Hardeep recounts his culinary journey from Scotland to India to fill up on history and taste the future. In this extract, he describes how he chickened out of cooking mince and tatties for his hungry five-star hosts
THERE is no one event, no one occurrence that I can look back on and use to explain the prominence of food in my life. When someone once asked me why I was so obsessed with food, I thought a moment, struggling to find a coherent answer. And then it d
awned on me; it had only taken me 38 years to realise that, as a child, the only aspect of being Indian that wider society seemed to celebrate was our food. To say Glasgow likes Indian food is inaccurate; Glasgow loves it. And my experience of this love as a boy in Glasgow seemed to be true of life in every other British city. Even the racists who hated the fact that my parents' generation had come to Britain still liked our food. It was the only aspect of being Indian that garnered any positivity.
Ironically, despite this plethora of restaurants around us, we never ate out much as kids. We were the offspring of immigrants. The single biggest expense in my parents' house was school fees for three boys.
We would never have gone out to eat food that Mum could have made at home. Why pay over the odds for home food? But Mum didn't have a tandoor. So, once a year, we went to a little restaurant and gorged on tandoori food. I didn't quite understand why my father was so happy eating red chicken; it was only years later that I fully comprehended how much he'd missed the food of the Punjab, the food of his home.
IT WAS many years later, as I sat at the New Asian Tandoori Centre, a devoured plate of lamb curry in front of me and the remnants of a paratha, that I started to think I should maybe return to India what India has so successfully given Britain: food. If I was to find myself in India, I must take some of myself with me. And what better to take than my love of food and cooking? I resolved to take British food to India.
Then I mentioned my idea to my dad. Now, my dad really likes my cooking. He calls me Masterchef and whenever I'm home he turns up with some exotic shellfish or a special cut of meat or a quail and expects me to do something amazing with it. I love his belief in me. However, he was less than impressed by my new plan.
"So, Dad, I'm going to cook British food in India when I am travelling."
Silence on the Glasgow end of the phone. I repeat what I've said.
"Why?"
"I just thought it would be a good idea... you know... to take back to India what India has given Britain..."
He pauses. Again. "Son, if British food was all that good, there would be no Indian restaurants in Britain."
THIS IS MY first dish in my long and winding road through India. The Indians are not well-acquainted with British food, less so Scots food. But I have decided that my opening foray into the education of the Indian palate should be something straight out of my childhood. I need to be bold, uncompromising, resolute. I must embrace my quest and deliver to executive chef Arzooman and his chefs at the Taj Green Cove, a five-star hotel in south-west India, the dish that epitomises all I am, all I hope to be. I will give them stovies.
Stovies – delicious and quintessentially Scottish – is a peasant dish, said to have come from the gentry handing leftover meat from Sunday lunch to their workers. The workers would then combine this meat with potatoes and onions, frying the mixture in dripping.
The stovies I grew up eating was mince stovies. Another common thread between the Punjab and Scotland is the combination of mince and potatoes. The Punjabis have keema, curried mince with quartered potatoes – the floury potatoes mashed down into the rich, spicy, minced lamb, which would then be enveloped in a hot, buttery chapatti. The Scots love their mince and tatties. We got stovies at school, once a week on a Tuesday. It was my favourite meal of the week.
So I feel stovies somehow speaks from both sides of my heritage. And if I am to find myself on this culinary adventure around India, I must be bold, uncompromising and resolute.
But suddenly I am meek, compromising and irresolute. I can't cook a plate of stovies in a five-star hotel for an internationally trained chef and his team. It would be mental. How could I possibly convey to them the myriad reasons for what is effectively a plate of carbohydrate-heavy brown sludge that tastes of comfort. I can't do it. So instead I choose to cook a chicken dish that's really poncy and European. I suggest a pesto with coconut, coriander and paneer.
"Coconut, coriander and paneer?" The stress is all on the question mark. His face is deeply quizzical. He thinks for a moment. "Not paneer, man. It's too... grainy. Not smooth enough for a pesto."
"Oh," I respond, trying my hardest to look simultaneously unflustered and knowledgeable. "Yeah. Paneer. Too grainy."
The cheese usually used in a pesto is either pecorino or parmesan. Arzooman doesn't use pecorino, parmesan is limited and expensive, and I don't want to use such a precious kitchen resource. As I stand face to face with Arzooman, I suspect that I may be close to tears.
His eyes light up. "You can use strained yoghurt, man." With that, he rushes into the kitchen. Strained yoghurt instead of cheese? This yoghurt strained through muslin sounds similar to something my mum used to make when I was a boy: paneer.
My mum would boil milk and then split it, with the addition of distilled vinegar. There's nothing quite as repulsive as the smell of split milk. Actually there is: split milk solids tied up in muslin. That's what my mum would do. Once the milk was split, she would pour the entire mixture into the largest piece of muslin I have ever seen, the solids being caught up in the muslin and the water draining away.
The fact that the stink of the preparation bore no similarity to the delicious taste of paneer was lost on us children. We simply refused to eat it. And she would shout at us to eat it until we cried. As children we cried over split milk.
Thoughts of my mum lead me uncomfortably to thoughts of my dad. I'm sure that if he were with me he would suggest I put down my cooking implements and return to my room for a wee lie down. But alas, my dad is on the other side of the world, the Indian man in Britain, while I, the British man in India, am attempting to bluff my way through.
The chicken breasts are slit and a cavity is fashioned within them. The breasts are skinless. Ordinarily I would have preferred the skins to have remained intact; the skins have so much flavour and they take much more colour than the naked flesh, but ho hum, skinless it is.
At the continental cooking counter, visible to the entire poolside restaurant crowd, I am furiously chopping coriander and grating fresh coconut. Time to blend my Indian pesto – coconut, coriander and this strained yoghurt thing.
The pesto is whizzed and turns out to be quite delicious. Meanwhile, I have my stock reducing. I pop the skinless chicken breasts into the frying pan, adjusting the timing for absence of skin.
As they fry away, I add my wine to the chicken stock. I ask a humourless sous-chef where the oven is. I've turned the chicken and need to finish them off. He points at a microwave and grabs my breasts, so to speak. I have images of exploding pesto bombs and manage to wrestle them back from his overzealous hands.
Arzooman returns and chastises the sous before sending him off with the chicken to the oven.
Plating-up time. I serve the chicken up to Arzooman and his chefs, not confident enough to send it out to paying customers. I watch them tuck in with grunts. Since it is nigh-on impossible to distinguish between grunts of approval and grunts of derision, I err on the side of optimism: they are grunts of approval. As they eat my chicken stuffed with Indian pesto, I ponder what their reaction might have been to a plate of mashed potatoes and mince.
That night I lay in bed worrying about whether this whole trip was a good idea. I had managed to pan-fry a chicken breast and reduce a white wine sauce in a state-of-the-art commercial kitchen with an entire team of chefs on hand and the finest ingredients one could fly to India. This was no sort of challenge. I felt indulged. Maybe this trip was much less about what I was taking to India and much more about the impact India would have on me.
That night I can't say that I didn't consider packing my bags and going home – the words of my father about Indian restaurants in Britain ringing in my ears.
What was I doing? I had a choice. I could simply take the train to an airport and write a book about gardening. Or I could knuckle down and embrace this journey of self-discovery. The next morning I took my wheely bag and my desire to cook up towards the north-east, to Madras on the way to a small fishing town.
This is an edited extract from Indian Takeaway: One Man's Attempt to Cook His Way Home by Hardeep Singh Kohli (Canongate, £16.99), published on September 4. He is appearing at Foodies at the Festival at the Sheraton Hotel, Edinburgh, from 1pm on Saturday
