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Cook's Graveyard

A Culinary Alphabet:

I - Indian

IIt’s an oft-repeated culinary truism that the food you eat in Indian restaurants bears no resemblance to the food of the subcontinent. I’m sure this is entirely true. I’m sure that the fish cuisine of Kerala has to tasted (preferably in situ) to be believed and that the spice mixes of the North have an intoxicating and evanescent finesse that disperses like incense smoke when exported.

The problem is that ‘Indian’ has changed so far and so fast that it’s achieved critical mass. It’s a thing alone, like tinned peaches and baked beans - delicious in its own right. Whether you trace it to the Raj, Lascar seamen in London Docks or the first waves of mass immigration, a fork was formed in the evolutionary tree of Indian cooking and the product of our curry houses is a result.

Uniquely tailored to British taste, brilliantly developed by a fertile and entrepreneurial industry, the Ruby Murray is now demonstrably more British than boiled beef and carrots and we’re all the better for it.

Bores who’ve had fish grilled by the locals on a gap year in Goa or who nibbled lightly at spiced petit fours in the Lake Palaces should be conspicuously ignored as the showoffs they are. It matters not if the chicken is battery. No one cares if the menu has 85 options but we only ever order three of them. No-one gives a toss if the sauces are all created in giant vats on an industrial park just outside Birmingham. A properly policed curry blowout with a bunch of mates in a Brick Lane curry house, ticks all the boxes of sensual pleasure, sharing, bonding and congenial hospitality.

When was the last time you got all that at a dinner party?

At the end of next week I’m moving my family into a tiny rented house. We’re sheltering there while I finish the final six weeks of work to make our new place habitable. Six weeks is an irritating period to pack for, a little too long to live out of bags, not long enough to warrant unpacking everything.

The best part of the challenge is trying to work out what needs to be taken from the kitchen (for the record: knives, coffee machine, three titanium saucepans and a toolbox containing bare survival quantities of herbs, spices and exotic cupboard staples) and what can be thrown into storage without demur (Magimix, breadmaker, blender etc).

This marvellous exercise in prioritisation that has also revealed a sort of archeological secret. At the back of the most inaccessible cabinet in the kitchen lurks a little graveyard of neglected utensils, gadgets and devices. Though they were obviously a great idea when purchased, their limited usefulness has not compensated for the effort of retrieving them and they have sunk into a sort of evolutionary slump, ignored and passed over by fitter tools.

By asking around foodie friends I’ve discovered a remarkable thing. I am not unique in owning such a collection of useless tat. Not only that but all of us had largely the same embarrassing objects.

Look in your own cupboard and you too will find…

1. A pasta machine. You too must have dreamt of skeins of silken fresh pasta, hanging around the kitchen. You too spent hours forcing increasingly unworkable dough into its yawning maw. You too gave up and bought the dried stuff that the Italians really eat. If your pasta machine is electric you are either a moneyed neophyte or it was on your wedding list in 1986 and you didn’t manage to lose it in the divorce.

2. Some bits of a wok. Never the whole thing, you understand, just some bits. The wok itself was chucked when you realised that, without a gas ring that could power a blast furnace, ‘stir frying’ was largely a matter of reducing perfectly fine vegetables into an unappetising steamed slurry to be basted in soy, slopped over noodles and thrown away. The semi circular warming grid, a bamboo rack and one or other half of the scoop/shovel combination will lurk forever – even when you’re sure you threw them out years ago.

3. A juicer. For one mercifully brief summer the juicer was an essential part of your exercise regime. During the hours you spent picking tiny bits of dried pulp out of its crevices you burned thousands of calories in sheer rage. For every four hours of cleaning, you succeeded in producing a single glass of juice with alarming laxative qualities. There is only one surer way of losing weight than a juicer and that is to amputate a major limb. After a few mornings struggling with the thing, this probably became the more attractive option.

4. A mandolin grater. Before the food processor was the mandolin. Cripplingly expensive with a complex folding structure which made even the slickest cook feel like M.Hulot erecting a deckchair and guaranteed to remove all of your knuckles down to the bone. After having been written about in breathless tones by every cookery writer from 1950 to 1980 it became a sort of badge of honour for the serious cook.

Like the Aga, the mandolin is a triumph of misty-eyed mythologizing over hard reality. There may well have been elderly French grannies who still used them in 1970 but surely the last few have grated their fingers into their last gratin and bought un Robocoup. Professionals of course, never used them as there was always some poor bloody footsoldier prepared to do it all with a knife for minimum wage and an earful of creative abuse. You will recognise your own mandolin by bloodstains on the box.

5. At least four coffee makers. You will have a plunge pot, though there’s a 50% chance that the glass is broken and you never got round to replacing it. You almost certainly have one of those French or Italian stovetop jobs which seemed so essential at the end of your holiday but, back in your own kitchen produce only a kind of oily, gritty sludge which tastes like a waste product from an illegal amphetamine factory. The truly gullible may also have a some combination of Arabic brass pot and hand grinder.

6. An EVULU (ethnic vessel or utensil of limited utility). This convenient catchall phrase of the kitchen archeologist covers all those pointless, comedy pots too embarrassing to display (excluding the Wok, which is stupid enough to be in a category of its own. EVULUs include, rice steaming baskets, paella pans, tajines, charcoal fishgrills, balti buckets, confit pots and foufou serving scoops made of shells. Each item was used once before you realised you could do exactly the same job in your regular western saucepans. And by the way – just because you use the dripping crock to keep your wooden spoons in doesn’t mean it isn’t an EVULU.

7. A sandwich toaster. One of those things that seemed a good idea when one was student. Other things included drinking Tia Maria and tequila shots, smoking dried banana skins, rag weeks and going out with girls who read you their dreadful poetry at three in the morning and took regular overdoses. None of these are appropriate for anyone with a job, a mortgage or any degree of maturity.

8. Some really bad kitchen knives. I know. None of us can throw out an old knife yet we keep being tempted by new ones before the old ones have the decency to wear out. This means that a little community of neglected cutlery has built up just to remind you that you once thought that an ‘EeZeeSlyce™’ serrated tomato cutter and a ‘NevvvaDull’ ‘Chef’s’ knife in a self-sharpening scabbard were the ne plus ultra of kitchen technology.

Maybe it’s time we ended this. I think we need some kind of support group. We could all get together round a skip with black bin bags full of useless old stuff and, to the sound of skirling pipes and professional mourners, finally chuck the bloody lot in the bin.

 

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