CROSS CULTURAL CUISINE
It’s a ‘model’ diet
ANTOINE LEWIS
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Not very practical for daily cooking but a great book to curl up with when in the mood for culinary fantasies.
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Exquisitely produced, the book evokes a sense of participating in the author’s personal life.
Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet: A World of Recipes for Every Day; Padma Lakshmi; HarperCollins, Rs. 1495.
Most of the cookbooks written by Indians in America fall into two categories: glossy, beautifully-shot books offering a panoramic view of the diversity of Indian cuisines and simple, text-heavy ones that veer either towards regional cuisines.
By showcasing commercially lesser known dishes from regional cuisines the former, written mostly by successful Indian chefs, are an attempt to break away from the generic north Indian fare that typifies most foreign Indian restaurants.
Pushing boundaries
The latter, with some notable exceptions, like Niloufer Ichaporia King’s My Bombay Kitchen, tend to be written by enthusiastic non-professionals eager to introduce readers to their underrepresented cuisines. In both cases, the authors are firmly rooted in Indian cooking and the intention is always to push the boundaries of stereotypical, restaurant-style food.
Padma Lakshmi is only nominally Indian with her tastes and culinary experiences being shaped by the cross-cultural influences of her early life. As she explains in her opening essay, “In New York, where we’d moved to start a new life, there were immigrants like us from all over the world, and our kitchen was heavily influenced by them. From Polish sausages to Vietnamese steamed fish, the world was right here on our island.”
As a model, constantly travelling to exotic destinations the scope of her experiences widened beyond the island. Her first book Easy Exotic: Low-Fat Recipes from Across the World was a collection of international recipes adapted or chosen to a suit a model’s regimen.
The recipes in Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet: A World of Recipes for Every Day are her own. While for the most part the book is occupied by her cross-culinary experimentations there are quite a few recipes for internationalised and traditional Indian food.
Some like the Keralan Crab Cakes, Meen Moilee, Chicken Korma, Tomater Gosht seem to have undergone insignificant changes. Others like, her Hot and Sour Fruit Chaat, in addition to the normal flavourings and spices call for Granny Smith apples, English Cucumber and concentrated Japanese yuzu juice. They have admittedly been influenced by the people around her. “A Peruvian babysitter, a Korean college roommate, an Italian lover, and a Swiss aunt have all influenced my cooking,” she writes.
Inaccessible ingredients
Her argument that the recipes are a reflection of “how my generation eats: a little bit of this and a little bit of that”, however, sounds somewhat unconvincing. Not everyone from her generation is privileged enough to eat Mushroom and Goat cheese Falutas, Spinach and Black Plum Salad or Andouille sausage with Black Lentils and Artichokes. Many of the ingredients like Moroccan salt, fresh kumquats, Omani limes or za’atar powder which she uses quite freely in her recipes would be inaccessible to even the ordinary New Yorker. But for the supermodel-turned-super-successful host of the reality show “Top Chef” there’s nothing special about ingredients available almost exclusively at expensive gourmet stores. It probably explains why she considers these recipes suitable for every day cooking.
Excellent presentation
Experiments on food: Tastefully presented.
Her background in the glamour and fashion businesses has made Lakshmi appreciate the importance of artful presentation. Exquisitely produced, the book evokes a sense participating in the author’s personal life. Lusciously tempting food photographs are interspersed with images of Lakshmi caught seemingly candidly strolling with her grocery, working in the kitchen or just winding down with a bowl of salad.
The carefully calibrated casual untidiness of the photographs, the inclusion of family pictures, dog-eared pages of hand written recipes give the book the feel of a personal diary or being vignettes into the author’s knife.
All the recipes are prefaced with very conversational explanations of their origins, substitutions that can be made or tips on how to improve the recipe. Some of the additional notes occasionally offered are quite interesting: according to her friend Matt, who comes from a farming family, flatter onions that look like they’ve been pressed down are sweeter than tall, more oval onions. That’s because sugar causes the fibres to break down and collapse the onion; therefore the flatter the onion the higher its sugar content.
Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet requires far too many inaccessible ingredients for any practical use. It’s a great book to curl up with when you’re in the mood for culinary fantasies.
Antoine Lewis is Food and Drink Editor of Paprika Media
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