Cookery Elisabeth Luard
DISHOOM DISHES
Save your carbon offsets this bright new decade and take a virtual tour of Mumbai’s street food.
In Shamil Thakrar, Kavi Thakrar and Naved Nasir’s big, fat, photo-stuffed, bestselling cookbook, Dishoom (Bloomsbury, £26), the authors pay exuberant tribute to their bustling, overcrowded, magnificently architectured, poverty-stricken, food-loving native city. Dishoom, for the uninitiated – me too – is a trio of easy-going pit stops, serving mostly Parsi cooking in the savviest corners of London – King’s Cross, Carnaby Street and Shoreditch and now Manchester and Edinburgh. And dishoom is the whooshing sound made when the Bollywood hero lands a killer punch on the Bollywood villain, establishing the victor’s right to ride into the sunset with the Bollywood heroine thrown over the saddlebags. ’Twas ever thus – Metoo notwithstanding.
Some 400 pages – about people, food and places – are punctuated with recipes reminding you what a proper plateful should look and taste like before someone got at it with the tweezers.
A day’s grazing is not for the fainthearted. Breakfast: bacon naan with
The Oldie
tomato chilli jam. Elevenses: masala chai with buttered-bun soldiers ( brun maska). Lunch: potato curry with puri and pickles. Afternoon refreshments: salted lassi or fresh lime soda (yes!). Sunset snacks: okra fries (my fave). First dinner (7 o’clock): garlic ginger crab. Second dinner (8 o’clock): jackfruit biryani cooked in a dum (double-handled copper pot). Third dinner (9 o’clock): lamb kabab with gunpowder potatoes. Pudding (10 o’clock): kulfi. The whole should be rounded off with a midnight tipple – rose-syrup and cardamom bellini, or a gimlet with dill and lime – at the Taj.
Irresistible. Here’s a little taste of what’s inside. For step-by-step recipes and fabulous traveller’s tales, you’ll have to buy the book.
Bacon naan roll: spread freshly-baked naan with full-fat cream cheese (Philadelphia does the trick), sprinkle with a few coriander leaves, top with very crisp bacon rashers, a pinch of finely chopped green chilli and a drizzle of tomato-chilli jam. Tomato-chilli jam: for a couple of jamjarsful, blitz 800g skinned and chopped fresh tomatoes (or good-quality canned, including the juice) with 60g fresh ginger, 3-4 garlic cloves and 2-3 fresh chillies – all finely chopped. When the mixture is reduced to a coarse purée, whizz in 125ml rice vinegar. Transfer to a heavy-based preserving pan, stir in 300g sugar and cook over a low heat till thick and jammy – about 30 minutes. Pot up in clean jamjars. Keeps for at least six months. Okra fries: the secret is in the coating. Quarter or halve topped okra pods vertically and toss with ginger paste, garlic paste and a pinch of chilli powder diluted with a little water. Mix gram flour and cornflour in proportions of three to two, sprinkle over the okra and toss gently to coat. Drop into hot oil in batches and fry till golden and crisp. Gunpowder potatoes: spread readycooked baby new potatoes in a baking tray, sprinkle with a little oil and roast or grill till the top is crisp and brown, then turn and crisp the other side. Meanwhile, in a dry pan, toast cumin, coriander and fennel seeds for a couple of minutes, then crush in a mortar and mix in a bowl with a little melted butter, chopped spring onion, coriander leaves and finely chopped green chilli. Add the hot, crisp potatoes roughly broken with a spoon, and turn to coat with the buttery spice mixture. Finish with sea salt, a squeeze of lime juice and a pinch or two of garam masala blitzed with dried, toasted fenugreek leaves.