Other Tables – More Thoughts on Food
My relationship to food has been shaped and formed by the sum of my experiences and encounters, both monumental and seemingly insignificant.
Kabul 1972, Before the Taliban.
I was accustomed to sitting among day laborers and craftsmen, seeking out the utilitarian places where they ate, because the portions were big and the prices small. In a back alley in the bazar of Kabul, Afghanistan, I found a stall that served lentil soup and the ubiquitous Afghani flat bread, naan. Believing that my meal would cost three Afghanis, at the time about twenty-five cents, I ordered and sat down shoulder to shoulder alongside sinewy, unshaven men in collarless tunics under vests of coarsely woven wool. When it was time to pay, the cook held up his hand, and said "panch"meaning that my lunch would cost me five Afghanis. I pointed to the sign, that I thought read three. When I insisted, the cook leaned over the counter, and as if it was decided in advance, two men came up behind me, so close that I could smell lentils and onions on their breaths. The cook said something and held up his other hand showing another finger, and I understood the price had increased again. When the buzz in the stall quieted, and the other diner's attention focused on the pending entertainment, my survival instinct kicked in, and I quickly agreed to the new price. Discussion ended. Principles were one thing, a pummeling over the price of lentil soup in one of Kabul's back alleys was another.
The Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay 1970
Bad conscience, mixed with empathy and guilt were the wrong spices for my meal.
After months of living on a normal village diet of rice, lentils and vegetables, I felt that I had earned the right to splurge on a meal at Bombay’s luxurios Taj Mahal Hotel before I returned to the spartan life of a Peace Corps Volunteer.
On my way to dinner, I walked through Bombay’s back alleys and squalid side streets, past ragged families living in makeshift carboard hovels. With outstretched hands, and entreating eyes, these forgotten people asked me for only enough to be able to give their children a bowl of rice. That walk turned out to be a bitter appetizer and that bad conscience and the guilt that I felt, were the wrong spices for my extravagant meal.
The stark contrast between India’s poor and rich was once again, painfully obvious to me, when I stepped over and around people sleeping on the marble stairs in front of the hotel’s opulent dining hall. Two barefoot attendants dressed in spotless white livery, white turbans and matching white gloves opened the massive teak doors leading to the dining hall. When I entered and my eyes adjusted to the sea of light from the crystal chandeliers, and I saw the care-free diners oblivious to the poverty only a few meters from their tables, I was startled as though I had inadvertently stepped into a scene from Colonial India.
Shocked and embarrassed, I turned in the doorway and made my way back down the stairs, over and around the sleeping men, found a street stall, and sitting on a backless bench polished smooth by countless diners, ate my normal meal of chapatti and curried vegetables.
Note: Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1995
Forest Gold
Among all the wild plants and fruits of the jungle, honey was the most sought after, and men of the indigenous tribes were masters at climbing to the roof of the forest and risking their lives for their favorite food. Immune to the stings of the agitated bees, they climb fifty meters or more to pull the hives from hollow tree trunks.
After months of travelling through the deserts of North Africa, and then down into the continent’s steaming jungles, Kersti and I continued our trip on the Congo River with a Greek trader whose boat was carrying a cargo of beer to Kisangani in the Eastern Congo. We slogged upstream 1500 kilometers deep into the remote interior of the continent, on a river that was so wide that at times you could barely see the opposite shore, and at others, so narrow that our boat seemed like it would be swallowed by an unbroken wall of green.
We brought a little breath of the outside world to the thatched hut villages that we passed on our way upriver. We were a diversion in the unchanging life of the jungle. Villagers came out to the narrow strip of shore to watch us pass, waving and chanting. Children swam out a bit to get our attention, and fishermen paddled their dug-out canoes to intercept our boat and hitch a ride or sell whatever fish or fruit that they might have. One of these river peddlers, while holding on to our gunwale, haggled with the crew over a beehive dripping with honey, complete with dead bees and their larvae.
We found a tin bowl in the galley and pressed out the honey with our hands. We picked out dead bees and bits of wax from the honeycomb and crushed the hexagonal cells between our fingers and palms so that the sugary liquid ran out.
I filled a frying pan with palm seed oil, sliced and quartered thick, green, fibrous plantains and fried them golden brown over a kerosene burner, and poured the honey over them while they were still sizzling.
If there was ever a review of jungle delicacies, fried bananas and fragrant rain forest honey would be at the top of any list.
Congo River 1973
Ragi Mudde, Not Fully Acclimatized
In India, my first home away from home, I learned to eat food with exotic names like sambar and idli, masala dosai and chapatti. Everything was so spiced that it singed my tongue, stung my throat, smoldered in my stomach, glowed in my bowels and burned when it came out.
It didn't take long before I was acclimatized to the point where I stopped using cutlery and began eating with my right hand. I learned to take a shock of rice with my fingers, turn it this way and that, to soak up some curry, and careful not to wet my palm, gathered the mixture into a ball, and flicked it into my mouth. I began to drink like a native too, tilting my head back and letting a stream of liquid trickle down my throat, never touching the rim of the cup or glass with my lips. I had not exactly gone native, but after having lived in India for almost three years, I felt that I still needed to prove to myself that I was truly acclimatized. So, looking for some kind of personal validation, I asked Mrs. Mani my cook, to serve “ragi mudde,” firm round balls the size of a tennis ball, made from the millet that gave good yields from the stony, dry fields of Kolar District, and was a nourishing staple in the local villages.
"What will people think of me if I feed you this,” she lamented in her Tamil blended Kannada. As if I hadn’t already done enough strange things, she shook her head and asked, “why would you eat this simple food when I can make you rice with mutton or chicken every day?”
She placed several balls of boiled millet in front of me on a tin plate and pretended not to watch, as I chewed and chewed. No matter how much curry I soaked those gooey balls in, they still tasted like brown lumps of coagulated dough, and no matter how much water I drank to wash them down, they still stuck to the roof of my mouth. For my unappreciative and untrained palate, ragi mudde’s firm, gluey consistency reminded me of the oatmeal from my childhood, that was left standing too long in the bottom of the pot, and that I sneaked into the trash bin when my mother wasn’t looking.
To Mrs. Mani’s satisfaction, I gave up after a few days and went back to eating her excellent meals. She never said, “I told you so,” and only gloated a little, if you don’t count her hearty laugh when she shared the story of my fiasco with her daughters, as they helped her prepare my favorite dish, chicken curry with rice and chapatti.
Mrs. Mani´s Chicken Curry
Mrs. Mani’s chicken curry wasn’t the same from time to time, but the basic ingredients were, and the result was always an explosion of flavor. I ‘ve made this dish countless times. I try to make it like she did, and this is about as close as I can come, considering her spices came from sacks at the village market, the chicken was slaughtered and plucked a few minutes before going into the pot, and she used tamarind for tartness instead of lemon.
Ingredients:
Peanut or coconut oil, or a neutral oil for frying
3 onions chopped
1 cinnamon stick
2 tablespoons of chopped ginger
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
Two chopped tomatoes or two spoonfuls of tomato paste
1 tsp. ground coriander seeds
1 tsp. ground cardamon seeds
1 tsp. ground cummin seeds
Ground cloves = 2
Ground chili pepper to taste – mild to hot
Juice of one lemon
2 dec. of yogurt
One half liter of water
1.5 – 2 kilos of chicken without the skin cut into pieces
Procedure:
Grind the spices in a mortar.
Heat the oil in a thick bottomed pot and sauté the onion, garlic, and ginger until the onion is golden. Put in the ground spices, fry for several more minutes and add the tomatoes and the cinnamon.
Put in the chicken, add half a liter of water and simmer the mixture while stirring, until the chicken is cooked, about ahalf hour. Stir in the yogurt and the lemon juice.
Serve with boiled rice.
Don’t Argue With an Expert
Cooking for Italians peels away all pretensions. You either get it right or you don’t. So, here's some advice. Don't argue wine with someone whose house is surrounded by vineyards, and who got his first taste as an infant when his grandfather, according to family tradition, put a few drops on his tongue.
You were usually in somewhat safe territory when you paired wine with a meal, if you kept to the usual red with meat and white with fish, but I felt that attitudes were changing and mistakenly thought that the wine I chose one evening was not that unconventional.
We were hosting Italian house guests, and I was cooking Swedish with a touch of Italy. Our dinner began with an appetizer made from crayfish tails in a mix of creme fraiche, mayonnaise, red onion, caviar and dill on rye bread squares that I had baked and pan fried in butter. As a second course, I served an acceptably creamy seafood risotto with North Sea shrimp, and as the main course, served filet of pork garnished with sautéed chanterelle mushrooms, fresh from the forest. To accompany the meal, I had chilled several bottles of Pinot Grigio, a fruity and refreshing white wine, that in my opinion, suited the summer temperature and served it with the first two seafood courses, and even felt that it would be suitable with the pork.
One of the guests, the group’s designated wine aficionado, came into the kitchen holding an unopened Pinot Grigio and said apologetically, “Francis this wine shouldn’t be served with the pork filet." I didn´t protest or say that I liked its tart, fruitiness and that there was a changing attitude toward whites. Nor did I have the inclination to discuss or to defend my choice of wine with someone who not only had strong preferences and a firsthand knowledge of the intricacies of the beverage, but probably got his first taste when his father or grandfather put a drop on his tongue when he was an infant.
Not so much to rectify my mistake, if I want to call it that, as to make a quiet statement with a touch of provocation, I brought up several bottles of the red Tuscan, Brunello di Montalcino, one of the premier Italian wines that I had been saving. As I was putting the final touches on the evening’s dinner, my discerning guest came back with the unopened bottles, and again in the vein of instructing me said, “sorry Francis this wine isn’t suitable either.” Already knowing the answer, I asked, “Why not?” “Of course, Brunello is “molto buono,” excellent, but it is too robust, and its intensity will overwhelm the pork.” And he was right on that score also, but I already knew that as I climbed the cellar stairs.
Looking back on that evening, a lighter Primitivo or Montepulciano d’Abruzzo probably would have been better, but mistakes are always an opportunity for learning.
Self Confidence or Self Deceit : When you are preparing a meal in a hurry, stick to what you know.
Even if my meal wasn’t going to get mentioned in the Gambero Rosso, the platters were cleaned and the participants talked about the meal the next day, and I knew our friends would ask me to cook for them again, that in itself, an adequate compliment.
I was visiting Venice with Italian friends and one morning over coffee and a robust Italian breakfast, consisting of coffee and several biscuits, instead of the usual one, my host said, “Oh by the way, I’ve invited some people for dinner tonight. I told everyone that you were a wonderful cook and that you wouldn´t mind throwing something together for us.”
Before I could back out, everyone around the table agreed in chorus, giving me no time to make excuses as to why I couldn’t. All I could think of were the problems: strange kitchen, were the knives sharp, what would I cook and where would I find all the ingredients that I needed? None the less, a little flattered, I graciously accepted the challenge. Just then, the idea of me cooking for people that had high standards, and that I had only recently met, seemed plausible.
What followed was an intense day of sightseeing, on my host's sloop, sailing through the lagoon, stopping at the islands of Torcello, Burano and Murano. As the day progressed, I was wondering when we were going to turn back, so I could shop, wash, slice, dice, pare, mix, blend, grill, fry, boil and roast. For every hour that slipped past, and every historical sight we saw, I removed a dish from my planned menu. We anchored in the lagoon and after a long lunch and obligatory siesta, and then an aperitivo on Murano, I realized that I was only going to have a few hours to prepare for the evening. I was beginning to feel the first quiet signs of panic. This was going to be a “catch what catch can meal.” I changed the menu again, scaling it down even more, and decided on a few dishes from the traditional Swedish “smörgåsbord.”
When we finally docked, I found what I needed in a nearby market. Of course, I’d break the rigid Italian rules for preparing fish, and there was the chance that my rich Scandinavian menu wouldn’t suit the Italian palate, but I was following the culinary rule, “when you are in a hurry, stay with what you know,” and with Kersti as sous chef, I’d manage.
Starter = Toast Skagen - shrimp mixed with caviar in a bed of mayonnaise blended with thick sour cream, finely chopped red onion and topped with sprigs of dill served on slices of buttered dark bread toast with the crusts removed.
First course = The two types of pickled herring from the supermarket at home in Sweden, firm one-inch chunks in a marinade of onion, peppercorns distilled vinegar and sugar served with knäckebröd, flat, hard baked rye bread cakes. (We brought both from Sweden as gifts to other friends.) The herring would be washed down with shots of Swedish Absolut Vodka that was available, surprisingly enough, in the supermarket.
Second = Thinly sliced poached salmon with a sauce made from light Dijon mustard, vinegar, honey and thick Greek style yogurt whipped lightly to aerate it.
Third = “Jansson’s Frestelse, “potatoes sliced in thin strips and layered with anchovies along with diced onion and butter covered in thick cream and baked in the oven until the potatoes are soft and have absorbed all the liquid.
Fourth = Swedish meatballs “köttbullar,” small meatballs about fifteen millimeters in diameter made from equal mixtures of double ground pork and beef, with a little diced red onion, egg, breadcrumbs and cream, fried in butter.
Dessert would be simple= strawberries were in season and were part of the Swedish mid-summer tradition, so it was a quickly frozen strawberry semi-freddo on a mirror of strawberry glaze, decorated with strawberry slices and mint leaves.
We’d drink Birra Moretti. Wine wasn’t a traditional Scandinavian beverage. Beer would suit the menu nicely and Moretti's crisp, malty taste, would mellow some of the heaviness of my menu. Vodka shots, according to tradition, would go with the pickled herring, which along with the knäckebröd, would give the meal an authentic touch.
Because I cooked that evening, I had the honor of being “capo di tavalo,” the honorary head of the table, and sat close to the stove so that I could oversee the dinner. After each course I heard, “very good, buono, complimenti” and the poached lax and dressing were a success, as were the potatoes with anchovies and cream.
How did my dinner go? I survived. The platters were cleaned and the participants talked about the meal the next day. Even if I wasn’t going to get mentioned in the Gambero Rosso, the Italian restaurant guide, I knew our friends would ask me to cook for them again. That in itself, was an adequate compliment.