Untold Food Stories From Industrial, Small-town India

Yarns, Lessons and Musings From an Indian Kitchen

The process of tadka

As I was growing up in the heart of India, where all around lay red soil and, in the summer, the heat rose like gauzy waves from the earth, one of the earliest sounds I heard was the pop-pop-pop of mustard seeds dancing in hot oil in a kadhai.

It was a performance I saw day after day. Every day, my mother did a tadka, as it is known in Hindi. Chef Gordon Ramsay, that star of British and European cuisines, says, while adding a pinch of dark mustard seeds to a pan on a YouTube video, “Mustard seeds in. Now they start dancing as they hit the pan.” The video features the star showcasing “Indian-inspired” dishes.

Indian cuisine seems to be basking in its moment. Creative and high-profile chefs from India, however, now focus on “modern” or “progressive” Indian cuisine. That kind of cuisine is city-centric and embraces global elements. But Tadka Tales brings to light culinary stories from India’s heartland — an industrial town small yet cosmopolitan where modest people with middle-class values raised their children with aspiration in their hearts. This newsletter will talk about home cooking from several states from the point of view of one man who walks the road back to boyhood to relive his formative years in that steel town. Tadka Tales will offer stories, recipes and techniques with a dash of wistfulness.

These stories are underreported. Far from the hubbub of today’s fine-dining and the coolness of casual American chains, people in small-town India in an earlier era cooked and ate food that reflected not only middle India but also the universal pleasure that cooking brings. The word tadka unites all of India and represents the joy of cooking.

The Bengali word for tadka is satlano. It’s only recently that I heard of the English equivalent: blooming. I have acquired a taste for food science, so the science behind it now excites me — I find new insight in an experience I have long known. Blooming Indian spices — mostly panch phoron, a five-spice mixture, or cardamom, cinnamon and cloves in our house — means drawing out the aromatic compounds of those spices by sautéing in a small amount of oil. The oil is infused with the essential flavor molecules from those spices. When done, you mostly pour the oil, along with the spices, into dal, curry or chutney to finish off the dish. But you may also build layers of flavor while continuing to cook by adding powdered spices or other ingredients. Food writer Nik Sharma talks about the science better. If there is one pan-Indian cooking technique, tadka it is.

I absorbed the sound and smell of tadka, also known as chownk, until it became second nature to me. I took to cooking as a duck takes to water. As a young boy stealing around my mother’s feet in the kitchen, I began tossing salt, oil and other unwarranted ingredients into the kadhai of bubbling broth or curry when my mother wasn’t looking. I was a mama’s boy. I watched her cook as she spent most of the morning preparing lunch for the family. Lunch for my father would be packed into a tiffin carrier, a lunchbox of four stacked stainless-steel bowls secured with a frame. The tiffin would be picked up by a dabbawalla who arrived every day of the work week at 11:30 a.m. I remember how my mother hustled in the kitchen to pack that lunch for my dad, who worked in a giant steel plant, which mined the red earth for iron ore.

The kind of dabba my dad used

Tadka Tales is my effort to capture those formative years and my later education in cooking — in India and the United States — and to relate them to the innovation happening in the hands of Indian chefs and the recognition Indian food is earning from the food media. I am glad Indian food is no longer the equivalent of a subculture. Nor is it anymore a monolithic entity with dozens of cuisines from different states reduced to a few iconic dishes — tikka masala, dosa, idli, tandoori chicken, and butter chicken.

Mainstream American food media are suddenly talking about more than curries. I am also glad that “modern” and “progressive” Indian cuisines, an eclectic combination of Indian ingredients and global techniques and traditions or the other way round, have been gaining ground, winning international customers and Michelin stars. Vogue India defines the progressive style as “dishes that showcase ​​classic flavors in new, imaginative avatars.”

In the hands of the most rarefied Indian chefs, Indian food takes on exotic dimensions. A modern twist or fusion (a matter of debate that involves “authenticity,” but that’s a topic for another day) becomes a signature. Take Chef Vikas Khanna’s Rose Tea Smoked Chicken Tikka Masala, for example.

Indian-Canadian chef Vikram Vij said in an interview to The Hindu, “I am not an Indian chef. I am a classically trained French chef. I put myself on a plate: I am India-born, using Canadian ingredients and French techniques.”

At one of his restaurants, he serves a rack of lamb marinated in mustard and white wine, but the sauce is fenugreek korma.

Yet, I return, over and over again, to the memories of my boyhood, when I knew nothing about fusion or modern cuisine. I only knew what my mother cooked — and she cooked not only Indian, but also, occasionally, a few Western dishes, especially cakes and puddings in her own way.

I dared farther into Western territory and beyond South Asia, trying recipes from The Dalda Cookbook during my teens, sometimes with disastrous results. Once, following a recipe, I poured beaten egg into a curry at the end as though it were Chinese egg-drop soup. The dish did not find favor with the family.

Tadka Tales will cover not only those stories of callow youth, but also recipes from mothers, including mine, who lived in that town, Bhilai — mothers from my native Bengal and other states in India. I am keen to share Macher Jhol, a staple of the Bengali home, and Hare Tamatar Ki Sabzi from my then Maharashtrian neighbor. I am pestering Seema, who was the girl next door, to share the recipe of that dish of green tomatoes, the most toothsome dish of unripe tomatoes this side of the Atlantic. I will unearth recipes with interviews, tracking down former neighbors for their mothers’ recipes, for most mothers from those days have now departed.

Tadka Tales captures a microcosm of Indian cooking — untold stories from industrial, small-town India about down-home cooking.

To me, innovation and creativity are essential to elevate Indian cuisine. However, one should not forget its very heart and soul. The hoary spices that add depth and character. The food of our parents and our childhoods. The food of our growing up years. The food of essential India.

Asian Indian Chef Gaggan Anand, whose restaurants have won top international honors (Best Asian restaurant) and who is an exemplar of progressive Indian cooking, believes in recognizing and retaining the core values of Indian food. He often returns to his culinary roots and adolescent memories. Being a Kolkata boy, Gaggan serves some of the city’s classic dishes in his Bangkok restaurant. In a recent interview to a magazine, he said, “I have aloo dum on the menu. I have Bengali fish chops, in mustard oil. An Indian ate this fish and he’s like ‘oh this fish tastes Japanese, it has wasabi.’ I asked him where he was from, and he told me he’s from the north. I told him this is mustard oil, and while he has understood Japanese cuisine well, he seems to have forgotten Indian food.”

Embracing elements of global cuisine is fine; fusion is fine, as are modernist twists. But I return to the core of Indian cuisine, the food I grew up with, the food I learnt to cook from my mother and the food my friends’ mothers shared across the fence in the town of my adolescence — even as I draw inspiration from cuisines beyond.

Twice every month, I would like to take you on a journey of an aspect of Indian cooking (from the myriad regions of India). If the stories whet your appetite, share generously the FREE newsletter while the news is still hot. And subscribe.

Talk soon.