Cynthia D. Bertelsen's Gherkins & Tomatoes
A Writer's Musings on Nature and Culture, Since 2008
Curry. I can't live without it. And thus it was only natural that I used some of my Santa Claus money to buy myself a copy of Dan Toombs's clever cookbook, The Curry Guy: Recreate Over 100 of the Best British Indian Restaurant Recipes at Home (2017). The cooking found in British Indian Restaurants. Or BIRs.…
Continue reading ➞ The Curry Guy
I am of the unpopular opinion that no one owns cuisine. In spite of UNESCO decrees and loud cries from the lecture stand or pages of popular books, the fact remains: Food and ingredients travel with people. People share food. People love food. People want the recipes. Or at least the basic facts about how…
Continue reading ➞ Cooking with Hurricane Irma, Part I: Tomatoes Breathing Fire: A Universal Sauce
I love food from India, I mean, I really, really do. And so when I had a chance to review Madhur Jaffrey's latest, well, what could I say??? Heck, YES! Here's my review, of a marvelous book, on that wonderful new magazine from the U.K. - Modern Salt: MADHUR JAFFREY’S “VEGETARIAN INDIA: A JOURNEY THROUGH…
Continue reading ➞ Madhur Jaffrey’s “Vegetarian India”: My Review on the”Modern Salt” Site
For numerous reasons, lately I've been indulging in one of my passions - cooking the food of the Indian sub-continent. I just ran across again William Makepeace Thackeray's "A Poem to Curry," quoted by nearly everyone who takes a stab at writing about the mystery of curry, and how it traveled to the nooks and crannies…
Continue reading ➞ The Poetry of Curry, or, a Traveler’s Tale
Several years ago, I set up an informal experiment with an observation of two: in my tiny two-person household, I cooked and ate only Indian food for one month, relying heavily on cookbooks by Julie Sahni and Madhur Jaffrey. I felt terrific, with more energy and alertness than I knew what to do with. Of…
Like most of you (I hope), I have been cooking from Julie Sahni's cookbooks for years. I learned to feel utterly confident that Ms. Sahni's recipes really work and come close to what people from India know about good food. One weekend my husband's office held a pot-luck at a colleague's house. Feeling assured that…
Continue reading ➞ Julie Sahni -Talk About Great Indian Food!
The cow stood there, stoically it seemed to me, chewing with lazy abandon, while I fumbled with the focus on my camera. She rolled her big weepy eyes, as cows are wont to do when confronted with something new. Coincidence or not? I pressed the shutter and peered at the tiny LCD screen, the sun's…
Continue reading ➞ Keep Calm and Carry On: Cows as Zen Masters
Just a reminder that you will be able to see some 10 of the 28 sessions live and for free on Friday and Saturday, February 10 and 11, 2012. See schedule of free sessions below. To brighten up a dreary February in 2011, a group of food scholars and cookbook writers started a cookbook conference.…
Continue reading ➞ The Roger Smith Cookbook Conference
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,…
Continue reading ➞ To India, via Paris’s Le Passage Brady
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…
Continue reading ➞ East is East and West is West: Pondicherry and French Curry
A little prickle of recognition, a sense of déjà vu --- that's what happened when I turned to page 86 of A Colonial Plantation Cookbook: The Receipt Book of Harriott Pinckney Horry, 1770 (1984, edited by historian Richard J. Hooker*). There it was: “Ats Jaar, or Pucholilla.” My first thought was, “What is an Indian…
[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation. See also "India Asks, Should Food be a Right for the Poor?"]
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…
Continue reading ➞ The British Melting Pot
Trick-or-treating may well have originated in the old custom of "souling," as people went from house to house, begging ( "mumming") for "soul cakes," actually prayers --- in sweet form. Sir James George Frazer wrote about this practice in The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, a classic in anthropology, first published in…
Continue reading ➞ Saints, Souls, and Haints: Soul Cakes
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…
Continue reading ➞ To Balance, Strength, Love, Faith, and Hope:* Jehangir Mehta’s Mantra
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…
Continue reading ➞ “Curry & Rice” on Forty Plates: The British Raj Encore
[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
Food certainly gave us a way not simply of ordering a week or a day but of living inside history, measuring everything we remembered against a chronology of cooks. ~~Sara Suleri, Meatless Days In The Road to Vindaloo: Curry Cooks & Curry Books, authors David Burnett and Helen Saberi discuss a number of cookery book…
Continue reading ➞ A Chronology of Cooks, in the British Raj
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…
Continue reading ➞ Summer Fare, or, Steamroller Chicken
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.…
Continue reading ➞ Eggplant: Passage from India
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.…
Continue reading ➞ MOVE OVER, MAJOR GREY
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…
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…
Continue reading ➞ A PASSAGE TO INDIA, REVISITED … SORT OF (AND BOOKSTORES)
