INDIA: GO FOR THE FOOD
Chris Caldicott suffers no more than an expanding waistline on a food-focused tour of India
IWAS standing on a street corner in Kolkata at night and in the pouring rain when, from a large clay pot, a man filled a ball of fried wheat with some magic liquid.
The shell was wafer-thin and I had only a few seconds to get it into my mouth before it dissolved. I made it in time and with a sharp crunch a massive taste explosion went off in my mouth, overwhelming my taste buds with pure pleasure.
It was a moment of culinary perfection in which I could revel for only a second before another ball was loaded and in my hand, requiring immediate attention. Jonty Rajagopalan had just initiated me into the Kolkata version of pani puri, a classic Indian street-food treat of deepfried puri balls filled with pani or water, here enriched with tamarind and date purée, chickpeas, potato, onion, chilli, coriander, mint and kala namak, or black salt. It is sweet and sour, hot and cold, crispy and wet, weird and wonderful all at the same time.
Rajagopalan is a food historian who has channelled her passion for Indian cuisine into creating the ultimate culinary tour of the country. On it, she explores the regional, religious, historical and cultural influences on food served everywhere from the most basic makeshift stalls set up by roadside hawkers to the homes of local people and the kitchens of palaces.
There was a time not so long ago when the idea of a culinary tour of India would have seemed absurd. Was India not a place where millions of people were starving? “Eat everything on your plate, think of all the poor hungry children in India,” I was told as a child. Then there was the fear of “Delhi belly”, stock advice to never drink the water, avoid ice at all costs, beware of salad and never eat the food served from street stalls. There were even sinister rumours that Indian cooks only used spices to disguise the taste of rotten food. All these things may have been true once, somewhere in India, and they may even be true now. If so, they are the exception rather than the rule.
Today, celebrity television chefs tour the country in search of authentic street food and local dishes, then rave about the creative, subtle use of spices they discover. Now you can follow in the footsteps of the likes of Rick Stein, guided down secret paths by Rajagopalan on your own Indian kitchen confidential.
It’s not a tour for everyone, but, for anyone who already loves India and its cuisine, this is as good as it gets. I joined Rajagopalan in Kolkata for the second half of her tour, and by the time I left her in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, a week later, I’d had the best experience of India in all my 69 trips there. My only regret was that I’d not been able to go on the whole tour, which also includes two other gastronomic hubs of India, Amritsar in the Punjab and Ahmedabad in Gujarat.
Everywhere we went, from a frenetic fruit and vegetable market in Kolkata to the back streets of the old city in Hyderabad, just being with Rajagopalan meant we never
Eat everything on your plate, think of all the poor hungry children in India
felt like tourists. She seemed to know everyone, and they all seemed to love her and she made me feel like a welcome guest. She led me down a labyrinth of winding alleys behind the Charminar mosque and up anonymous stairways into family homes that were hives of cottage industry. Every room was busy with women making sweets and snacks on the floor while up on the roof men cooked samosas and pakoras in vats of bubbling oil on open fires.
In a pottery-village suburb along the Hooghly River, we had breakfast with rickshaw pullers and watched artisans making extraordinary, giant, lifelike Hindu idols out of river clay, then paint them in vivid colours and adorn them with elaborate jewellery.
Nor was it only the raw street-life experiences that showed me slices of an India I had never seen before; Rajagopalan has friends in high places, too. One of them, Bomti Iyenger, an art collector and oldstyle Kolkata socialite, invited us to his gorgeous Raj-era apartment for an intimate dinner party of authentic home-cooked Bengali cuisine. Among the oil paintings and candelabra, in a scene straight out of a short story by Somerset Maugham, we feasted on fresh fish and seafood curries cooked with mustard oil and spiced with panch pooran, the classic Bengal five-spice mix of mustard seeds, fennel, nigella, fenugreek and cumin.
A lunch cooked in a unique Indian-Chinese style was served in Eau Chew, the restaurant and home of one of the established families of Kolkata’s Chinatown. It included an intriguing “chimney soup” of vegetables and fish served in a bowl with a metal chimney in the middle, and hot coals burning away underneath. At the members-only Bengal Club, founded in 1827, we feasted on Anglo-Indian classics such as mulligatawny soup and railway mutton curry served by waiters in white gloves.
Rajagopalan puts up her guests in the finest hotel in each city so, naturally, in Kolkata it had to be the Oberoi Grand. I decided to walk back there after the meal at the club, a pleasant stroll along avenues of Raj nostalgia, down Park Street, then along Chowringhee Road beside Maidan park to the Esplanade area, and turn right into the genteel elegance of the hotel.
In Hyderabad, just staying at the Taj Falaknuma Palace was a good enough reason to go there. As you climb into the ornate horse-drawn carriage that carries you from the gate house past manicured gardens to the former home of the Nizam of Hyderabad, perched 610m above the city, you know you have arrived somewhere truly special. It is a crazy blend of Renaissance, Baroque, Indian and Italianate architecture, packed to the rafters with Venetian chandeliers, frescoes, sweeping staircases and objets
d’art. This was the perfect base from which to set off on forays into the vegetable, spice, bangle and pearl souks, and among the ancient Sufi tombs, palaces and mosques of the Arabian Nights-style old Mughal capital.
Trying out local fare is optional. On her food walks, Rajagopalan explains everything you see being cooked on the street with such enthusiasm that it’s hard to resist trying almost everything — but there is no pressure. She arranges for a special stall to serve safer versions of delicacies such as chilli fritters, butter-fried masala dosas and pani puri (using mineral water and no ice) for anyone concerned about how far to go in terms of eating. I suffered nothing more than an expanding waistline on the trip, but I did decline the nihau goat’s tongue and trotter soup.
We saw a different side of the city at the Park Hotel, a product of the new, rich young India that is thriving in places such as Hyderabad, where there is a new town with a large IT and software industry. Despite the futuristic architecture and the cool café crowd, Aish, the hotel’s fine-dining restaurant, has established itself as the best place in the city to taste the three distinct regional styles of Andhra Pradesh cuisine.
Rajagopalan arranged for us to experience the classic cooking style of these three regions in a single meal. It was a fascinating food journey that included the sophisticated and subtly perfumed, Persian-influenced biryani dishes of the city; then the pumped-up, fiery, “no mercy with the spices” style of coastal Andhra with sensational giant prawn, crab and fish curries; and then the even spicier (really) inland Rayalaseema style of chicken and lamb curries.
The next day was easier on the waistline and the endorphins, as we learnt about how Hindus fast during religious festivals. We spent a relaxing few hours in a wonderfully atmospheric haveli in the heart of the old city, listening to our charming hostess, the owner, as she explained the secret of how Hindus make a feast out of a fast. Avoiding cooked foods and spices, and eating only fruit and raw vegetables, they nevertheless manage to make a wide variety of tasty and mostly healthy treats.
As part of the Gujarati section of her tour, Rajagopalan introduces her party to Jain cuisine. The Jains believe all life is sacred so not only are they strictly vegetarian, but they will not eat anything that grows under the ground in case insects are harmed by harvesting. Even this cuisine impresses everyone who tries it. It is delicious despite the absence of ingredients such as onion, garlic, ginger and root vegetables. The night streetfood walk in Ahmedabad sounds wonderful, from the kebab and naan stalls of the Muslim quarter to the vegetarian stands of the Hindu and Jain districts. In Punjab, participants can be volunteer cooks for a day at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, can visit an organic farm and attend a wedding to feast on tandoor favourites.
My tour ended with a night off (or so I thought) to immerse myself in the pleasure of staying at Falaknuma. I began with a beer on the terrace at sunset, listening to a group of local qawwali musicians. My room was so splendid that I decided to order in-room dining for my last meal. I should have known better. Rajagopalan had arranged a surprise farewell feast, the details of which I will not divulge here as it would be like revealing the ending of a brilliant book. All I will say is that anyone who goes on this tour and enjoys every minute of it as much as I did will not be disappointed. — © The Telegraph