I had my first oyster…I remember it like I remember losing my virginity—and in many ways, more fondly… [it was a] glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive…I tilted the shell back into my mouth…it tasted of seawater…of brine and flesh…and somehow…of the future.—Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
The Chef’s Story
My name is Arvind Dangwal. I am 24 years old. I come from a small family: parents and a younger brother. In my childhood, my father was the only earning member of the family. He is a typesetter who works for many big presses; but typesetting is a hard, tiring, dull job. I have never wanted to follow his trade. When I was in school my cousin joined a hotel management institute in Sainik Farms, in Delhi, and, seeing him, I too wanted to join up. Eventually, I studied at the Pusa Institute.
I wanted to be a chef right from the beginning of my course at Pusa. The kitchen became my specialization. For my two-month-long course training I was sent to the Park Royale kitchens in Delhi. I’ll never forget my first day there. I was given two sacks of onions to peel, and each of those sacks weighed thirty-five kilos. In the end my eyes stopped watering and my nose didn’t smell them any more. When my fingers cramped and froze I took a break to stretch them, but then had to start on the onions again. The first few days, I was in this department—the vegetable preparation department, where all the vegetables required for the entire hotel are washed and cut in whatever way is required. I thought I knew from the management institute how to hold a knife, but I didn’t, and I could not cut things fast enough. I had to try chopping quicker, but on the third day, along with the vegetable, I chopped off half my nail. I’ve come a long way since then.
I chose to specialize in Continental cuisine. Everyone in this country wants to be a doctor and similarly all chefs want to specialize in Indian food. Why? Because Indian chefs cooking Indian food are in demand abroad. I chose the engineering stream of cooking, you might say--the less obvious. I saw everyone wanted to do one thing; so I thought, let me try and do the other--something different.
It wasn’t easy in the beginning. My family is from Garhwal and we ate ordinary food at home: daal, subzi, bhaat, roti, paneer. Last Diwali my mother bought an oven and has begun making pizzas, but these things were never made in our house before. We are Brahmins and I had been vegetarian until then. My father ate eggs, but that was about all. I had never tasted meat or fish before. It is only now, when I bring bones from the hotel for my dog, Lucky, that meat has entered the house.
But a chef must taste everything he serves. In the beginning I wasn’t prepared for this. A day came when I had to eat beef and pork. I had to come home and tell my parents I had eaten those things. When I went to Singapore for training I ate pork’s ears, shark’s fin and organ soup. I didn’t like the taste and felt nauseous, at times, at the thought of putting such things into my mouth. The smells, especially, made me feel sick. After a while I felt there was nothing in Chinese food that didn’t have some animal part and I was longing for the home-cooked food I was used to. But I had to eat everything; it was part of my job. I had to learn how to cut meat and fish in the butchery department. The first time I ate oysters I vomited; now I love oysters and prawns. In Singapore we found you could get live oysters to eat, and I ate those also. I have never eaten snails though, or served them: there is no demand for snails here.
My favourite restaurant food is vegetarian, a baked dish—cannelloni au gratin. Italian food is what I cook best. Of course in the beginning I hadn’t eaten any Italian food; I didn’t know what any of it was meant to taste like. It’s a process of gradually overcoming unfamiliarity, aversions and prejudices--this training yourself to taste and even like different kinds of food as part of your job. Unlike some graduates from hotel management institutes, I have never had the opportunity to learn French or Italian. So even the names of the dishes were unfamiliar and meant nothing to me. On one of my early days as a trainee chef I had trouble understanding the order my chef was giving me. He’d said, ‘Spaghetti marinara’! I looked back at him and said, ‘Sir?’ He repeated it, but I still couldn’t understand what it was I had to cook. The kitchen was busy—it was one of those peak times when orders are flowing in from five or ten tables and each order needs many items—side dishes, salads, accompaniments—it’s madness at those times. And the chef was furious because I couldn’t understand the spaghetti order when there was no time to waste. He picked up a red-hot tandoor seekh in the grill and hit me on my leg with it. I still have the scar—but I understand why he did it. Twice, in similar moments of frenzied work, I’ve put my hand in the flame by mistake, or right on a scalding hot frying pan, and burnt away flesh from my fingers. You have to carry on with your work, though; you only get time out for very bad injuries.
I’ve seen many famous and important people at the hotel where I work, the Maurya Sheraton in Delhi, but rarely met them. These people don’t call the chefs to thank them. They’re too important to think of the kitchen. But we’re less concerned about people complimenting us than about people sending food back. If it happens a couple of times a week, it’s put down to chance or to the customer having different tastes—even in the Bukhara, food gets sent back because many foreigners simply haven’t acquired the taste for its kind of food. But if it happens repeatedly, the chef’s professional appraisals are in trouble.
When important politicians visit, there is scarcely time to breathe, or in Delhi in the winter, when so many people—embassies especially—throw parties at hotels. On such days we often do double shifts, and I leave very early and come home very late after work. At times, after cooking the whole day there is such a rush and the kitchen so hot, we have no time to eat. People say you’re a chef so you must be eating good food all the time. But there are nights when I go home hungry, when all day I’ve had nothing to eat at all.
I live in Dwarka, from where it’s a long way to the Maurya. On double-shift days, I try to sleep as soon as I get home, then I wake up at five in the morning, when it’s still dark, and step barefoot around my house getting ready, because I know my father works at his typesetting till late in the night, sometimes till two or three. The dog always wakes up, however quiet I am, and then my mother wakes up, gives me tea and something to eat. It’s very cold, these winter mornings, and when I start out at about five-thirty, I pass only some people wrapped head to foot in shawls or labourers going to work on bicycles or people setting off with water bottles to the edges of roads to shit. I go to work on my motorbike and when the wind in my face feels very cold, or when I’m exhausted from work the night before, I distract myself…I dream of going abroad…to Australia. I will find work abroad and then I will leave.
By the time I reach the hotel, I’m happier to be there than at home—except that the hotel has no dog. I sometimes think of Lucky in my hotel’s kitchen: he’d have loved the scraps I could have fed him.
It’s a different world, the hotel kitchen. It’s become my world. When I walk through its doors, I try to forget even my dog. I become a different person.
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In transformations of food, inorganic becomes organic, one form is metamorphosed into another; the eater is eaten, big fish eat little fish, and if you wait long enough, little fish eat big fish.
—A.K. Ramanujan
The Brahmins’ Story
Pre-independence, Tamil Brahmin nationalists faced certain unique problems. When they went for meetings of the Indian National Congress, sometimes far away from home, what were they to eat, and where? The very gaze or touch of other people would pollute. When a steamer went from Madras to Calcutta for one such meeting, there were special Brahmin cooks on board, cooking food in Brahminical ways at Brahminical times, and serving them in rooms closed to all but Brahmins. However, this was not reassuring enough for Raghunatha Rao, an interpreter of the Shastras, who went through the five-day journey eating nothing but dried fruit, milk, and a tin or two of peas. Far-sightedly, he had brought his own coffee essence with him. Another Brahmin delegate had brought cold rice with him and would eat that rice in a room from which he shut out even other Brahmins as he thought any gaze could pollute his food.
In a poetic reversal of sorts, when Mani Shankar Aiyar, a Brahmin, fought the elections against the DMK, he had to reassure the electorate that he could challenge his opponent ‘to an open competition in the village square to see who could eat more chicken biryani….he or Brahmin me’ (see M.S.S.Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, Delhi, 2006).
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The Neo-Brahmin’s Story
‘Well, thanks for all the compliments you guys are showering me with, keeps me going…or else it’s not that easy you know, running a place of this kind here…this is almost a village, although it’s supposed to be a b****y hill station! It’s very small, there wasn’t even a three-star hotel here before…and it’s tough training these hill chaps—they’re basically villagers—so how do you tell them the fish knife’s a different one…keep saying it and saying it but (chuckles)…some of these boys I’ve hired have worked at the hotels here… I’ve eaten in those hotels. I’ve been coming here for years, since my childhood, man. And I know those hotels don’t know a tagliatelle from a noodle and their service is pretty rotten and their upkeep is bad and their kitchens only function somewhat during the Season… I learnt my cooking on the Continent, you know, when I was mooching around Italy and France for some years, I know what the standards are….now look what we got here today for lunch: the dried mushrooms for the tagliatelle are Italian, the chocolate in the mousse is eighty per cent cocoa, from Belgium, the asparagus is from Himachal, we source our meat and fish from Delhi because the quality here is poor…we did try getting the baker in town to bake good bread, but he’s just not up to the mark. So now we get our bread from Delhi too—basically all our supplies come from Delhi in a refrigerated truck and then we put it in our deep freeze…yeah, I know, the power keeps going but we have a generator and a deep tubewell…we’re trying to grow some stuff here: look, that bed has rocket, the other one’s lettuce…and of course we’ve got our basil and our sage…and those hens there…we keep them for free range eggs for mayonnaise ….have some more wine—do!—and do you mind if I smoke?…that area you can see beyond the gate, where the labourers are digging, that’ll be the health club…oh yeah, we’ll have the works, from yoga to rappelling…meditation centre, health food…yeah, we expect foreign clientele or from big cities in India…nobody from here, don’t be crazy…come for a drink on Christmas, we’re getting a DJ from Delhi, it’ll be fun, everyone’s coming!
—Manager of a new four-star hotel at a hill station
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‘It was noted with envy and admiration that the breakfast in these households consisted of eggs, toast and jam instead of vegetable bhujia with paratha, and that even the women had begun to use spoons, though only little ones, to eat. Guests to tea were served cake and sandwiches instead of samosas and barfi. In the evening there was Scotch whisky and soda….instead of keora sharbat’—Sheila Dhar of her family’s move from Old Delhi to Civil Lines
The Cook’s Story
My name is Manju Arya. I think I am 64 years old. My mother died when I was one and then my father married again and went away. My grandmother, my father’s aunt, brought me up in her house in a village near Kathmandu. She gave me too much laad-pyaar (affection), did not make me go to school because I didn’t want to go, and by the time I was older I was too shy to go. I played in the rice fields near the house all day and when the dhaan (paddy) came from the fields I took it to the chakki (flour mill) to get it threshed. That was my work. The rice was enough for us for the year. We ate rice for all our meals. When my grandmother died, those days ended and I had to live with my father and his second wife.
I eloped at sixteen. My husband is from Garhwal and the marriage was frowned upon by my father and stepmother. They didn’t speak to me again for many years. At first when I came here to Ranikhet with my husband—I think it was early in the ’60s—I was quite scared of the jungles around this house and the people whose servant he was. But one day I was doing something and I heard Memsahib shout for me loudly. From the garden of the main house, she was waving towards me with hands glued up with wet flour. I ran up to help her. She had been trying to show the khansama (cook) how to make something out of a book and because he was slow, she got impatient and put her hands into the dough but it was so sticky she couldn’t clean herself. Memsahib could get very agitated very quickly. I cleaned her hands and then kneaded the dough.
No, of course Memsahib didn’t know how to cook and she never cooked. But she had a cookbook in a foreign language and after that day she called me more and more. She would sit on a stool and read from the cookbook to herself and then tell me in Hindi what it meant, what the processes were. In this way I learnt to make tarts, cutluss (cutlets), chicken rosht (roast) and puteen (pudding). Some things I learnt I didn’t like to do: for example putting sharaab (alcohol) into puteen. I can make thin pancakes and also bread. I make soups out of khatta ghaas (wild sorrel) that grows all over the hills and in the monsoon I hunt for junglee tulsi (wild oregano) to put into food. Chicken I cook with rosemary—rosemary bushes work as short hedges around our house. In her salad sometimes I added the leaves of nasturtium, the orange climber-and-creeper which flowers even through cold December. We had no oven and no special pans so I made the tarts on a dekchi (cooking pan) lid and baked them on a chulha (wood stove). For breakfast, when it was in season, I would give Memsahib strawberry—there was a small patch in the flowerbeds in those days—and malai (cream) from the milk. Sometimes we bought cream from the Military Dairy. There were always more strawberries than she could eat, so we also tasted them. Now the patch is dead.
In our own home we eat daal bhaat (dal-rice) in the morning every day. Memsahib, all her life, gave us two kilos of chana daal to cook every month. In those days it was the cheapest daal. In winter we might have rotis made of madua (millet) which is very warming and bhatt ki daal (black soya broth), which is also warming. When it’s cold, the children pluck big lemons from the tree and get maltas (oranges) from the market and then make the pulp into chutney with dahi and chilli and then they eat it all in the sun. It’s too sour for me these days. When it snows my grandchildren run about playing in the cold and pick up lumps of clean snow to mix with gur and eat as ice cream.
If I ever brought leftovers home from Memsahib, nobody would eat them but my husband and me. My children think all that English food is tasteless. They don’t like anything that is not chatpata (tangy). I’ve slowly started to like soups. I also like tuna, and omelettes with cheese, and coffee. My children don’t like any of these things. My youngest grandchild begs his mother each time she goes to the market to get her just one aloo tikki (potato cutlet), on the sly. But her mother says she can’t do that. There are too many children in the house and we can’t afford aloo tikkis for all of them, except occasionally. I tell them I’ll make you tikki at home, but they say it’s not the same thing.
We’ve never eaten out in a restaurant to fill our stomachs—but if we are stuck in the bazaar long past mealtime then we might eat a samosa or a tikki. One day my granddaughter, who has a new job, took me to eat at Rajdeep Hotel in the bazaar. We shared a plate of chowmein. It was expensive, twelve rupees for that plate. But youngsters want these things, like noodles. They always want Maggi noodles in their tiffin. Look at the tea shops in Ranikhet now: they all cook Maggi noodles and sell it as a snack! The children want ice cream, they want cakes with cream. All these things are too expensive for us. But for their birthdays we buy a small cake and I make chhole (chick peas). For some special days we cook mutton or chicken curry. Earlier when we bought mutton the butcher would know from the small amount that it was for our own use and would always give us pieces of scrap and gristle although we were paying the full price. If we bought bread we would always find we had been given a stale loaf, sometimes with fungus. My daughters, who are very smart, began to tell the shopkeepers they were buying for Memsahib and then they got better quality.
I have lived in Bombay with Memsahib also. All along the wall in front of our house there were a line of stalls selling dosa and paav bhaji (bread and vegetables). Early each morning the stall owners would start chopping kilos of onions and coriander and peeling potatoes and then cooking. Then, at lunchtime all the office-goers would crowd the stalls. I had never eaten a dosa before. They had great big tavas (griddles) on which they would spread the batter really fast and bake them golden and crisp. I could smell their sambar (spicy lentil curry) from the balcony: it used to make my mouth water then and even now, I love eating sambar. My middle daughter has learned to make it. We pluck curry patta (leaf) that grow wild near Ranibagh, on the way up from Kathgodam, and dry it and store it. We can now buy sambar powder in the market if we want to. I always say, if you have money, you can buy anything in Ranikhet these days!
In those days, in Bombay, I would stand at the balcony and watch them stirring the sambar and turning out heaps of white idlis. Then after the lunch-time rush was over the vendors would clean up, and in late afternoon, go nearby to buy a piece of fish each for themselves. They’d cook it with a lot of masala and in the evening they would have their one meal of the day with great relish--fish curry and rice. The owners of the bungalows near these vendors would be very annoyed by the crowds and cooking smells, and would try to chase them away, but I could not stop watching them from the upstairs balcony everyday.
I have never returned to Nepal. I was not welcome in my father’s house. I don’t even know what happened to my stepmother, but I know my father is dead. One day a Memsahib from Nepal brought bhogta (grapefruit). I had never seen it since I left the country. When I cut it and saw the pink flesh inside and smelt it, my home came back to me--the fields in the village near Kathmandu. I have kept the seeds and planted some of them. They’ll fruit one day.
Author’s note: I’m very grateful for the patience and candour with which Manju Arya and Arvind Dangwal dealt with my questions. I’ve deliberately not provided the name of the manager who showed me around his new hotel but none of his words are made up.
