FLAVOURS OF AN INDIAN CHILDHOOD
Nik Sharma shares expansive collection of dishes
Nik Sharma’s elegantly inventive recipes are as recognizable as his signature photography style. Set against a dark background, his instructional shots have a clear focal point: his food, of course, but also his hands.
“When I photograph myself with my hands in (the shot), I really want to engage the user in showing them that the process of cooking … is a beautiful process,” says the creator of the award-winning blog A Brown Table and a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. “I want to pay homage to all those different moments that are taking place while I cook. It could be something really simple, but to me those are pleasant and exciting things, and so I try to convey emotion through that.” In his enormously expressive debut cookbook, Season (Chronicle Books, 2018), Sharma shares tales from his past as he travelled from his native Mumbai, India, to Oakland, Calif., where he now lives with his husband, Michael Frazier. As Sharma writes in the book’s introduction, “Mine is the story of a gay immigrant, told through food.” The 100 recipes reflect his childhood experiences, as well as the varied influences of his new home. He grew up in a diverse household — his mom’s family is from Goa, a former Portuguese colony in western India; his dad is from Uttar Pradesh in the north — and Frazier hails from the American south. “Had I grown up in a very traditional atmosphere, I may have not had that sort of thinking just thrown into my head where OK, you could do this and this together, and it will work. So I think that kind of identity helped me develop my personality when it came to food,” says Sharma.
He offers the example of the bone broth in Season. Inspired by his grandmother’s beef- and mutton-based recipe, which she enhanced with a handful of lentils or alphabet pasta, he sees it as a common thread between many of the world’s food cultures. “Those are the kinds of trends I’m trying to show people, that we’re not that different and you’re not that different from us. So I think we can all get along and have a good time, be respectful of each other and share our stories,” says Sharma. “I usually try to come from a much more personal standpoint. So not only am I able to connect, say, with a brown kid who might be Indian, who’s gay, who’s questioning whether he or she is queer and trying to find themselves … (But) at the same time it’s also really important for me to connect with people who aren’t like me, who don’t look or sound like me (and) who don’t eat the same food.”