Archives

To India, via Paris’s Le Passage Brady

January 24, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In spite of French presence in India for a couple of centuries, trying to find Indian curry in France tends to be a bit of a chore. The first Indian restaurant didn’t open in Paris until 1975. Those in the know (mostly British expatriates pining for curry in London) lament the lack of good Indian food, although there’s an occasional stampede to certain Indian restaurants in parts of Paris, only to find that the owners are Pakistanis. And Richard C. Morais’s […]

Categories: Asian Cooking, Chefs, France, French Cooking, India, Spices • Tags: Cuisine Francaise, Cuisine indienne, Curry, France, French cuisine, French India, India, Indian Cooking, Paris, Passage Brady, Spices, Vadouvan

East is East and West is West: Pondicherry and French Curry

January 20, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In Pondicherry, Pondichéry, or Puducherry as it is now called again (since 2006), you still see streets sparkling with old colonial buildings, dating back to a time when passersby heard French spoken daily. Yet, those buildings, policemen’s hats, and a fully functioning French lycée or school, are among the few overt signs that you’ll notice of France’s colonial presence in India. The French colonized a piece of India in the 1600s, leaving only in 1954. After the Treaty of Paris […]

Categories: Cooking, France, French Cooking, India, Menus • Tags: Antoine Beauvilliers, Colonialism, Colonialisme, Cooking, Cuisine Francaise, Culinary History, Curry, France, French cuisine, India, Joseph François Dupleix, L’Art de cuisinier, Pondicherry, Post-Colonialism, Puducherry

Idylls of Cuisine, #74

August 8, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation. See also "India Asks, Should Food be a Right for the Poor?"]

Categories: Cooking, India, Photography, Rice • Tags: Cooking, Food Photography, India, Indian Cooking, Poverty, Rice

The British Melting Pot

March 13, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I recently ran across these books, mentioned on an interesting British Web site providing glimpses and glances at cookbooks published in Britain, cookbooks that we here in the US of A rarely see. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems that the British cookbook market features more books concerned with other cultures and not so much with “slimming,” as our friends across the pond call dieting. So here they are, some books to fascinate you on a rainy day in […]

Categories: Africa, Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, India • Tags: Africa, Cookbooks, Cooking, India, Middle East, Peru

Turmeric Flowers (Photo credit: Subharghya Das)

To Balance, Strength, Love, Faith, and Hope:* Jehangir Mehta’s Mantra

September 26, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Reflecting the ayurvedic principle of balance, chef Jehangir Mehta’s cookbook, Mantra: The Rules of Indulgence (2008), carries the imaginative use of flavorings to nirvanaic levels. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Indian-born Mehta draws on the centuries-old practices found in Indian cuisine and combines them in startling ways with many traditional Western, and even Indian, dishes. Take his Turmeric Yorkshire Pudding as just one example: Turmeric Yorkshire Pudding 16 servings 1 cup milk 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted […]

Categories: Asia, India • Tags: Cooks, India, Indian Cooking, Jehangir Mehta, Mantra: The Rules of Indulgence

“Curry & Rice” on Forty Plates: The British Raj Encore

August 28, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In 1859, George Francklin Atkinson, a captain of the Bengal Engineers and a writer of some imagination as well as artistic skill, published “Curry & Rice” on Forty Plates: or the Ingredients of Social Life at “Our Station” in India. Illustrated with forty drawings, or the “plates” in question, Atkinson’s fictitious account of life in a British colonial enclave proves highly entertaining as well as instructive on a number of levels. Atkinson drew forty pictures, each “plate” representing various aspects […]

Categories: Books, India, Lit & Food • Tags: Bigotry, British Raj, Cooking, Cooks, Curry & Rice on Forty Plates, George Francklin Atkinson, India, Prejudice

Mrs. Beeton Goes to India

August 25, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

English women going out to colonial India packed cookbooks in their steamer trunks. Among the many possible tomes available, Mrs. Beeton’s brick-sized Book of Household Management,[1] took up little room but it packed a powerful wallop on lives. Valuable not only for the food and the ties to home, the Book of Household Management also included much medical advice, valuable to those living in isolated stations without medical help nearby. Even today, Where There is No Doctor and an updated […]

Categories: Cookbooks, England, English Cooking, India, Spices • Tags: Alison Blunt, Book of Household Management, Cooks, Curry, David Burnett, Dr. William Kitchiner, Helen Saberi, India, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, Isabella Beeton

Idylls of Cuisine #27

August 23, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

Categories: Asia, India, Photography, Spices • Tags: Food Photography, Garam Masala, India

Cooking for the British Raj: The Englishwoman’s Dilemma

August 21, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The British Raj, not just restricted to India but also to parts of East Africa, embodied the male-dominant culture of the times. Just watch the snippet of the film “Out of Africa,” when Meryl Streep as Karen Blixen walks into the men-only club bar in Nairobi … That film told a story that repeated itself all through the British Empire — wives were needed and women really were the pillars of the Empire. Some young women went out to India […]

Categories: Cookbooks, India • Tags: Cooks, Emma Roberts, India, Maria Rundell, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan

Cooks of the British Raj: In the Shadows of the Cantonments

August 20, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Moonlight, shadows, and frangipani fluttering in air rich with the smell of curry — many people today might harbor such images of India trending toward those seen David Lean’s film, “A Passage to India,” based on E. M. Forster’s novel of the same name. And yet, to anyone who’s spent time on the ground in certain countries around the globe, an untold backstory surges against the gorgeous scenery, the nights filled with starry skies, the nattering of songbirds in the […]

Categories: Asia, English Cooking, India • Tags: Chota Mem, Cooks, David Lean, E. M. Forster, English Cooking, India, Mrs. C. Lang, The English Bride

Lady Harriet Georgina Blackwood of Dufferin and Ava

Supping in British India

August 18, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

As the wife of the eighth viceroy-to-India, and like many privileged women of her day, Harriet Georgina Blackwood, Marchioness of Dufferin & Ava, worked hard for the social good. She created the Dufferin Fund (The Countess of Dufferin’s Fund for Supplying Medical Aid to the Women of India), which provided medical care to Indian women, assisted in the building of hospitals, and encouraged Indian women to study medicine. Traveling in India, whether from place to place as the Viceroy’s wife, […]

Categories: Asia, England, English Cooking, Europe, India • Tags: British Empire, Cooks, Dak Bungalows, Harriet Georgina Blackwood, India, Marchioness of Dufferin & Ava, Simla, Viceroys

Summer Fare, or, Steamroller Chicken

August 17, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Today, when the throbbing heat of a summer day might mean grabbing a salad at the local deli, it is hard to realize that in the past people conjured up other solutions for food on the days when sweat poured off of brows like tiny streams rushing to meet a river. Everyone knows that the dog days of summer used to lead to a flurry of canning and preserving, an all-out assault on bacteria, the eternal enemies of freshness. But […]

Categories: American Cooking, Chicken, Cookbooks, English Cooking, India • Tags: British Raj, Chris Casson Madden, Cooks, Elizabeth David, Hill Stations, India, Judith Olney, Simla, Steamroller Chicken, Summer Cooking, Summer Food

Eggplant: Passage from India

April 3, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Considering that people over the centuries have blamed eggplant for “causing insanity, acting as an aphrodisiac, and serving as a dental cosmetic,”* it’s no wonder eggplant tended not to “take” in certain cultures. United States, yes. India, no. Some experts say India gave birth to eggplant, called brinjal or baingun, originally called vartaka or vrntaka. Actually, it looks like the Indo-Burma takes the honor of first creating eggplant, as early as 600 BC. Then it spread to India proper. But […]

Categories: Eggplant, India, Video • Tags: Brinjal, Cooking, Eggplant, Food, India, Indian Cooking, Markandeya-Purana

MOVE OVER, MAJOR GREY

February 25, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In keeping with the whole British colonial heritage story [See HERE and HERE for more], here’s a change of continents. From Africa to the Indian subcontinent. Chutney. Etymologically, the word entered English via Urdu ( چٹنی ), Hindi ( चटनी — caṭnī ), and Bengali (চাটনী) . Chutney is chutney is Major Grey’s mango chutney. Yes and no. Chutney, introduced to Americans around 1850 by colonialists in the British Raj, is more than just mangoes. Or tomato catsup. Or ketchup. […]

Categories: India, Recipes, Tomatoes • Tags: British India, Chutney, Cilantro, Cooking, Coriander, Food, India, Major Grey, Major Grey Mango Chutney, Recipes

UPDATED: BREAKING: Indian Food Critic / Journalist Sabina Sehgal Saikia Dead in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks

November 29, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Sadly, I’ve just learned that Sabina Sehgal Saikia’s death has been confirmed by her friends and family: A massive fire has gutted major portions of the floor she was in. Till late Friday night, her husband Shantanu Saikia, who is also a journalist, was “hoping against hope” that she would be found alive. But that was not to be. Sabina leaves behind her husband and two children – a daughter aged 14 and son aged 11. She had texted her […]

Categories: Food News, India • Tags: Food, India, Sabina Sehgal Saikia

A PASSAGE TO INDIA, REVISITED … SORT OF (AND BOOKSTORES)

October 8, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

For those lucky souls living in one of the larger cities of the eastern United States, bookshops purveying only cookbooks exist just around the corner. In Portland (Maine), Philadelphia, and New York City, to be exact. Who knows? You might find a copy of one of Elizabeth David’s favorite books, a rather pompous Anglo-Indian cookbook from the nineteenth century, Culinary Jottings for Madras: A Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles Based Upon Modern English and Continental […]

Categories: English Cooking, India • Tags: Bookstores, Cookbooks, Cooking, Culinary Jottings, English Cooking, Food, India

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life