Dare to be different
Food writer Nik Sharma was eight when he made his first pot of rice. It was a disaster. He found a bottle of Rooh Afza, a rose-flavoured concentrated syrup popular throughout South Asia, in the studio apartment in the Bandra neighbourhood of Mumbai, India, where he grew up in the late 1980s. Though Rooh Afza is typically mixed into cold water or milk, Sharma had other plans. “I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you put the Rooh Afza in the rice so it smelled like roses?’” he said.
The syrup turned the rice an atomic pink hue. It was disturbingly sweet. After a few bites, he threw it out.
His failure was an early cooking lesson: Be bold with flavours. Don’t be reckless.
Today, Sharma, 38, has a more measured approach to experimentation, a philosophy he distils in his first cookbook, Season: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food released on Tuesday from Chronicle Books. In it, he toys with flavour combinations, chopping unripe green mangoes and stirring them into mayonnaise to make a verdant tartare sauce, and working an extract of caramelised fig and bourbon into glasses of iced chai.
Over the past few years, Sharma has amassed a following between his food blog, A Brown Table, and his cooking column in The San Francisco Chronicle. As with his column, he took all the book’s photographs himself. Their dark, noiseless backgrounds emphasise the elements of composition that matter most: his brown hands, and his food.
The light-soaked kitchen at his home here in Oakland, which he shares with his husband, Michael Frazier, their two cats and a dog, is charmingly chaotic. The spice drawer is clogged with dozens of jars: ancho chilli, juniper berries, fenugreek powder. A collection of nearly 400 cookbooks spills from his living room into his kitchen. (“It’s not a lot,” Sharma said, shrugging.) Pieces of black cast-iron cookware, from tea kettles to Dutch ovens, dot every corner of the room.
A small wooden box sitting on a high shelf contains talismans from the home he left behind: paperback cookbooks, their pages now yellowed and disintegrating, that he borrowed from his mother, along with his grandmother’s recipes scribbled on notepads.
Sharma’s food is quietly expressive, nodding to the flavours he grew up eating in Mumbai without chaining itself to tradition. Take paneer, an ingredient he feels has untapped potential. It often gets relegated to gloppy bowls of mattar paneer, where it floats next to peas. But it possesses versatility: It is a pretty stubborn cheese, able to withstand heat without collapsing into goo.
In Season he places charred cubes of roasted paneer in a bed of cauliflower, scallions and lentils. He breaks it up with his hands and folds it into a warm potato salad with cilantro, chives and a cured spicy sausage native to the Indian state of Goa; the paneer eases the jolt of the sausage. He bakes it into a frittata with garam masala, where the paneer retains its rubbery feel, the crumbles scrubbing against your tongue.
“It is wrapped up in so much tradition, but it can be fluid and move across boundaries,” Sharma said of paneer. “I always believe that tradition is great, but it can bind you.”
Sharma knows this bind well. Throughout his life, he has experienced a tension between sticking to tradition and freeing himself from it, between convention and originality.
It is no coincidence that this conflict plays out in his recipes, which are very personal — even autobiographical. They often rely on ingredients found in the Indian dishes of his youth, like that paneer. But Sharma breaks away from familiarity, putting those ingredients in conversation with the food he has encountered in America.
The results defy easy categorisation, like Sharma himself. “Mine is the story of a gay immigrant, told through food,” he writes in his cookbook’s introduction, which details his journey from childhood in India to his current life in California as he sought out his place in the world. His cooking helped carry him, providing both direction and comfort along the way. “My food has always been about wanting people to accept me,” he said. “But I’m also looking for acceptance from myself.”
Sharma spent the first 22 years of his life in the closet. He grew up in Mumbai, born to a Hindu father from the state of Uttar Pradesh and a Roman Catholic mother from Goa. He was not like his schoolmates, whose families had more money than his. He also realised early on that he was gay, though he did not tell a soul. Still, he found himself a frequent target of schoolyard bullies.
Through it all, he cooked. Once he mastered rice, he moved on to a binder of recipes his mother had cobbled together from Indian lifestyle glossies and newspapers. These recipes were not exclusively Indian: He baked a Neapolitan cake using maraschino cherries for the red layer.
“I know people will hate me for that,” he said, laughing. “But that’s all they had in India, so that’s what we used.”
Sharma has attracted champions as high-profile as British cookbook authors Nigella Lawson and Diana Henry. Henry, now a close friend, credits him with opening up a world of flavour combinations she did not realise existed.
“He doesn’t have a string of restaurants as Yotam Ottolenghi does, so he has less scope to disseminate his style, but I think Nik really could do for Indian flavours what Yotam has done for Middle Eastern ones,” Henry said. “It is a matter of getting us to see these ingredients in a different and more modern way.”
He also takes dishes of personal significance to him and gives them new life, like his version of bebinca, a traditional Goan dessert of eggs and coconut milk that his grandmother made often. A bebinca usually consists of layers, but he, like his grandmother, makes it with mashed sweet potatoes, condensing them into a mass that resembles pudding. He added a dash of turmeric to accent the vivid orange of the sweet potatoes, and sweetened it delicately with maple syrup as well as jaggery, a fixture of Indian cooking.
The recipe, like others in Season tells the story of who Sharma is: a child of India with his feet in American soil. But he does not want the world to define him in terms of difference. He wants them to know him for the work he produces.
“Being gay, being brown, that’s a part of me I can’t hide,” he said. “But I hope people see me as a writer and a photographer and a cook. These are the things I hope they see me as when I die.”
My food has always been about wanting people to accept me