Kitchen Midden

My current obsession is, disturbingly, a hipster trend. Agreed, I’m a few years too late because it has long moved from underground to mainstream, but I already have the record collection, and now have a yearning for a fixed-gear bicycle… who am I?

I find it a little baffling that I’m so drawn to a bicycle without gears. As cycling-obsessed children, we had only the single speed, up hills or down. Only the rich kids had gears, on their… was it the BSA Mach 1’s?

When I think back though, I remember yearning for a headlight and a speedometer, and don’t remember ever yearning for gears. Also, I want that “fixie” as my second bike. My current bike, which I love to pieces (yes, literally… I love taking it apart) has 24 gears — more than any sane person could ever need.

I have been OBSESSED with the “Build-a-bike” feature at Irocycle.com. I learned of Iro only recently on Bikeforums.net and fell in love with the way they look. I learned of fixed-gear bikes not long before — cycles that have one cog on the back and no freewheel. They don’t need rear brakes because if you stop pedalling the wheel stops turning. Some people ride them without front brakes either, and I’m sorry I won’t let myself be that foolish because those bikes look truly beautiful. See here. And here. (Will open in new windows.)

Anyway, just because it’s one gear doesn’t mean it’s cheap, even though Iro is one of the cheaper options. So, this might just be a passing fad after all, and I’m just a poor man’s hipster. The aim, though, is to get back to Bangalore and cycle as much as possible. Sounds mad, but people do it — more on that soon. It might work out pretty cheap in the end. And a bike with no gears and no fancy paint job wouldn’t attract too much attention.

Sadly, it’s pronounced “eye-row”, otherwise, as a friend said, I’d simply be on an eero cycle!

My final favourite is also the “cheapest”:

The one with the bullhorns is brilliant too:

All black is nice in theory, but I love the black and chrome I think. Besides, the dressed wheels cost $90 more:

This blog has followed a familiar path. I start something, get completely obsessed and then let it rot as I start something else.

I think I was too ambitious, and made the blog too much like work. So I’m expanding now. It’s going to be a blog about current obsessions. This will also, as a blogging writer friend promised, help silence the chatter.

I think Lakshmi worries sometimes about how much I mutter to myself. The less I write, the more I mutter. So here… my mutterings.

When I was a child, my parents would often tell me that I should marry a Chinese girl when I grew up. I just couldn’t get enough Chinese food. (Of course now, we all knowledgeably—and over-pointedly—use the retronym “Indian Chinese”, but those were simpler days.) My favourite eating place in the world was called Hong Kong Restaurant at Richmond Circle, next to where Reynolds is now. I loved everything about Indian-Chinese, especially noodles and sweet-and-sour dishes.
Today, I live very near in a part of Los Angeles know for its authentic Chinese food (the San Gabriel Valley). It’s a place where you can drive to a supermarket and buy live crabs and lobsters (not so unusual), live spot prawns (a leetle less common), and live soft-shell turtles and frogs (not something I ever saw in Food World). You can buy sea cucumber, sea-urchin roe, barbecue eel (like the unagi in sushi, but a whole fillet – GREED!), boneless duck feet, 1000-year-old eggs and all kinds of strange preserved roots and fish bits.

And the pork!There are the usual ribs and chops, but also the ears, snout, blood, heart, kidneys, uterus, stomach, intestines, trotters and even their curly-wurly tails. You could buy a pig in kit form and assemble it at home.

I have nothing but respect for this. If you must kill an animal for food, the least you can do is eat every bit of it. Fergus Henderson (who I quote in the About page) says in the foreword of his cookbook: “‘Nose to Tail Eating’ means it would be disingenuous to the animal not to make the most of the whole beast; there is a set of delights, textural and flavoursome, which lie beyond the fillet.”

(My sub-editing self wriggles and has to point out two grammatical errors. “A set of delights” is singular and therefore lies. And surely this is a particular set of delights that lies beyond the fillet, not “which”.)

Where was I? Ah, pig’s guts. If you really must eat an animal, I believe you should show it respect and eat as much of it as you possibly can. But I have decided that I really don’t like tripe and chitterlings.

The first time I had some was at a cart outside Guru Nanak Bhavan. A brave band that comprised a younger Raja, a younger Mistry, a younger Menon and I went across and ordered a plate each of tripe and intestine curry (a goat’s I think) and rice. We ended up giving most of it to the dogs that stood at our feet.

The next time was when I had haggis, a dish I found puzzling more than anything else. I have only a vague memory of it now, so I need to have another go.

More recently, one of the dim sum carts in California featured a tripe and spleen soup. The spleen was nice, but the tripe… well let’s just say I named it “dung soup”. It had a heavy, dark flavour that made me uncomfortable.

Recently, I tried again. Yes, I’m a persistent sort of chap, especially with food. If I wasn’t, I’d have grown up hating liver, prawn heads and other delicious things. We were at a Mexican restaurant one Sunday and I finally ordered a menudo, a soup made using tripe. (For a long time, I thought it meant “menu”, and so restaurants that said “Menudo available” simply weren’t fixed-meal places.) Because tripe is cheap, you never get a small portion. We got a bowl I could have bathed in, one that the wife wouldn’t even look at it, let alone dip a spoon into. I had a few spoonfuls, and then had to waste. I think I really can’t stomach stomach. And don’t have the guts for guts.

(It’s very likely that this whole post was only so I could write those last sentences.)

I just remembered the fish in the Breakfast in France joke.

Chinese-supermarket juicer: $1.99

Bag of navel oranges with “thank you” sticker: $4.99

Glass of freshly squeezed orange juice: terrifyingly not that much better than “fresh from the grove” carton OJ with lots of pulp.

Until I finish one glass and make another.

As any wine snob will tell you (there’s one on every corner these days), wines in general have become a lot better. So the difference between a good wine and a great one has narrowed to the point where the merely good will seem good enough. The same in digital-music world. The average CD-player has become so accomplished, that it makes you wonder why people still pay for $10,000 CD players.

The answer is in the ineffable. It isn’t about tannins and sugar, or bass and treble any more. It’s beyond mere technical accomplishment, say the aficianados. It’s all about character, feel, emotion.

So though packaged orange juice has become very good indeed, and that carton does everything with aplomb, there’s still something about fresh juice that the carton isn’t capturing.

“But is it worth the effort?” asks grasshopper.

“If you have to ask, then no, it isn’t,” says OJ squeezer.

Part one.

Part two.

Part three.

These days, I eat just a palmful of pandhi curry, and I can’t sleep at night. A teeny part of it is guilt about all the sat fat. The main reason is that even as the rest of me ages, my stomach insists on behaving like a crazed 17-year-old. I introduce it to somebody colourful (say, pepperoni pizza, Buffalo wings or, for some reason, hummus), and it stays up all night carousing with them, singing and dancing wild.

When it’s pandhi curry though, my stomach gets positively slinky: giggling and snaking with it, gurgling now and then at something it said, and urging it to make mock getaways up the oesophagus every time I hit R.E.M., so that I get up screaming and feeling as if somebody just poured drain cleaner down my throat.

On the whole though, the relationship is a little more dignified. The Coorgs are ancestor worshippers and have a lovely concept called “meedhi”. On the death anniversary of a loved one, they put out an offering of the person’s favourite food and drink. Lakshmi’s dad loved pandhi curry, and so every year, I make a kadai-ful of it and after a short prayer, we set a bit out on a plate in front of a photograph of him, along with a splash of whatever drink we have in the house. Then we eat.

My mother-in-law knows my unholy love for pandhi curry, and makes it every time we visit India. Not the effete version I churn out, but a powerful, black, dangerous curry—the sort of dish a wild boar would be proud to be a part of.

Heck, the sort of dish I would be proud to be a part of.

Pandhi curry in, pandhi curry out.

-Ancient wisdom you don’t want to acquire the hard way

Part one.

Part two.

Never eat pandhi curry before travel, important meetings, or anything that’ll keep you more than ten seconds from a sturdy, well-ventilated loo.

A group of friends and colleagues learned this the hard way on a trip to Coorg. Our bus back to Bangalore was in the evening, and at lunchtime the same day, we had a hearty repast of rice and pandhi curry.

As the bus pulled into Majestic, Bangalore, the high-level negotiations with the lower end of my digestive tract were breaking down. We’d been debating for hours now, and just couldn’t see eye-to-eye. The revolution had begun. The insurgents were at the gates. (I was one of the fortunate ones. Some of us had breakdowns on the way, necessitating stopping the bus and wandering out onto darkened fields.)

If you haven’t travelled in India and don’t know how bad a train or bus station loo can get, watch the suppository-retrieval scene in Trainspotting. Luckily, the human brain is a plastic thing, and in times of digestive in extremis, it shuts down every circuit in the squeamishness bank. If you had to wade first, you would.

This is why eating pandhi curry is such a moving thing. It’s the start of the world’s shortest long-term relationship. With every bite, you are saying, “For you, my love, I would go anywhere.”

Woman cooks 15 dishes in a morning without even breaking a sweat, leaving the kitchen looking unused. Each dish is different, delectable.

“The food? Oh yeah, it’s good.”

Man cooks one dish all day, sweating, cursing, dropping things. Kitchen looks as if a bomb exploded in a garbage heap in the centre. Dish is nice enough, but more intricate than tasty.

“Wow, you’re a real chef!”

“This is amazing, you should go to culinary school!”

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, exquisite. You should open a restaurant!”

This little piggy went to the market…

Part one.

Many Indian dishes, made the long way, involve toasting whole spices until fragrant, and then grinding them. For pandhi curry though, you take those whole spices and torture them until they’re all black and nearly burned. Then you make a wet mixture of the sharpest tools in the vegetable bin (onion, ginger, garlic, green chillies and coriander leaves), you slow-cook the lot with some really fatty pork and then, the secret touch, you top it off with kachampuli vinegar.

Kachampuli… nobody seems to know the English equivalent, and I’ve never actually seen the berry so I’m wondering if this “vinegar” is just battery acid with molasses for colour. Don’t get me wrong though, kachampuli vinegar (I’ll drop the “vinegar” after this) has a wonderful, complex flavour. If you’re thinking, “Ah, like balsamic?” you should know that kachampuli is balsamic vinegar that fell into radioactive sludge as a baby, grew up in maximum-security prison and got a job skinning skunks alive. It is the sourest thing I have ever tasted. And this is coming from a guy who used to champ on, not green mangoes… green tamarind as a child. (If you’re above 20 years old and can get through three inches—heck, one bite—of green tamarind without your salivary glands exploding, I’ll touch your feet.)

I once tried to be a smart-arse and use kachampuli in salad dressing. I used less than half a teaspoon for a giant bowl of lettuce, and had to throw the lot out because just touching it with a fork made my teeth sing the Hallelujah Chorus. (In key as well, with all the right harmonies. The molars sang bass of course, the pre-molars tenor, the incisors were altos and the canines… um… this is what your teenaged child would call TMI isn’t it? Okay, I’ll stop now.)

Anyway, so there you have it. Nearly burned spices: a deep, dark sub-base note. Base notes of fried onion, ginger and garlic. Heart notes of green: chillies and coriander leaves. That keening top note of kachampuli. Pandhi curry is a very accomplished dish. Not the sort of accomplished dish that stains a large square white plate that you chat languidly over, but the sort of accomplished dish that makes you weep and stumble for the door, totally disorientated after just one bite. Then, you stick your head in the horse trough outside, and stagger back in for more.

Part three…

Warning: this is a really, really, really, really bad one. Really. But it’s an original (I hope!).

Q: Why do Bengali Western buffs always keep the salt on the top shelf?

A: Because they love High Noon.