Christine’s Indian feasting
To celebrate the release of her cookbook, Tasting India, Christine Manfield cooks a spicy Indian summer feast featuring heirloom family recipes from her travels.
Christine Manfield is using a fork to dig around in a plate of green bean poriyal – a dry curry laden with freshly grated coconut and seasoned with turmeric. This particular recipe is native to India’s Tamil Nadu region, where the renowned chef has spent many evenings at dinner tables and in kitchens of ancestral family homes, jotting down recipes during her frequent culinary pilgrimages. “If you close your eyes and taste, you can often tell which part of the country you’re in,” Christine says. “It’s different as you move across the regions and the cities, and even within the towns and the villages, the food changes. It’s determined by religion and caste.”
Born in Brisbane, with a curious heart and a restless soul, Christine has travelled all over and lived several different lives. She was a teacher in Elizabeth, home to the Holden plant on
the northern fringe of Adelaide, before moving to Paris to live out a dream of learning about food. She didn’t formally train. It was a personal “explore and discover” journey, she says, before her Australian homecoming for her third act – award-winning restaurants and a swag of recipe books. “Food had always been very seminal,” she says. “Travel for me was all about food culture. Because of travelling I jumped into food.”
Christine is talking to The Weekly while preparing a photo shoot to promote her new cookbook Tasting India, Heirloom Family Recipes – a compendium of Indian cooking, lovingly collected and presented alongside beautiful photography and travel notes. The air in the studio is thick with spice that smoulders in the back of your throat. Pans are crashing against gas burners and cutlery is tinkling as curries are arranged on a vibrant table, decorated in tones of marigold and amethyst.
“It’s based on tamarind and more souring agents. It’s leaner, just different flavour profiles,” Christine says of the food of Tamil Nadu. The region is home to Chennai, west of the Bay of Bengal, where she cemented her love affair with India in 1996, when she accepted a visiting chef position in a hotel kitchen during Diwali, the raucous festival of light. “It was a little bit like a homecoming in a way,” she says. “I get this place.”
This latest book – her 10th – is the first time she has published recipes she didn’t personally write. Instead, she curated them from mothers, grandmothers and family cooks. “My working title for the book was Mother India, because they’re the keepers of culinary history. You ask any Indian who cooks the best and they’ll say their mother,” Christine says. “It’s an oral tradition: mother to daughter, mother to daughter-in-law. That’s how I often worked when I was in kitchens, wherever it was.”
The book is divided into regions and that’s because, Christine writes in the introduction, “with India, it’s difficult to know where to start. For me, it’s a sensory world of spice and I really believe that food should push all those buttons.”