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GOURMET FILES

The stuff of good evenings

PHOTO: R. ESWARRAJ

Heady combination: Great food and friends.

This has been one of those weeks I’m just too old for now. Out every evening — after a day at work I zip home, cursing all and endangering some, only to jump into a fresh sari and zip off yet again to some dinner. Not t hat I was ever young enough to enjoy this kind of lifestyle: once, maybe twice a week is all the outings I can take. But seven days… and I reach the point of craving a whole evening in pyjamas. But there are some outings I jump at, despite a debilitating week. And those are evenings at friends’ homes, where the company is right, the atmosphere, at the risk of sounding cheesy, relaxed and yet stimulating. And, most important, where the food is right.

It’s easier to describe what’s not right. Somewhere where the one thousand others are work contacts of one spouse and the Accompanying Partner ends up being asked what he or she does/how the children are/where they live/whether they’ve seen “Slumdog”. And where the party is Standing Only and the food is unimaginatively catered, with, God forbid, my pet hate: a Live Pasta Station. The opposite of all this is what I consider a Good Evening. Where most of the company are familiar friends, with a peppering of new faces. Where the food is delicious and the menu simple. And has been cooked at home, if not by the fair hands of the host, at least under his close supervision. As I write I can see the false and valiant attempt at gender equality, because, when I recall Good Evenings, the primary cook is always a woman.

My three favourite hostesses are Kavita, Anita and Nirmala. Kavita because the house is always perfectly chilled or heated, the flowers show-stoppers, enough ice in your drink and a table handy to rest it on, the appetisers living up to their name, the company great fun, and the menu interesting. As she memorably said once, in a spat with Kan who was demanding accountability for the just less-than-perfect dinner, “that’s not part of my job description”. But when she does expand her job description to include dinner planning, or when Kan cooked (precisely twice), dinners are memorable. I remember the time when Kan, newly returned from a cooking trip to Portugal, made us dinner. The run-up was enormous. We were asked repeatedly to arrive punctually else dinner would spoil. Kavita, who, in another life, was a graphic designer, made beautiful menu cards for each of the eight dinner guests. The first course was served: it must have been a soup or salad. And then came the pièce de resistance, a whole red snapper baked in a casing of sea salt. The hard salt layer was — very ceremonially — broken open at the table and the fish was revealed. I was asked to cut and serve portions with the two sauces he had made to go with it, it was consumed, dessert followed, and that was it. Was the food great? Yes, maybe. But what makes me remember the evening is the love and care that had gone into the preparation for the evening, Kan in his oversized apron being self-conscious and dramatic and Kavita sweetly providing all the props for an amateur but successful theatrical production: the most appropriate and elegant tableware, thoughtful placing of guests at the table, running around like a sous chef anticipating the maestro’s needs.

At Anita’s, too, the company is fun, as comfortable and familiar as old clothes. And the food to drive 500 miles for. Her menus are classic — no bought bread rolls and baked vegetables in white sauce on one side of the table while the other end has a few Indian curries. It’s always Indian, with two or three excellent mutton or fish dishes and colourful, pretty vegetables. The moong dal there is delicate and fragrant. Mixed into steamed white rice, which I eat with my fingers, it’s a soft foil to the spicy meat curries. The huge salad is uncomplicated and refreshingly crunchy, and there’s always an unusual raita. One I have often imitated has basically spinach and freshly grated coconut mixed in the dahi with a simple chhaunk. But the dinners I remember most — perhaps with nostalgia because she’s now one zillion miles away — are at Nirmala’s. Her husband Raj, poor ignorant, says her cooking’s not a patch on her mother’s, but he’s wrong. She has fused her mother’s traditional Syrian Christian cuisine with a light touch of her own. For instance, she’ll make meen vevichathu, that intensely flavoured red fish curry, and serve it not necessarily with a thoran, but with tender green beans sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. Or creamy, fragrant mutton stew with fluffy appams — and how she manages to dish out enough hot numbers for 20 guests I can’t understand — and accompany this with vegetables as brightly coloured as a picture: maybe an Indian-style combination of broccoli and carrots, or whole spinach leaves barely sautéed and sprinkled with thinly sliced and crisply fried garlic, deep green flecked with gold. Sitting with old friends, feet up, fingers immersed in Nirmala’s fish curry, I always overeat. But she has such a light hand with the oil and spices that though I may consume too much, I’m never left with the feeling of Oh no… never again. Instead, as some European gourmand said, she’s the perfect cook whose table one leaves with the wish to go back to it at once.

The author is a Delhi-based food writer. She is with the ASER Centre.

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