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Magazine
GOURMET FILES
Le Pique-nique
BY VASUNDHARA CHAUHAN
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Cooking and packing for a picnic can be a stressful affair but it helps if you understand that it is simply a meal eaten outdoors.
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Picnic food must be portable and arrive intact.
Photo: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
Chilling out: Food, fun and family...
Late one winter morning my mother visited. My children were two and four, I had no help, my husband had buzzed off to earn a living (or escape the resident virago), I was in the middle of sorting-washing-boiling spinach with a child cling-wrapped around my knees, and surrounded by high decibel screaming “AMMA! HE HIT ME WITH A HANKY!” I will not forget what a short tempered mother she had been to me, but with my two, Mama was an angel, bringing joy and peaceful coexistence. She gave me enough time to vent, then said that maybe we should go for a picnic. To me a picnic had always meant sandwiches or kabab-paratha and I had absolutely zero energy to start on a fresh menu, having spent hours on alu-matar and the stupid spinach. I had only just started whining when Ma said, “You have such a lovely park right here, let’s just pack what you’ve cooked, pick up some roti from a tandoor, and go!”
The four of us had such a happy time, running around in the sun in the deer park next door, eating vast quantities — even the children, without threat or persuasion and then collapsing on a durrie, snuggling up to Ma, sucking on toffee. So this was a lesson I’ll always remember. A picnic is just a meal eaten outdoors, it matters not what, just where and with whom. Apparently the word comes from the French piquer, to pick, and possibly niquer was added to rhyme. It used to mean just a meal put together by a bunch of friends; the eating outdoors element came later. The Portuguese have the same word, also meaning the same thing: a meal eaten outdoors. So alu-matar and chewy rotis do just as well as paté or artisan cheese on multigrain bread, and fresh mooli, radishes, as cherry tomatoes, for a déjeuner sur l’herbe.
Childhood associations
Of course, some foods are more convenient to pack and eat than others, unless you must have soups and gravies and want to pack little bowls to eat them in. In which case, you might as well include soup spoons and different forks for the salad, the fish and the red meat. But there is an association we have with picnics, and mine came early on from Enid Blyton. There were — and I think I remember the lot — ham and potted meat sandwiches, hardboiled eggs and tomatoes. Ginger beer and lemonade and “slabs” of cake. My daughter, whose reading is much more recent, says it’s all in my imagination. Regardless, we never had any of this stuff on our picnics — in fact, to this day, I have no idea what potted meat is, but I do still want to check it out. Enid Blyton has much to answer for. What we did have was chicken or ham sandwiches in soft, fresh white bread and bursting with filling. And a large plastic box of washed salad vegetables: radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes — no dressing, but sometimes a whole lemon — all cut on the spot with Daddy’s handy pen knife. Peanuts and chikki to follow.
The other option for picnic food was kababs and parathas. Soft parathas, the dough kneaded in milk, packed securely in a damp napkin, and a round steel box crammed with shammi kababs. Ooh those cold kababs. But I always longed for the food other people packed that I saw on train journeys and imagined eating on picnics: in the same Hindustani category as kabab-paratha: piles of uncounted pooris and cold alu ki subzi. Yellow-yellow, with good homemade aam ka achar leaking its strong smelling mustard oil onto the wrapping, waxed paper from that week’s Britannia bread.
Basics
The operative idea of picnic food is that it must be portable and arrive intact. Like all food, it must look and taste good, but what can look perfect at home must, for a picnic, endure a possibly jolting, bumpy ride. It should require the minimum of crockery and cutlery; just be picked up and eaten.
About a year ago a local newspaper ran a column by Mark Bitten, an American food writer, listing 101 foods to take on a picnic. The original was in the NYT, so naturally the ingredients were for another audience and included neither poori-bhaji nor potted meat sandwiches. But he had delicious ideas that I tried with a little adaptation, and they worked. He suggested things like pesto chicken rolls, where you season and grill chicken cutlets, then layer with tomatoes and arugula in a wrap-type bread smeared with pesto sauce. Curried egg salad with hardboiled eggs, mayo, curry powder (whatever that may be!), mustard, onions and diced apples. Grapes — or grape tomatoes or watermelon chunks — with feta cheese, mint and chilli flakes. Cold boiled noodles seasoned and mixed with tahini or peanut butter and tossed there and then with separately packed shrimps, scallions and cucumber.
I find packing for a picnic is a bit of a strain, especially when you’re rusty about the drill. You have to remember too many things: plates, napkins, water... so the food itself should be as uncomplicated as can be. So if the weather is nice, just put together lots of something on the lines of Bitten’s ideas, like pesto chicken or grape-and-feta salad, pick up some rolls to save yourself the bother of even making sandwiches, pique it up and go.
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