GOURMET FILES
Battered fiasco
VASUNDHARA CHAUHAN
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When you pit childhood dreams of fragrant dosas against established household traditions, any guesses as to which is going to prevail?
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Photo: S. Mahinsha
Looks easy enough, doesn’t it?
My cook of many years has left and a new hopeful is on trial. The hopeful is me, not him. He comes from years of cooking in a vegetarian household, and I’m clutching at straws, confident that teaching him how to cook meat and Western food is possible. Because he’s an accomplished cook. He can make — from scratch, not MTR packets — idlis, dosas, papdi for chaat… The resident Mr. Realistic Wet Blanket said, But how often are we going to eat that stuff? and was ignored.
Only a North Indian will appreciate the respect and awe I feel for such skill. As a child growing up in Delhi, school tiffins were a predictable affair. Some, like me, usually had sandwiches. Disgusting tomato ones that were wet in the centre and dry and curly at the edges. Others had parathas and aam ka achar and/or alu ki sabzi. But others had dosas, and Shobha Mani had the best kind: her aluminium tiffin box, with its three red clasps, opened every day to reveal first the aroma, then the sight, of three soft kall dosas. Alas, she wasn’t very generous about sharing them, or, more probably, she thought they were too boring to offer around, so one rarely got a taste. The box also had a small compartment in which her mother packed podi but there was never any need for it: the dosas were soft and moist and delicious enough to go down unaided in swift gulps. Now, decades later, office tiffins have the same effect. Suman’s mother packs the same fragrant dosas in neat oval steel boxes, with a tiny round one for the podi. And I can’t wait for lunch time. As another colleague from the north and therefore similarly handicapped, wails, why can’t we make stuff that smells like this!
The real deal
This was supposed to be an explanation for hiring the vegetarian cook. I know one can go out for dosas, that at Sagar or Saravana Bhavan we’ll get not only the best looking dosas, crisp and golden, but steaming idlis, light as air, and real coconut chutney, as opposed to the vile chana dal pretender at Bengal Sweets. And in a home not geared to this cuisine, the going out option is so convenient. But I want the Shobha Mani/Suman kind. Crisp? No. Paper thin? No thank you! They taste of nothing, eating them is like eating crisp, brittle, fried paper. I’m probably in a minority of one, but I cannot understand their appeal. Especially when the alternative is the home made kind, where you can smell the fermentation, the slightly sour flavour of risen batter, and feel the soft grainy texture in your mouth. Where there’s some thickness and you’re eating something, not just a crisp papad, and you can tear off bits to wrap chutney in. To fulfil this dream the cook was hired.
My home has some culinary traditions: lousy pooris — all flat and misshapen — and shredded dosas. So today’s lunch had two objectives: make New Cook feel comfortable, do not intimidate with demands for coq au vin and goat cheese soufflé. And eat many soft dosas prior to a two-hour siesta. Well.
Last night quantities of rice and dal were soaked. This morning they were ground. New Cook was asked to have at least three dosas on the table before we set to. Requests for soft or crisp were registered. Being a seasoned hand, he asked for the appropriate griddle, which was produced triumphantly (many moons ago I had put down the cause of our shredded dosas to the wrong sort of tawa and bought the “right” kind.) He approved of it and won my confidence with a comment about annealing it with a cut onion.
I have no real right to approve of any cook’s methods when they’re making dosas. Or pancakes or cheelas. Because I have consistently and absolutely failed to ever make one decent one and have given up.
D-day
So Sunday lunch was an event. Writing which is making old resentments bubble up. People casually make dosas whenever they want? And say, Oh there was this bit of batter lying in the fridge so Ma just made some dosas in the morning and packed them for my lunch? Anyway lunchtime came and we were not summoned. I went into the kitchen to casually check on progress and found New Cook standing at stove, hands on hips, staring down. I cleared my throat so he stepped sideways smartly, blocking my view of the action. I drank a glass of water and scuttled off. About 15 minutes later Mr. Gloomy Realist called out towards the kitchen, asking for lunch. And after another 15 minutes we were summoned. There were two dosas on the table, one okay, and one slightly not. So we shared them. We helped ourselves to alu and chutney, some sambhar, eating slowly to eke out the waiting time. After a wait another appeared, definitely not okay. So we politely told each other to please have it and concentrated on the chutney. Then the cook came in and said the griddle wasn’t right, they were sticking and tearing. I suggested he try the non-stick pan. We avoided looking at each other. Another one appeared, shredded, in the best traditions of the house. The Realist got up, washed his hands and ate an orange. Now I’m appealing to anyone who can help: is there a foolproof way to make dosas at home?
The author is a Delhi-based food writer. She is with the ASER Centre.
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