Quinoa, East Indian food, Bengali food, and the village life

I love rice, the staple of choice for the consummate Bengali.  A pointed heap of rice occupying a good fifty percent of a brass dinner place, a little hole indented into the top to pour gravy, ghee or dal into; such are the memories of meals in Bengal.  The near instant energy that its simple carbs liberate rejuvenated our rural ancestors after the long day of toiling the fields, or herding their buffaloes across the river.  To me and my urban contemporaries who have retained these dietary habits but cast away the physical effort, this indulgence brings nothing but grief.  Rice has a high glycemic index (impact that a food has on your blood glucose content) and glycemic load (that also factors in the carbohydrate load).  This is not good news.  Bengalis have one of the highest incidences of heart disease and diabetes.  So, a good 5 or 6 years ago, with wisdom settling in along with a receding (or rather a deeply incursive and collapsing) hairline, I decided to switch and join M for a couple of chapathis (rotis) every night instead of rice.  Hand made whole wheat tortillas from Trader Joe's.  The healthiest I could find.  This was not fun.  Rotis are fine for a restaurant meal, but not at home for dinner. Yet,  I kept at it.  Rice I recoursed to only for special occasions, sometimes dipping into my sons’ supplies for dinner. Being Bengalis, they too prefer rice, especially the younger one whose predilection for anything that goes from dish to glucose in the time it takes to pass your esophagus, is downright scary—donuts and potatoes included.

Then one day, a scientist friend of mine, and someone with diabetes, told me about some experiments that he had been conducting.  He would ingest various grains and staples, and then do a time dependent measurement of his blood sugar.  Rice was bad.  Whole wheat tortillas were not that great either.  But he highly recommended quinoa (“keenwa”).  M of course already knew about quinoa.  And various other assorted grains and staples with healthy sounding names that seemed to come from the middle east.  Quinoa originates from Peru and it is technically a grass, not a grain.  So next time, at Trader Joe’s, we picked up some quinoa (it is also available at Mrs. Greens).  Get the white colored ones and not the dark ones (I don’t know the technical difference, just go with this optical inspection for now). 

M cooked it like rice.  Two parts water and one part quinoa.  Cooktop or microwave both work.  On the cooktop it take a bit longer to cook (about 10-15% longer).  I use it just as rice, mixed with East Indian dishes.  It is somewhat less firm than rice, so you cannot form it like you can with rice.  And of course it does not have the aroma that some rice grains have.  It take a couple of tries to get used to, like switching from left full back to right full back in soccer.  But the game, and the thrill, are about the same.  Quinoa blends in perfectly with the meats and curries of Bengali dishes and you can even mix in pickles or yogurt.  It goes very well with East Indian food.  I say East Indian and not just Bengali, because M sometimes cooks Assamese food.  A light delicate, tangy gravy called Tenga, a cross between Bengali curries and Thai soups, cooked with fish like Arctic Char. 

The name quinoa itself sounds as if it was made for the Bengali lexicon. In the patois of my forefathers, I can imagine myself hear them say, “Aazkey kwinwa khaitey mon kortasey”, if only the Peruvian trader could have unloaded his produce at the docks by the Ganga, after a new trade route had magically opened up between Lima and Bengal in the 19^th century.  M cooked some khichuri the other day, a rainy day food, a mush of cholar dal (a kind of gram) and rice cooked together.  Except this time she substituted half the rice with quinoa.  Even my younger son did not complain.

I do not miss rice, and I feel good these days about quinoa.  It is a grain (nay, grass) whose time has come. It makes you feel healthy, it has that urban health nut ring to it, its grains staring at you from plastic bins in Mrs. Greens, screaming out restraint.  It is an oats swirling, pilates flexing, no antibiotics in my milk world, a return--as a housing development ad screamed at me this weekend in the newspapers--to the “village life”.

Kewpie’s

Lala Lajpat Rai Sarani (Elgin Road), Kolkata

In a formal Bengali meal fit for an traditional household with a professional cook in the kitchen, you get an elaborate multi-course meal containing several vegetable preparations, at least three fish dishes, a couple of meat dishes, followed by dessert. You would sit with a metal dining plate surrounded by a constellation of small bowls containing a small amount of each dish, with the sweets making their entry at the end. If you were traditionally from West Bengal, then the mistress of the household ensured that the curry dishes had at least a tablespoon of sugar in it, and if you were from East Bengal, you generally scorned upon this practice.

In Kolkata, we wanted to take a visiting colleague out to a restaurant serving authentic Bengali food, and I asked two sets of close friends for recommendations. Both endorsed Kewpies--a small, homey, restaurant near the Forum Mall on Elgin Road, in a little bylane for foot travel that abuts a wall of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s yellow colored mansion. If you ever wanted to know how the backstreets of Chowringhee and Park Street, that are now clogged with traffic, felt in the seventies and early eighties, then take a walk along this ten foot wide bylane. It is afternoon, it is quiet, the sun is filtered through big trees, and you can take a pleasant walk and converse to the sounds of automobiles from middling distances. This the the quality of the afternoon, the light, and the sound that you could get, at that time, on Little Russell Road, on Camac Street, and on Elgin Road.

Kewpies has been the closest that I have come to authentic home cooked traditional Bengali food that is found in a restaurant. I say home-cooked, because it lacks the ostentation that many restaurants have, relying instead upon authenticity. This is not adventurous food, nor is it any different or particularly better than the food that my mother, or mother-in-law prepares, except that you get an array of such dishes at one sitting. It is a dapper little restaurant in what appears to be a converted residence. The room is tastefully done with a traditional red stone floor and freshly painted walls and ceilings, the bathroom could have been a bit cleaner.

We ordered what is called a “thala” or a platter that consists of an entire, multi-course meal, and M was our navigator with tips on the preparation and ingredients. Food is served in earthenware dishes that are disposed after use, and the meal plate is covered with a fresh banana leaf. It starts with rice, a couple of luchis, and a traditional shukto (a slightly bitter vegetable mush with green plantain, bitter gourd, potatoes, eggplant, and ridged gourd, with a small amount of milk added at the end), dal and a fried potol (snake gourd). Following this opening gambit, arrives an onslaught of meat and vegetable dishes. There is fried bhecti (a type of fish) with a batter of breadcrumbs, an Anglo-Indian legacy; fried and curried hilsa, a shadlike fish with a dense bone structure, the seduction of the flesh between those relentless bones giving it a cult following. Then there are two types of goat meat (what is called mutton), one watery and one dry (kosa mangso). There is daab chingri, where shrimp is cooked inside a green coconut; alu-jhinge-posto, a triumvirate of potatoes, ridged gourd and poppy; dhokar dalna, fried lentil cakes in a gravy; mocha ghonto, a hash made with banana flowers; chital muthia, dumplings of the chital fish set in a gravy, and with a meat-like texture, popular at one time during marriage feasts. And all through this ecstasy, the plate periodically refilled with white rice, the high glycemic index, high energy carb staple that Bengalis consumed by the heap to generate the energy to toil the fields, except that the urban Bengali has now left the physical effort out of this equation. Dessert followed. It was a mishti doi—a unique sweet Bengali yogurt, a small portion of sweet and sour chutney to clarify the palate, and paan, the traditional betel leaf based meal closer.

This was a formidable lineup, truly unique in the way that it is cooked. This food is almost completely unknown in the States outside of places like the Bangladeshi enclave in Queens, New York, but part of a growing trend in upscale places in other Indian metropolises. Wholeheartedly recommended.

Guwahati & Shillong Jul Aug 2010

I was waiting for the lady behind the counter at the coffee shop to finish counting her money and close her previous transaction, but the man behind me seemed to be in a hurry. “Hello—are you waiting to order?”. “Yes”, I say. “Well, you should go ahead and place the order, she is just counting her money—she can hear you”. He was an alpha male type, in a black suit and in a hurry. As I waited to pick up my coffee he proceeded to order a coupled of bottles of Kingfisher Blue and left. I was at the brand new, cavernous, Delhi International airport on the third day past its inauguration, waiting for the last leg of my Air India flight to Kolkata. The airport expansion, timed for the Commonwealth Games, felt unusually sparse for an Indian airport. Airport officials seemed ill prepared for this supersized terminal. Tempers flared. A tourist walks away in a huff yelling at the airline staff, calling them idiots. I am shocked and appalled at the language, but the staff takes the abuse with restraint. It is as if, softened by the heat and pelleted by the dust, we are witnessing the time honored ritual melt-down of the foreign tourist. The airport personnel are generally helpful but often refuse to acknowledge ignorance. I ask around for an ATM machine and I am given six different responses that rout me above the escalator, below the escalator and beyond the escalator. It turns out that the ATMs have not yet been installed.

We reach Kolkata late at night and pass through customs quickly. The night air is warm and sticky and it looks like the rains have flattened the dust. In a sign of the changing times there are no pestering touts. We drive through the empty streets of the suburb of Salt Lake. Families of stray dogs have bedded down in the middle of the street, and the nightwatchman is out on his rounds, banging his baton on the pavement. It is a lonesome sight in this mega-metropolis: bare streets with dark parked cars, a mound of garbage waiting for pickup, warm yellow light filtering out through houses shuttered up for the night, the bustle evaporated out of its bedded down physical shell.

Kolkata owns some excellent old bookstores replete with the ambiance requisite for a traditional old thing like a book, whose format has changed little in over 400 years. I like the feeling of quiet, of mustiness, of volumes piled up in varnished dark bookcases and a manager you can talk to about books. The morning after our arrival, we seek out the venerable Oxford Bookstore on Park Street. In a sign of acceptance of the times, they too will sell you coffees and DVDs, but in addition the place holds a large collection of books in English by Indian authors: from the ones that Naipaul derisively refers to as writing about Chachajis and Mamiji, to the instant fiction by an IITian (this seems to be a fashion trend), to books written by an earlier generation of Indian writers. I am here to look for “My God Died Young”, published in the late sixties by Sasthi Brata. Critically applauded for its honesty, enthusiastically embraced by teenagers for its titillating passages, and viewed with mild amusement in later years for a dated writing style that sought its cues from the English, I wished to revisit the book after decades.

From Kolkata we travel to Guwahati, where I am back after only three months. One evening we drive out of the city, cross the magnificent Brahmaputra river and visit an orchid garden set on a flat of red earth deep in the hills. It is a drive on a narrow two lane road through villages with dense jungles set behind them, much like the countryside that I used to see more frequently as a child. Our host is a young man from the Garo tribe, and he built the nursery in a cost shared project with the state formed to encourage local industry. Inside the huge, climate controlled greenhouse are rows and rows of orchids, set in based packed out of the husks of coconuts, and beneath an elaborate sprinkler system that controls the humidity. He is a successful entrepreneur, his flowers are shipped across the country, and he soon plans to diversify into carnations. There is a little camp built next to the nursery with a small living quarters and a traditional Chang Bungalow, or platform house built of wood on stilts, set at the edge of the plateau overlooking a small gorge and ringed by hilly jungle. It is a beautiful site. We sit there awaiting dusk as they tell us stories of the leopards that come near camp at night to drink water in the brook some fifty meters below, their roars shaking the bungalow. For our hosts, this is the regular course of life. They accept this without fear, even indifference, and the only remedial action taken has been to tether their cows away from the brook for the night. The small residence is neatly equipped with satellite, broadband access, and a flat screen TV. The stories of jungles past when my grandfather was a hunter in these Assam wilds, or the books of Jim Corbett, bring to mind the steely minimalism of the starched, khaki clad hunter of the 1930s with his rifle and his first aid packet of potash and tincture of iodine, are now replaced with this image of the wilderness, where you scroll the web while the leopard roars in the valley below. Our host is a Baptist Christian, as are most of the hill tribes here, converted at the turn of the last century by American and British missionaries. At that time, missionaries formed the fourth leg of the community of the European expatriates, in addition to the administratiors, the box-wallahs (term applied to European businessmen), and the armymen. Their mission and their unique sense of self instilled in them a fearlessness that they carried with them “up-country” where they often perished with infections and ailments foreign to their bodies.

We drive back after dark, through a backdrop of black jungle and paddy fields, passing small villages with threadbare shops, selling essentials, tobacco, and liter sized bottles of gasoline for two wheeled motorists. We pass cow-herds returning from the fields with water buffaloes and cows, cowbells tinkering, moving unchallenged down almost the entire width of the road, like a pack of cyclists in Westchester County. We pass places of worship—Namghars for the Hindus, and Churches for the Christians. Structurally the buildings are similar--Assam type timber framed constructions set back about 20 meters from the road with the churches distinguished by a large cross in the front yard.

I have a meeting with the Guwahati press club the next morning where I speak to them about nanotechnology and solar energy. It is a gathering of young men and women, journalists in the local newspapers. Except for one person, they are all uniformly liberal arts educated, with little involvement in science --yet they listen with rapt attention and ask questions that would not be out of place at a conference in Washington or Delhi.

One morning we hire a small Tata Indigo and drive 100 km up the hills from Guwahati to Shillong, a harrowing three hour journey on a two lane road. The humid heat of the valley turns to temperate up in the hills and the roads and coniferous forests remind us of Westchester. Twenty kms from Shillong we stop by to view Umiam Lake, an enormous artificial lake that was the result of a dam and a hydroelectric project commissioned in the 1960’s by Nehru. Viewed high up from the road above, its calm waters, turquoise in patches, glisten in isolation –largely unchanged from my last visit 30 years ago. The same cannot be said of Shillong, a one time elegant hill-station full of pine forests, wood framed houses with flooring of hard pine (similar, in hardness, to what is called Southern Yellow Pine in the States), gardens and flower nurseries. Today, it has one of the region’s ugliest infrastructures grafted onto this backdrop. As the larger cities like Kolkata have begun streamlining their transportation and civic facilities, the mid-sized cities remain unchecked with their congested roads, open drains , and malignant concrete constructions.

Culturally, Shillong feels like no other part of the country. We wait in a traffic jam for a length of time, but there is no honking. Roadside butcher shops sell pork meat and beef. Dressing habits are more westernized than any other part of India and the indigenous Khasi population of the state is almost completely Christian, speaking a language that has common origins with Vietnamese and Cambodian. Late at night we take a drive through the city and without the traffic, there is a magical transformation. It is dewey and misty, rain is never too far away, we drive fast through deserted streets with embankments that curve and climb next to houses built into the hills—it feels like the Shillong of old, age sheds and slithers off the tail of the vehicle, and both car and occupant—with a stab at the accelerator-- reverie to decades back when this was still a sparse, wooded hill station with suburbs as diversely named as Bishnupur and Lachamiere, and that left you at a loss for adjectives. We stay at the century old Pinewood Hotel, a graceful ageing hotel with three slightly grime encrusted stars in a suburb called the European Ward. The English preferred Shillong because of its weather, calling it their “Scotland of the East” (the comparison is quite appropriate). They came here by the droves from the hot plains in summer, living out their Victorian pretences, with a hierarchy of rank and precedence that was intensified by the distance to home, a lifestyle amplified beyond their stations by a retinue of native attendants, and little work outside of what could be achieved in half a day. The hotel is a single storey Assam style construction with timber framing that holds together walls made of a bamboo reed composite. It reflects its English roots with wooden floors made of wide plank pine, wainscoted walls, working fireplaces, pegged mortise and tenon cabinetry, and foxgloves and hostas planted in the gardens outside.

English ambiance aside, the food to be sought at Pinewood should be Indian. We lunched on fresh warm chapattis, dal fry, a sabzi (a dry vegetable curry) and kebabs that were hot off the grill. I have no idea why Indian restaurants in India do a better job in offering a superior immediacy of taste that the ones in the US. If you are ever eating at Pinewood, however, feel free to ask for the bill at the same time that you place the order. For, in a tip of the hat to colonial English bureaucracy, followed by years of Indian clerkdom, this government run hotel has made a fine art of generating receipts and bills that involves various people checking and making entries, and culminating with the waiter bringing you a sheaf of documents, each bill identifying a different entrée, in the same time that it would take to cook a chicken.

A few days later we fly back to Kolkata on an airline that, about 5 years ago made a splashy entry into the business with a glamour in the skies type of theme. As we wait for the flight to take off, a breathy, purring, “come hither” female voice instructs us on emergency procedures in Hindi—someone unfamiliar with the language would no doubt have confused this with soft porn. I wonder if this same company might benefit from entering the call center business. We sit there, a motley crew of locals, tourists, and folks from the north east hills, seat belts fastened in a nearly empty turboprop plane, the voice now mixed in with the whine of the revving engines, a memorable education in oxygen mask usage behind us, and the promise of a hot vegetarian meal ahead.

World cup US style

A few minutes after the finals between Spain and Holland ended, I took a walk to the Starbucks in Mt. Kisco, 2 miles down the road.  On my way back, two cars rolled by, festooned with flags and the colors of Spain, music blaring, its waving occupants cheered on by passing motorists.  Remarkably, within an hour of the event, everybody around me was aware of its outcome.  I have been watching World Cups in the US every 4 years since 1986, and this is the first and only time that I have felt its fever starting to grip this nation.

I had an inkling the day the games began, when I travelled to White Plains to run some errands.  There was just that hint of a thinner crowd, not quite ghost town thin, but thin enough to halve your time at the check-out queue.  That was the day South Africa played Mexico.  Then, a few days later, deep into the group plays, I was at the barbershop for a haircut and heard that the shop saw no business during the times that the US was playing.

Soccer has always maintained its popularity among suburban middle class children, buoyed by mothers repulsed by the physical dangers of American football.  But somewhere along the way the sport dissipates, ceasing to hold its magic upon its young practitioners.  Yet, with the steady progress of the home grown Major League Soccer (MLS) league, soccer has begun to emerge. Arguably, the biggest impetus to the game’s visibility in the US in recent years was the addition of David Beckham to the Los Angeles Galaxy roster.  As in a classic Beckham free kick this experiment appeared off target at first--as Beckham sputtered on the field and cavorted off it with his celebrity wife--but then veered back on target, not due to any residual magic in Beckham's legs, but from the media fallout that extracted the maximum visibility for soccer in this country.

A few days after the world cup I was at the check-out counter of a middle eastern deli in Yorktown, speaking to its Mexican waitress.  When Spain played the Dutch, who did she support, I asked her.  “Of course, Spain”, she said, “because we speak the same language.”  What if  Spain had played Argentina in the semis, who would it be I queried, in face of this linguistic parity?  Of course, Argentina--no question about that, she replied, since they were from the Americas.  Aha—so if now Spain played Brazil—where would she hang her hat?  Without hesitation she rooted for Brazil, how could she not support them, she countered.  I went back and relayed this story to my family.  This is just one data point, they argued, not  a trend.

So a couple of days after that, I went to test drive a car and the sales guy was a immigrant from Latin America—an ex-engineer who having lost his job in the downturn of 2008 had changed careers to support himself.  As we breezed along Saw Mill Parkway, I decided to expand my dataset.

“Spain vs. Holland” I asked—
"Spain!” he countered.
“Spain vs. Argentina?”
“Argentina!  Are you kidding me?"
“Spain vs. Brazil?”
“They may speak Portuguese my friend, but it would be Brazil—all the way!”

As enjoyable as the games were, I relished their coverage.  There were no soap operas in the mold of American style sports programming, no human interest coverage of personal adversities bordering on schadenfreude.  Uncorrupted by timeouts and breaks, no cutaways to sideline interviews of athletes referring to themselves in the third person (prepare for this if video replays arrive). No delayed programming, no jingoism--just the game, expert analysis at half-time by Lalas and company, then back to the game.  At least for now, it appears that the US is adapting to soccer in the style of the rest of the world.

The evening that the US loses in the quarterfinals, outhustled and out-conditioned by Ghana, a team some 30 places behind in the FIFA rankings,  I attend a free concert in Newcastle by Charlie Lagond and his band.  Seated in the auditorium, waiting for the show to start, I hear around me whispered conversations about the game.  A high school boy had come to the show hoping it would lift his spirits, crushed after the loss.  The players were household names by then.  Landon Donovan, perhaps the finest player in the history of US soccer, was a hero, a playmaker, a tireless engine of a man, a visionary.  Perhaps he was good enough to have even made the English team, which had cemented its position in history right next to the US national team of the 2002 basketball world cup.  Folks discussed the lack of a US striker with killer instinct; how twice, the US could have put the game away, but lacked that last bit of moxie.  At first, the team became heros, embraced by an indulgent media.  Then began the process for a more realistic assesment.  Making the quarterfinals was no longer good enough for the US, they ought to have gone further.  This was a team that could just win one game, that too barely.  Was this coach really in the elite category? 

This team did not perform as well as the 2002 squad, yet they possess a certain solidity, like an amorphous mass that is crystallizing but whose effects will take some more time to harden. They lacked the elegance of the Argentinians, or the precision passing of the Europeans.  But they were superbly conditioned, fearless, and played with a workmanlike ethic and an indomitable drive.  You can see traces of these national styles on display even in the low level amateur company leagues here that are stocked with multinational players and in which I participated for several years (where Indian players, I might add, always fell short in the conditioning department, including yours truly).  This US team seemed to have some vision, and the ability for quick and decisive counter-attack.  It is a team that, with a little more added depth, could be one world class striker shy of being an elite team.

Perhaps that might happen in 2014, for the US seems to be committed to this through careful nurturing of local talent.  Barring a few hiccups, such as the ado over Freddy Adu, a boy wonder who at 14 vaulted into the MLS in 2003 with a million dollar plus Nike deal only to fizzle out, most of the development of US players have been gradual rather than mercurial.  Almost all of the players on the US team today grew up in the United States.  While a majority of the starting eleven today play in Europe, most of them reached there following the path of the US divisional college leagues and the MLS, a success story that used measured doses of celebrity players blended with skilled foreigners and local talent, to ratchet forward.  Beckham did his bit for the popularity of the game.  And now it is Thierry Henry’s turn, as he joins the New York Red Bulls at the age of 33.  It is a league that draws its water from wells far and wide, from ageing European superstars, to 22 years olds from FIFA bottom-feeders such as India, when Sunil Chhetri its diminutive Manipuri striker signed up with the Kansas City Wizards.

Pleasantville Farmer's Market

The young man had the windblown hair, fresh faced American look from novels about the American Midwest. He was selling fish from under the tent of his store at the Saturday morning farm market while M and me were debating on the mackerel fillets. He asked us where we were from, then caught us off guard as he continued his conversation in Bengali. Fresh fish from Long Island and the eastern seaboard is sold here every Saturday morning—mackerel, bass, bluefish, tuna, scallops, shrimp—expensive but fresh; and here was this young man, suggesting grilling tips, and then slipping into Bengali. He spends time as a teacher he said, in Khulna, Bangladesh, and he was headed there again in a month’s time.

There are many surprises at the Farmers Market, held in Pleasantville, NY on Saturday mornings. It is popular among the locals, with farmers travelling from as far as 70 miles upstate to sell their produce to a well heeled clientele. Farms from Gardiner and further north bring grass fed beef, farm chicken, sausages, potatoes of myriad shapes and colors, local wines, cheeses and dried nuts, that are taken away in reusable cotton and jute grocery bags. I recall hearing a professor of agriculture from Arizona once comment— “if you want a great tasting tomato, then eat the ones from a farm store or your back garden, but you cannot get a few thousand pounds of them a month in winter, each tasting exactly the same, as you would from a hothouse!”

I wander about, camera in hand. There are other photographers like me, some with serious gear. A video interview is being conducted at the fish store, and the owner offers a primer on discerning quality. Passing dogs, tethered to leashes, measure one another.  Children frisk around chomping vegetables, people with big sunglasses perched on their heads stand in line patiently waiting for their turn to buy. We come across a few people we know and exchange pleasantries. I stop to pick up some meat. I have a beard and am often mistaken for a middle-easterner. As the farmer handed me a packet of pork sausages, he asks me if I am Muslim. “Take a wild guess”, I reply.

And what interesting people man the stalls. The British farmer from whom we often buy our meats was a one-time elephant trainer who spent time in Mysore. The bread store is run by Tibetans from Dharamsala. A Calcutta Kitchens booth run by an American and a Bengali lady with an MBA from IIM Kolkata. When the morning sun is yet mild and there are blue skies beyond the train station, sandal clad localites descend upon the market Starbucks in hand, and little children and barefoot babies in their summer dresses swing at the air in close fists from their prams. A peaceful outcome distills out of the din and turmoil of the bazaar--as if time has stood still, if only for a a few minutes. In rhythm to the ticking parking meters in downtown, the crowd gelates together in a celebration of fresh food, in a happy timeout from Westchester’s characteristic edginess.