Episode 16: More Indian Food, at Home and Away

For tonight's dinner I had a cabbage that needed to be used, some ground, grass-fed beef, and a full spice collection. So I turned to Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973), and ended up making some savory kheema, and cabbage with onions. (I had done the kheema because I figured we needed some protein, but in retrospect the cabbage dish was hearty enough that we could have made a vegetarian meal of it, with perhaps a garnish of hard-boiled egg for protein.)

The Jaffrey book was one of the first cookbooks that Hot Librarian and I shared while keeping house together. She was a year ahead of me in her education, and a grad school colleague had given it to her as a gift just before the summer between my college graduation and the start of my graduate schooling. It was a peculiar summer, during which she slaved over her Master's Exams and retrieved big stacks of books for me from the graduate library, which I read in the midst of a failed search for work in an isolated Midwestern college town, giving her the space and time she needed to get her work done, and cooking up elaborate dinners. A lot of those dinners drew on the Jaffrey book. (It was also during that summer that I first proposed to her.)

With English being the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent, and so many Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and members of their respective diasporas being active online, this is not a cuisine (or rather, a set of cuisines, for the regional variations are extensive) for which cookbooks are an absolute necessity anymore. There are plenty of websites on which one can find good recipes, written in English, using measurements and ingredients that are accessible to most American kitchens. (Including here in southern Maine, thanks to Masala Mahal.) I particularly recommend sify bawarchi. But a well-written cookbook is good for teaching you the fundamentals of a cuisine, the things that home cooks, in posting their recipes on the internet, may take for granted as being understand.

For example, many of the online recipes will call for "onion-garlic paste" or "onion-garlic-ginger paste" or "chili-onion-garlic paste". Those are things that you can now probably find in a jar at a well-stocked Indian grocery store, but you would get better results by making your own as part of the prep work. Reading Jaffrey's recipes, which nearly always begin with "put onion, garlic and ginger with x tablespoons of water into the food processor and puree into a smooth paste" will teach you the appropriate quantities of each ingredient. They will also teach you when to use whole spices, or ground ones, why Indian recipes call for cooking vegetables much longer than one would see in a French or Italian cookbook, and why "curry powder" is an abomination.

Though nearly forty years old, Jaffrey's book has held up well. As a rule, the ingredients are fresh (though she does make extensive use of canned tomatoes--understandable enough to anyone who lives in a place without year-round access to soil-grown heirloom varieties), the directions are clear, and there is a good balance between everyday staples and more elaborate, dinner-party-type productions. She did not attempt a compendium of recipes to represent the many regions and cultures of the country or the subcontinent, but drew mostly on her own Delhian background. However, for the "regions" of India (many of which are larger or more populous than some major European nations), there are other cookbooks and extensive online resources.

But even with the best of cookbooks, training and recipes, sometimes, you just don't have time. Sometimes, you need to eat out. Monday at the lunch hour was one of those times, and we ended up at Jewel of India in South Portland.

I had the sholay bhatura (previously known to me by the more common transliteration of "choley bhatura"). This is a Punjabi dish that, in Queens, can be found as a breakfast food at the small, 24-hour storefront restaurants catering primarily to taxi drivers that dot neighborhoods with either a large number of Indians and Pakistanis (like Jackson Heights), or those with a large number of taxi garages (like Long Island City and Astoria). It consists of a thick stew of complexly seasoned chickpeas (choley), served with one or two pieces of puffy, fried bread (bhatura), which is torn off in pieces and used to scoop up the chickpeas. The choley had a a bit more of a tomatoey sauce than I am used to, but that was more than made up for by the hint of an herbaceous pungency that I believe may have come from a judicious use of dried methi leaves (fenugreek). The bread was a bit odd: The shell was a bit thicker than I've had it before, resulting in a flavor and texture a bit like a good, but unsweetened, yeast doughnut; I'm more accustomed to a thin, flaky shell. (The difference had its benefits, as it held the weight of chickpeas better.) And to have the mixed pickle that is a usual accompaniment, I would need to have ordered it and paid an additional two dollars.

The oddest thing, however, is that the bread came out well before the choley, giving it time to begin deflating before I could actually have my meal. Perhaps this was a concession to a perceived preference among Americans to have their breads first, before the entree. If I return and order the dish again--which I may well, for it's not one I'm likely to make for myself--I will need to make a point of asking the waiter to have the kitchen time it so that they're ready to come out at the same time.

HL reports that the mutter paneer (peas and cheese) she and the Little One shared was likewise more tomatoey than she is used to, and generally characterized it as "workmanlike, not spectacular" but worth a return. LO said her mango lassi "tastes like a good mango lassi." You can't argue with that. Overall, it was good, and worth a return visit.

We didn't try Aroma, because it's closed on Mondays, but being South Portland residents we definitely have to give it a shot before declaring a favorite. With some South Indian specialties on their menu, and even a few Indo-Chinese dishes, I'm looking forward to it.