Foodie woes......
It was a warm sunny morning about a decade and a half back in a town in upper Assam which was (it still is) home to a lot of indigenous tea planters. The people who are associated with tea plantations are accustomed to li
ve like the Britishers who used to be the owners of the tea gardens in the pre-Independence era, complete with graciousness to offer one's own chair to a lady and sending their wa...
rds to the best of boarding schools in the country. Invited to have breakfast at a distant relative’s place who was etiquette and mannerisms personified, I was at my wits end upon seeing two eggs, sunny side up, served with utmost care on a bone china plate accompanied by a knife and a fork. Though brought up in Guwahati, it was still an uphill task for me to eat a poached egg with knife and fork which I usually gulped down (and still do) with a big spoon at home. Anyways, that day I managed to devour the eggs with hurried bites whenever the hostess diverted her attention from me. To add to my woes, my brother started to hurriedly finish off the plate of orange-cream biscuits and also tucked in a few in his half-pant pockets.
It took many a years and great effort on my part to start using the appropriate cutlery for the appropriate food. And now also my heart skips a beat when chopsticks that look like knitting-pins are laid down to eat slippery noodles....
Coming to the present, my four and a half year old son rattles the names of food like pizza, hakka noodles, hot dog, burger, pasta, etc with such an elan that I wonder if he learnt all these while still inside my tummy! I still remember my panic in a restaurant where I had gone with a school friend, who is now settled in the UK, whom I was meeting after ages. The menu was full of alien words like zucchini, provolone, linguini , ziti, spumoni , tortoni , etc. It was an Italian food joint, and I thought I will be able to devour the good old pizza or pasta. How did I know that I will be bombarded with such tongue twisting words which threatened to kill my appetite even before I had started to eat? Thankfully, my friend, who was footing the bill, volunteered to order, and I tactfully managed to camouflage my weakness by talking to him about our childhood pranks. I remember coming back home and searching the net for the few words which I had managed to memorize so that I know their meanings.
I admit to being a victim of “sweet desire”. I simple love anything sweet, be it the evergreen PEDA of Bokakhat, or the syrupy MALPUWA of Gole Market. When I started attending parties and conference dinners, I was bombarded with all ominous words like mousse, soufflé, fritters, zabaglione, etc. But I discovered an easy way out to pacify my sweet tooth; I simply ate the dessert which looked the best! Though the exercise backfired many a times when I ate some horrible dishes too! Later in life, the likes of Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsey and Anjum Anand played a pivotal role in introducing me to a whole new world of global desserts. But my personal favourite remains to be kumol saul, cream and gur (কোমল চাউল, ক্রিম and গুড়).
The memories of my college days is incomplete without the mouth watering Chinese fare at our good old CHINA TOWN at Rajgarh in Guwahati (for the benefit of the uninitiated and for those who have never visited Assam, just have a bite there and you will forget MAINLAND CHINA) where we used to rush the moment we got our stipends. It remains a favourite till date. Imagine my horror when I was caught in a web of words like Lamien, Koay teow, Tung hoon, Soba , etc., which I later learned, were nothing but various types of noodles! Howsoever high end the restaurant may be, I still feel at home only at CHINA TOWN for my share of Chinese food. And I would like to bypass the authenticity factor here, as long as my taste buds are satisfied.
At the threshold of a stage in my life (which is akin to midlife crisis) where at times I get caught between the tastes of Assamese cuisine and the lure of North Indian food, I find solace in the colourful fruit and vegetable market at INA in New Delhi. The prospect indeed threatens to dig a big hole in the pocket, but I guess it’s fine to do so once in a while. I was pleasantly surprised to see some healthy looking Mirika tenga (Parameria polyneura) and Noga Tenga (Rhus semialata) in one of the shops. Can you guess how much they were worth? A handsome rupees nine hundred per kilo! And the shopkeeper was enthusiastically describing to me how these berries were shipped from faraway oriental shores! I told him to contact my maternal Uncle in Assam who has a gardenful of these exotic berries which goes waste.
This account of food, which happens to be one of my favourite topics of discussion, will remain incomplete if I do not pen down a few words about my experience with south Indian food. In Guwahati, I lived in an age when the WOODLANDS was the only place where IDLI and DOSA were served. My Tamil neighbour Gayatri , who is a fantastic cook, and my colleague Anju, a Malayalee, introduced me to delicacies like gun-powder (it’s non explosive), medhuvadai, puliyodarai, kothu, kozhivarutha curry, chemmen piralan, pulisserry, etc. in Delhi. I guess memorizing the origin and insertions of muscles from Gray’s Textbook of Anatomy in medical college was far easier that remembering the names of these food items. But jokes apart, south Indian food is indeed very delightful, and makes me crave for that one more extra helping which is responsible for the untamed weighing scale.
And till I am done and over with the much required training course for flair and cocktails, which will atleast help me to know what type of liquor is served in which type of glass, and also gain some knowledge about the food which is non-indigenous, I guess I should stick to the familiar home cooked bhaat-dail-bhaji (rice-dal-vegetables) rather than trying out unknown horizons.
Who knows? A few years down the line you may see yours truly replacing the present hosts of HIGHWAY ON MY PLATE!
rds to the best of boarding schools in the country. Invited to have breakfast at a distant relative’s place who was etiquette and mannerisms personified, I was at my wits end upon seeing two eggs, sunny side up, served with utmost care on a bone china plate accompanied by a knife and a fork. Though brought up in Guwahati, it was still an uphill task for me to eat a poached egg with knife and fork which I usually gulped down (and still do) with a big spoon at home. Anyways, that day I managed to devour the eggs with hurried bites whenever the hostess diverted her attention from me. To add to my woes, my brother started to hurriedly finish off the plate of orange-cream biscuits and also tucked in a few in his half-pant pockets.
It took many a years and great effort on my part to start using the appropriate cutlery for the appropriate food. And now also my heart skips a beat when chopsticks that look like knitting-pins are laid down to eat slippery noodles....
Coming to the present, my four and a half year old son rattles the names of food like pizza, hakka noodles, hot dog, burger, pasta, etc with such an elan that I wonder if he learnt all these while still inside my tummy! I still remember my panic in a restaurant where I had gone with a school friend, who is now settled in the UK, whom I was meeting after ages. The menu was full of alien words like zucchini, provolone, linguini , ziti, spumoni , tortoni , etc. It was an Italian food joint, and I thought I will be able to devour the good old pizza or pasta. How did I know that I will be bombarded with such tongue twisting words which threatened to kill my appetite even before I had started to eat? Thankfully, my friend, who was footing the bill, volunteered to order, and I tactfully managed to camouflage my weakness by talking to him about our childhood pranks. I remember coming back home and searching the net for the few words which I had managed to memorize so that I know their meanings.
I admit to being a victim of “sweet desire”. I simple love anything sweet, be it the evergreen PEDA of Bokakhat, or the syrupy MALPUWA of Gole Market. When I started attending parties and conference dinners, I was bombarded with all ominous words like mousse, soufflé, fritters, zabaglione, etc. But I discovered an easy way out to pacify my sweet tooth; I simply ate the dessert which looked the best! Though the exercise backfired many a times when I ate some horrible dishes too! Later in life, the likes of Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsey and Anjum Anand played a pivotal role in introducing me to a whole new world of global desserts. But my personal favourite remains to be kumol saul, cream and gur (কোমল চাউল, ক্রিম and গুড়).
The memories of my college days is incomplete without the mouth watering Chinese fare at our good old CHINA TOWN at Rajgarh in Guwahati (for the benefit of the uninitiated and for those who have never visited Assam, just have a bite there and you will forget MAINLAND CHINA) where we used to rush the moment we got our stipends. It remains a favourite till date. Imagine my horror when I was caught in a web of words like Lamien, Koay teow, Tung hoon, Soba , etc., which I later learned, were nothing but various types of noodles! Howsoever high end the restaurant may be, I still feel at home only at CHINA TOWN for my share of Chinese food. And I would like to bypass the authenticity factor here, as long as my taste buds are satisfied.
At the threshold of a stage in my life (which is akin to midlife crisis) where at times I get caught between the tastes of Assamese cuisine and the lure of North Indian food, I find solace in the colourful fruit and vegetable market at INA in New Delhi. The prospect indeed threatens to dig a big hole in the pocket, but I guess it’s fine to do so once in a while. I was pleasantly surprised to see some healthy looking Mirika tenga (Parameria polyneura) and Noga Tenga (Rhus semialata) in one of the shops. Can you guess how much they were worth? A handsome rupees nine hundred per kilo! And the shopkeeper was enthusiastically describing to me how these berries were shipped from faraway oriental shores! I told him to contact my maternal Uncle in Assam who has a gardenful of these exotic berries which goes waste.
This account of food, which happens to be one of my favourite topics of discussion, will remain incomplete if I do not pen down a few words about my experience with south Indian food. In Guwahati, I lived in an age when the WOODLANDS was the only place where IDLI and DOSA were served. My Tamil neighbour Gayatri , who is a fantastic cook, and my colleague Anju, a Malayalee, introduced me to delicacies like gun-powder (it’s non explosive), medhuvadai, puliyodarai, kothu, kozhivarutha curry, chemmen piralan, pulisserry, etc. in Delhi. I guess memorizing the origin and insertions of muscles from Gray’s Textbook of Anatomy in medical college was far easier that remembering the names of these food items. But jokes apart, south Indian food is indeed very delightful, and makes me crave for that one more extra helping which is responsible for the untamed weighing scale.
And till I am done and over with the much required training course for flair and cocktails, which will atleast help me to know what type of liquor is served in which type of glass, and also gain some knowledge about the food which is non-indigenous, I guess I should stick to the familiar home cooked bhaat-dail-bhaji (rice-dal-vegetables) rather than trying out unknown horizons.
Who knows? A few years down the line you may see yours truly replacing the present hosts of HIGHWAY ON MY PLATE!
Comments
Post a Comment