Statutory warning: Do not read this post on an empty stomach
Wheat rotis puffed up with a few burnt edges are prepared by placing the flattened dough over the naked flame of a stove using tongs which make them really soft.This is my very first memory of food.It was our staple diet in Gwalior where I spent the early part of my childhood.At that point of time there was no concept of eating out but once in a while I was treated to some really tasty butter chicken ordered from some eatery in town. As a kid I loathed vegetables except cauliflower.
Uprooting myself from the hindi heartland and landing up in the southern coastal tip of the Indian subcontinent is like falling into a rabbit hole akin to Alice in wonderland. The culinary shock is one among the many challenges that I was exposed to when I moved to Trivandrum,Kerala. For starters wheat was hardly used here it was rice, rice and more rice throughout the day. To top on that you had fish literally every day. No one had even heard of butter chicken in my household. Mind you this is the early 90’s I am talking about here where there is no internet and only Doordarshan. Tired of my whining, my maternal aunt once made a chicken curry and topped it up with slices of butter. She tried to pass it off as butter chicken. This was sacrilege for me with respect to food. I flew into a rage when it dawned upon me that my culinary sensibilities were being ridiculed. To be fair on her she had lived her entire life in Kerala and her window to the outside world ‘Vanitha*’ never featured North Indian dishes. Cauliflower was also another casualty because it was not that readily available those days.
*The most popular women’s magazine in Kerala for more than 2 decades
The only food from Gwalior that stood the test of time was the ‘Aloo Paratha*’ which my mom made for breakfast once in a while to make me feel at home. As a matter of fact this was the first dish that my wife learned from my mother. This in itself is a testimony as to how important this flat bread is in my life. Oh yeah Jeslin makes great Aloo paratha these days, she realised quite early that mastering this skill could in a way be the key to marital bliss.
Coming back to my childhood in Kerala I was slowly warming up to fish and rice. After a point of time fried fish became a force of habit for lunch and dinner something that I missed a lot when I was living outside the state. Somewhere during my adolescence I was introduced to the all time favourite Kerala Parotta and Beef fry. It was love at first sight, akin to all the malayalees around the world; this is not a food for us but an emotion. Not to forget the Puffs(pattice for the rest of India) from the bakery* was something very underrated while you were here but you yearned for it when you stayed out of Kerala.
*bakery-this is not a traditional bakery which bakes bread but is a shop which sells evening snacks the whole day long. You won’t find such shops catering exclusively for such things anywhere in India.
Finally, I left Kerala after my engineering.I had been campus recruited into an IT major, stationed at Chennai. Understandably by then Kerala cuisine had made deep inroads into my dietary habits. Sreejith and myself were put up in a paying guest accommodation in Adayar where we were provided with breakfast and dinner. Every single day we had idli and coconut chutney for breakfast which got extremely monotonous after a couple of months. Post that I recollect vividly that for a few years I used to run for my life the moment I heard the term idli. Once in a while whenever we craved for home our malayali gang made it a point to visit some of restaurants over there which served Kerala cuisine.There was a place called ’Murugan’s idli‘ bang opposite to Besant Nagar beach which was always thronged by people,a testimony to its popularity. This was an anti thesis when I was struggling to come in terms with idli.
One of our popular hangouts was a chinese place called ‘Wang’s kitchen’. Eating there was like going for a movie. You go there and wait for a table for 45 minutes,once you get your table and make your order you need to wait for 40 minutes for the food to arrive.The 2 course meal would be savoured at a leisurely pace to eat up another 45 minutes. At the end of it you will be a lot lighter in your pocket but you spend the same amount of time as in a movie.
My next stop was Delhi, it felt good to be back to the Northern part of the country after a gap of 16 years. Slowly rice made its way for chapati and after a point of time gradually I stopped eating rice altogether. But nothing prepared me for the influx of potatoes that muscled its way into my diet rather forcefully. It was a given that you had an ‘aloo’ dish for lunch and dinner day in and day out. Add to that you had Aloo paratha in the morning there was just too much potato floating around that I started to have nightmares about potato. One day when I asked my breakfast guy for a change of fare. He promptly brought a sandwich the next day with a twist though, it was toasted bread with a filling of potatoes,it literally left me pulling out my hair in desperation. Many years after that I used to diligently extract potatoes even from Sambhar or any other dish and keep it aside saying that I had my share of potatoes for my lifetime during my time in Delhi. Even today at times by a force of habit I pick out potatoes from a dish because it is still very much ingrained in my subconscious mind. Delhi also enticed you with the sweets it had to offer. The gulab jamuns,gajar ka halwa(this was my favorite as a kid in Gwalior), Agra ka peetha to name a few were devoured with great anticipation.
Karims for mughalai food and the wares of the paratha wale gali of the Chandini Chowk area were my favourite hangouts when it came to food. Whenever you felt homesick you went to the Malayali restaurants of IANA colony in South Delhi.I still recollect vividly going to the Kerala house for the much anticipated special Onasadya in 2009 along with a few of my fellow travelers. Relishing a wholesome Malayali meal after a few months of solitary life post the sweltering summers in the national capital felt nothing short of divine.
Onam 2009
I sometimes regret that I didn’t get much to explore the food scene of Delhi. On my defense I wasn’t there to chill out but was in the midst of achieving the dream of cracking one of the toughest exams in the country. Hence, the time to go around was severely constrained thanks to the punishing schedule of coaching classes and self study which was equivalent to a work day.A few years later it was a dejavu moment for me when I visited Karim’s along with Jeslin who was floored by the taste of Mutton burra among many other dishes . I made it a point that we had to have a pitstop in Delhi during our honeymoon enroute to Manali as a pilgrimage to remind myself of the tough UPSC days.
An ode to Delhi
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