When fathers cook

Supratik Guha

Jhumpa Lahiri has written an affectionate essay in the New Yorker (2009) about her father and his skills at cooking rice.  It is a rice that he has made for decades, feeding at times upto hundreds of people.  The site has an accompanying web video showing the 80 year old gentleman make Persian fried rice, a Pollao, as it is referred to in Bengali.  He seems an endearing gentleman, a meshomoshai, at peace with himself, in a kitchen that could belong to so many East Coast Bengali immigrants-- happy suburban professionals in split levels, colonials and ranches, where the gentle breeze of Bengal blows in every day, thru the snow,  through the virunga like green foliage after the summer rains, through the ochre and sienna Fall. 

Mr Lahiri makes a mean Pollao and watching the multitude of precision steps in his cooking, two things come to mind.  The first is the sizable chunk of butter that Mr. Lahiri drops into the frying pan.  This is not just fried rice, it is langorous rice bathed in contentment after an orgy with molten triglycerides.  My second thought is, why does the father get all the attention when it comes to cooking?

I have seen this in my own family.  I remember the kosha mangsho (dry mutton curry) that my father made in Pune when I was 5, though it is my mother who does the lion’s share (very big lion!) of the cooking.  It was the same when I had my own boys, who—when young and not yet insouciant teenagers--would whoop with joy when Daddy concoted a dish that had more enthusiasm than substance.  Mom’s cooking was the constant dedicated supply of balanced nutrition, Dad’s creations the blips on top, at times adding, at times subtracting, but always remembered beyond their technical merits.

In the West, grilling has assumed the mantle of the stereotype for the male non-professional cook.  Jim Harrison, writing in the newly released collection of essays “Man with a Pan”, has this to say about grilling and men: “Men learning to cook often start with the BBQ grill, perhaps because they have been roasting meat over fire for a couple of hundred thousand years.  Of course women do it equally well, but then they must think, Let the d***head go at it, I’m tired of doing all the cooking.”  This is perhaps true, and I would venture that that a hot grill is self cleaning, and therefore a point of great appeal at to me.  Indian men in India do not grill, indeed grilling is not common among either sex there (you will not find tandoors—Indian grills—in the average Indian household), but Indian food generally goes well on Western grills and Indian men in the US have adapted to this technique.  Meats marinated the Indian way need some caution during grilling: spice-yogurt based marinades tend to burn quickly, so the heat needs to be directed from an indirect source.  Removing the skin of the chicken, as we often do, also leaves the meat dry after grilling, so constant basting with the marinade is advisable.  Vegetarian dishes like paneer (sort of like a farmer’s cheese)—get the one called Nanak paneer—grill nicely, marinated with some olive oil, cumin and coriander powders.

Why do men cook?  A British report can be found floating around on the web (see www.theadnostic.com/lauren/EmergenceoftheGastrosexual.pdf), describing “The Gastrosexual Man”,  heralding a new generation of men who are more generally involved in cooking than their predecessors: "It is certainly true that women cook more than men. However, it is interesting to note that it is not the occasional male cooks, not the barbecue kings who claim the most enthusiasm for cooking....” Through data gathered from polling the British public the report claims that more men in the 25-40 age group are cooking these days, in part anchored by the idea that it makes them more attractive to the opposite sex.  On the other hand they are 4 times less likely to be doing the cleaning and laundry compared to women, new avenues, possibly, for furthering their appeal.  I am not sure what to make of this study—was it an instance of trying to push a catchy title by putting some statistical meat around it?  Poking around on the web, it is easy to see that this is an oft touted concept and understandable at some level.  This is still not a satisfactory reason, I believe the answer lies deeper, probing other urgencies of the mind.

The aforementioned Jim Harrison leads us to a couple of other speculations: “For the man who cooks perhaps twice a week, the prime motive in cooking is to have something to eat worthy of your heart’s peculiar desires.”  This is believable.  Cooking can also be a be a counterpoint to one’s working life, what you cook is entirely within your control, a remedial lever to what you cannot control at work: “I recall a day when I got fired (for arrogance) yet again from Hollywood, and the murk of the dismissal was easily leavened by grilling five illegal baby lake trout,…..”

Back to Jhumpa Lahiri and her father.  Mr. Lahiri is depicted as a creature of habits with a strong sense of measurement, of the type that a good experimentalist would have.  He has 15 raisins on his oatmeal each day, he knows exactly, and in a scalable manner, how many glasses of water are needed for how many cups of rice.  He seems to like a set routine.  I know people like that—like Dr. X, who is also a creature of habit.  Dr. X used the four letter word once a week, right after taking the wrong exit on Rt. 287 while ferrying his son between piano and guitar lessons every Saturday morning.  Since this was a routine occurrence, Dr. X built the 10 minute delay into his schedule, leading to a satisfactory solution that corrected his errors. Grilling for him was an exercise in set pieces, a robust reaffirmation of causality.  It was a Newtonian world of mechanical fulfillment that had its own contentment--the click of the piezoelectric fire starter, the low growl of the three burners as they catch light in sequence, the linear blue flame that plants butterfly kisses on the nozzles streaming past them with the turn of the gas, the pork ribs marinated in Indian achar(pickle) and olive oil, the adjustment of the burner settings to a touch below “medium”.   You let Dr. X know when the ribs needed to be ready, and he would build the time factor in:  7 minutes for getting the gas grill hot, 5 for slitting the plastic package around the ribs and slathering them in achar, 45 minutes for the ribs with a turnover inbetween, and then 5 minutes for cool down.  He would consume one Amstel or Heineken Light during this process.

Dr. X also has a chicken stock that he makes for his family, the recipe adapted from his wife, then usurped as his own, injecting into it the drum beat of his methodology.  The process is undeviating—the back and wings of a free range chicken immersed in water along with pieces of celery, whole black pepper, coriander seeds, chopped onions, chunks of ginger, cilantro, bay leaves, a spoon of vinegar to leach out the calcium from the bones.  Boiled on a low, simmering, bubbles-rising-to-the-top kind of heat for an hour, the aroma plays lightly around the kitchen.  There is something wholesome about steam rising from a big and heavy cooking pot, particularly on a winter’s weekend morning.  The liquid is strained out, then chilled to raise the fat to the surface for skimming.

Dr. X cooked on occasion, because it gave him a sense of rhythm, and the melody of a loose recipe that drove him as in a hunt.  There was a sense of satisfaction, of a completed evening within a larger incomplete one, when the food was laid at his table.  And then the expansive  sense of elegance beholding one’s creation, and transcribing into words in one’s mind, the method, the smells, the sounds and the wholesomeness of handling heavy cast iron pans, the steam and the clarity of the liquid in the broth with its globules of fat suspended as little bubbles, scattering the ambient light helter skelter.

Just listening to the elegance of a dish is in itself a kind of meal.  And here is an example where Pablo Neruda, in his Ode to Conger Chowder, gives the following prescription for cooking a kind of eel:

You bring the conger, skinned,
to the kitchen
(its mottled skin slips off
like a glove,
leaving the
grape of the sea
exposed to the world),
naked,
the tender eel
glistens,
prepared
to serve our appetites.
Now
you take
garlic,
first, caress
that precious
ivory,
smell
its irate fragrance,
then
blend the minced garlic
with onion
and tomato
until the onion
is the color of gold.
Meanwhile steam
our regal
ocean prawns,
and when
they are
tender,
when the savor is
set in a sauce
combining the liquors
of the ocean
and the clear water
released from the light of the onion,
then
you add the eel
that it may be immersed in glory,
that it may steep in the oils
of the pot,
shrink and be saturated.

Such is the power of  the poet’s recipe.

Royal Palace

White Plains, http://www.royalpalacecuisines.com/

It would seem that with a retooled menu, royalty has returned to the Royal Palace in White Plains.  I used to come here several years back, but the food, unyielding in monotony, had driven me away.  But this afternoon it was different—somewhere along the way they changed the menus and upgraded. 

The lunch buffet has a wide variety of choices.  Spend some time on the appetizers. Too many customers head quickly for the curries--they know not what they miss.  Ask Abdul, one of the managers, to make you a dosa—he is from Kerala, he has been making the dosas for years, and he gives them a touch of perfection.  Grab a few alu tikkis (potato fritters) from the big black tawa (a heated flat cast iron skillet), go easy on the dipping sauces for it screws up the taste.  Make yourself a chat or a bhel puri.  Savor this gently, go for a few more helpings, forget about the curries for now. Some Manchurian Gobi (cauliflower) arrives magically, the name signifying some ill-defined chinese inspiration (Manchurian Gobi, though not quite Vindaloo level in recognition yet, is fast catching up as a popular dish).   A bit heavy on the grease, but tastes good. Have some dahi vadas, potato filled vadas in a sea of spicy yogurt laced with tamarind, you get a khatta mitha feel where different spots on your tongue feels sweetness and sourness simultaneously, bewitching in effect, like being hit by both sides of a swinging pendulum at the same time.  There were new appetizers that I had never seen, new creations that may need a bit of smoothing around the edges, chilli idli, not a great sub for the regular ones, spinach sprout chat –wonderfully khatta mitha, just a bit short on the sprouts.

This is not to say that the curries were not up to snuff.  Goat meat was a pleasant surprise, the puris were good.  This is all that I could get myself to taste after splurging on the appetizers, and ended my meal with some ginger tea.  I will be back here in another 2 months.

Rangoli in New Rochelle

www.rangoliindiancuisine.com

When we stepped into Rangoli on a Sunday afternoon, we were the only customers, an effect that beats upon itself  in a spacious restaurant creating a sense of loneliness.  You wonder whether this is the right place to eat, but the piped music by Kailash Kher and Rabbi brings you back in. 

Rangoli has conventional menus (for the buffet), good quality food, the authentic use of spices, and a refreshing home cooked feel.  There is some culinary liberty that it takes, but uses to good effect—the dosas (a South Indian dish), as my friend A stated, tasted like good “North Indian” dosas.

We had the buffet.  It had variety-- several meat, chicken and vegetarian dishes as entrees and kebabs, potato vadas and “self-help” chat as starters.  The chat ingredients were incomplete and the result amateurish.  The lamb kebabs had fresh tasting spices, though they were a tad dry, not uncommon for a buffet.  

Most fish is overcooked in Indian eateries, for Indian restaurateurs have collectively discovered a new method of synthesizing rubber that does not depend upon the sap of trees.  The fish at Rangoli was cooked beyond recognition and I would recommend avoiding it. The veteran lamb “rogan josh” was a winner, with the use of good, tender, meat that indicates this place did not try to cut costs in the wrong places.  The winners here were the vegetarian dishes—when a unique dish emerges, such as the dry shredded cabbage  stir fried with mustard seeds in South Indian style, curiously named “Bollywood Sweet 16”, you go for seconds and thirds.  Our hats off as well to the gajjar ka halwa (my North Indian readers will forgive the lapse over a Bengali’s misuse of ka or ki), a sort of carrot roux that is more solid than liquid—grated carrot cooked with ghee (type of clarified butter), milk and sugar.  It was not too sweet, nor floating in ghee and we settled our lunch in at the end, over refills of this classic dish, washing it down with tea. 

Ganesh Temple Canteen, Hindu Temple in Flushing, New York

(http://www.nyganeshtemple.org/)

 You will not get a better dosa for 4 dollars than at the cafeteria in the basement of the Hindu temple in Flushing, in New York City. Incongruous in the heart of Flushing, are the meticulously worked domes of a South Indian temple and a complex that contains a first rate auditorium and a fantastic cafeteria specializing in South Indian fast food. This is what I had been looking for all along—my Komala Vilas clone from Kolkata, a busy  place bustling with customers on bare, laminated tables in a sparse room bereft of formulated décor. 

It was my first visit to the temple.  It was also the first time that I have had a meal wearing traditional dhoti and kurta, dressed as a I was, for an evening drama performance as part of a suburban Bengali theater group making its first foray into the city.  Indeed the food was so good, that post-drama, we dropped by for a second meal. Most of the visitors to this cafeteria are South Asians, many of them devotees at the temple.  While there are a few non Asians scattered about the tables, the place seems to have gone largely unnoticed by foodies.

We had dosas and vadas at the temple, along with South Indian coffee at very, very reasonable prices.  The coffee was weak and milky, but the place sells a variety of dosas: Hyderabadi chili masala dosa for the brave, to the proletarian plain dosa with either the normal skin or a “paper” skin, where the batter is spread out extra thin on the flat frying surface, so that it crisps out like a giant fan akin to the fin of a huge, starched turban.  It is large enough that it needs to be supported by two plates.  These dosas are the real thing—not oily, nor over crisp, and the accompanying sambar dip is just as it should be: a subdued, polished presence that elegantly completes and extracts the splendor of the gaudy dosa without upstaging it, like the male counterpart in a tango duo.  I have searched for the perfect dosa often, receiving ephemeral glimpses of it on occasion, on a whimsical day when the stars lined with the chef’s manipulations at places like Saravanas in Manhattan, only to be disappointed by an oily, potato chip texture like mess when I revisited.  The dosas at the temple met their mark this time, this was like the South Indian restaurants in the Kolkata of my youth, replete with the sales lady speaking a perfect Bengali with a fluid South Indian accent.    

If you are a person of religion, you may find God twice at this temple, if you are agnostic—like I am--you will find Him at least once.  If you want authenticity in food, this is it. 

Ramen noodles at La Fiesta in Narita Airport

This was my first trip back to Japan after the earthquake.  Other than a few telltale signs, it appeared business as usual in Tokyo. Power shortages have forced the use of less illumination.  Airconditioners were turned down and not all restaurants were open at hotels. Radiation levels in Tokyo have always been safe and have returned close to the baseline of ~0.1 micro-sieverts/hr.  Even after the first rains following the disaster, the number had climbed to a maximum of only a few micro-sieverts/hr, more than a thousand times less than the dose received on a round trip flight to New York.

Before entering the immigration area, there is a food and shopping court upstairs at Narita airport, and there is one shop there that sells Ramen.  It has been a habit of mine to pay homage here before I fly out.  It is not so much the quality of the Ramen here, but the desire to finish off one last noodle bowl in Japan before departing is what brings me here.

There are 3 choices for Ramen noodle bowls: the usual ones with soya and with miso, and a dish with roast pork slices.  I went for the roast pork slices—the broth was hearty, the noodles themselves with their characteristic yellowish tinge reasonably fresh, though I would probably avoid the roast pork slices and go for the cheaper, regular slices in future.  Ramen at most places does for me what I believe it is supposed to do: provide a quick, warm, and tasty meal with fresh noodles and a few slices of meat swimming in a satisfying broth that has seen its share of “stuff” that has simmered in it for extensive periods.  This “stuff” is a matter of much ado and fuss, at times cloaked in secrecy, and a matter of much snobbery, whether among the Japanese menfolk who love Ramen, or New Yorkers like me, who have made it an acquired taste to fuss over.  But snobbery is a matter of style, that I suspect is at odds with the very purpose of Ramen, that percolated up as a quick fix noodle meal, from its Chinese “lo-mein” roots.

Anyway, the place at the airport, with the improbable name of “La Fiesta” seems the only place out at Narita where you can get Ramen.  Wash it down with a glass of lager beer and you are ready to hit the security lines.  The place does what it is supposed to do.