Cookbook chutney

In the mid-1990s, when my brother left home to study, my father gave him a closely written foolscap paper. Covered in his bold hand, it had the recipe of an all-purpose jhol or curry. A flow chart of sorts, with potatoes, eggs, fish, chicken and mutton, each inserted somewhere between step one and step 12, depending on cooking time and Bengali whim (“for deemer jhol , fry the boiled eggs until they blister”). Yet, this distilled sum of my father’s culinary prudence was more than just a set of instructions. It revealed as much about its author as it did about his estimation of the reader, his collegiate son (“step back before you light the gas”).

When I look at my cookbooks, especially those that belong to simpler times, I see people not things. People who lent something of themselves to the food they cooked and chronicled. Home cooks who brought to the table a combination of natural talent, remembered tastes, individual temperament and lots of typos. Authors who thrived between the pages of poorly produced, picture-less books, and thought nothing of ending a recipe with: “Put on dum till water dries up and only ghee remains.”

At a time when cookbooks are reinventing themselves as graphic novels and science journals, and bloggers are unpacking their lives, loves and contents of their fridge online, it may seem bizarre to dig for meaning in terse half-sentences and dry ingredient lists. But imagine the thrill of ‘knowing’ or dreaming up a person who writes almost with biblical certainty: “Those not admiring garlic flavour (sic) can also be served this (lahsun ki kheer) and not know.”

Now, what if I told you that the cookbook I’ve quoted from above lists a bunch of game dishes? That its jungli mans recipe is paired with the disclaimer — “I have deliberately avoided giving any weight and measures as these are not available when stranded on shikar”? But look beyond the imperial titles of both the cookbook, Cooking Delights of the Maharajas — Exotic Dishes from the Princely House of Sailana , and its author, Digvijaya Singh, and you might discover a man who’s used to giving orders, of course (“always use Gujarati yam”), and exacting to a fault [“serve ( murgh irani ) when it’s almost cold”], yet not entirely inflexible in his kingly ways (his garam masala includes 11 ingredients, but saffron is optional!). Like the conductor of an orchestra, Singh is more head chef than home cook. An aesthete who loves music and art, tends to his rose and cactus gardens, and ‘dresses’ most dishes with nuts and raisins… Rubbed up against the early ’80s, when the book was first published, this is an obvious thing to do. Not so obvious though is Singh’s insistence on serving nimish , a milky, ephemeral dessert, in “clay cups ( sakroas )” not silver. Could this be a minor act of rebellion? Or reverse snobbery? A subtle stab at self-definition even? Check with Uncle Jung.

Yet the “flavour and fervour of a Maharaja’s personality” that the book takes such pride in makes Singh somewhat opaque as a subject of investigation. Unless one cheats and mines 3,620 search results on Google. But where’s the fun in that?

The more obscure a writer, the greater the latitude for audacity, for cooked transgressions. Buxom authors holding out trays of come-hither cupcakes on the cover are all very well, and dishy men with meat cleavers even better. But insofar as cultivating meaningful relationships with strangers in the kitchen, they leave little room for imagination. Would you rather not acquaint yourself with a woman whose photo covers 3x3 inch of the inside backcover of a two-volume cookbook? One who wrote the book in 1910 — 26 years before Tarla Dalal was born and 63 years before Madhur Jaffrey published her first, James Beard-winning cookbook.

Pragyasundari Devi, who singlehandedly improved my rusty Bengali-reading skills, is a grandmotherly feeder of souls. The kind one must always write about in present tense. Quick to admit when she’s uncertain [(roughly translated) “It’s hard to tell exactly how much water you’ll need for pulao”], the implicit idea that not all meals are uniformly good, or that some dishes ought to be celebrated for their ordinariness runs through her 2,800-odd recipes. Had she hosted a TV show, I imagine the lebu’r (lime) soufflés that sank wouldn’t be whisked away under the counter. And the refrain of its jingle would be this maxim of hers — “Who doesn’t want delicious food? But just because you want it, doesn’t mean you’ll get it easily. Good food is hard work.”

As if handholding young brides — or in my case, a novice who learnt to cook pasta before posto (poppy seeds) — Devi always sets her sights on a flawless meal, but takes the lowest common denominator among her readers along. And when after a series of instructions she arrives at the end of a recipe, she lets out a joyous “ iha besh lage khaitey (this is quite enjoyable to eat)”. Sometimes, she’s near-lyrical — like when she says, sure you can wrap a blanket around the vessel in which you set curd in the colder months, but “ rodey doi jomaleo boro chomotkar hoye ” (setting curd under the winter sun can be magical too). I wonder if such poetic proclivity has something to do with her uncle Rabindranath Tagore or her husband Lakshminath Bezbarua, a literary stalwart from Assam.

Women in the Tagore family have always been more progressive than the average bhodromohila . But to embrace the idea of cooking firingi (foreign) or ‘Mughal’ food so heartily, suggests conscious choice. Had Devi been alive and cooking today, at a death-defying 145 years, her aspic jellies and stews cooked in indigenous Icmic cookers would perhaps be lost in airbrushed coffee table perfection. Or she may have surprised us all by taking to molecular gastronomy or nouvelle cuisine like hilsa to the Padma river.

What I love most about her cookbook though are the listings of sequences in which certain foods must be served, and seasons in which to cook them. A reminder that things perish. Seasons change. Wars determine where your food comes from. And in this spectacularly f***ed up world, “ mondo lagey na ” (not too shabby) is a good enough incentive to cook something.

Soity Banerjee is a Delhi-based food-travel and writer

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