principles have now been integrated into European cooking practises, and are at the heart of cutting-edge gastronomy.

The question is how to work these guidelines into desi cooking. One problem is that most of our chefs are not educated, and nor have they sampled the finest of other cuisines. Thus, they remain prisoners of tradition, and are unwilling to learn and experiment. “If the way we do things was good enough for my elders, it’s good enough for me” sums up the general attitude towards innovation.

Unfortunately, Pakistan lacks culinary schools where aspiring chefs could have the luxury of trying out new ideas. Professional cooks are simply too busy turning out dishes according to a set menu. Another problem has to do with social attitudes: while entertaining, hosts like to display a range and variety of dishes that often reaches obscene heights. I have been to parties with literally a dozen or more platters, each with a different dish on offer. The idea of this vast array is to impress guests, not necessarily to ensure that they enjoy their food, and appreciate it the way it was meant to be.

Finally, we must face the fact that in the West, wine almost invariably accompanies a meal, so that the interlude between courses is a pleasant way not just to converse, but to sip from your glass. The idea is to prolong the pleasure of sitting around a table, chatting with friends, and looking forward to the next course. In our part of the world, the tendency is for guests to depart immediately after a meal.

So until we are ready to change our social patterns, I fear my culinary revolution will have to wait.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 6^th, 2010.