The alu gutkas of Garam Paani village in Kumaon make a lethal combination with pahadi kheere ka raita
Just for a moment, put aside that cup of instant coffee, or instant cereal or canned juice or whatever instant food you are trying to poison yourself with and try to recollect - how long has it been since you sunk your teeth into something more real than that. Like half a dozen tangy gol gappas, a plate of bhelpuri, a piping hot wada pav or maybe even a big, juicy, chunk of pineapple? No, not the kind that comes sliced in identical bits in transparent white boxes at your air conditioned department store, but the one that is sold on the roadside in most Indian cities by a man pushing a wooden cart. Is it too long ago or can you still remember him taking the hard skin off with a cleaver held in deft brown fingers; chopping the plump, yellow inside into uneven rectangles; sprinkling salt on top from a faded plastic bottle. And then, handing it to you on a shallow cone of dried leaves, stapled together by brown twigs, with a twist of fresh green lime, a dash of chat masala and a toothy smile. Also, a few cholera causing bacteria, did you say. Well, Indian stomachs are strong enough to digest those. Or at least they used to be.
I can speak for my generation. We grew up on crispy fried potatoes, diced papaya, slitted guava, longitudinally sliced cucumbers, even peeled white radish for the brave and the burpers. Dished out from a hand pushed cart or a wicker basket on the roadside, sprinkled with a mouthwatering mix of secret spices, they scalded the tongue, satiated hunger pangs, combated heat strokes and gave good friends yet another reason to hang out together. The fact that they made you poorer only by Rs 10 or less, added to their charm. To those of you who never did this and are crinkling their noses even as they read, I can only shake my head gravely and say, “Just too bad buddy. You’ll never know what you missed. A better life next time”.
Actually, to be honest, this was supposed to be an article about eating trends in young Indians. That was the rather clear brief I was given, along with a rather clear deadline. I completely missed both. Not only did the article get written late, it also shape shifted and turned into a gush piece on roadside snacks. And what is more, it got published. Which simply reinforces my belief that there is some magic in street food.
Anyone who has sampled it can tell you, just as I do, that street food in India has a taste and flavor of its own, very difficult to forget or even recreate, in the best of kitchens. In all the years I was working in Delhi with a newspaper office at ITO, I was loyal to a paranthawallah who, probably being a later riser, would open shop (in an about-to-fall-apart rickety old van) sometime before midnight near the Times of India building. Watching him work was a pleasure in itself. He would roll out balls of dough into large circles, slap one on a hot tava and then pour onto it a finely whipped froth of eggs, onion, coriander and green chillies. Letting it cook for a while till the egg started to set, he would lift another circle of rolled out dough and with a practiced hand, flip it like a lid on top of the bubbling omelette. When each side of the parantha started to acquire delicate dots of brown, he would shallow fry it in oil by holding a large spatula over it very firmly. Finally, it would come to my plate - golden brown and sizzling, with a cube of butter melting on top and a spoonful of bright orange pickled carrot on the side. So many years have passed since and I confess I have tried more than once to recreate that magic in my kitchen, failing miserably each time. The anda parantha of ITO is just another one of those indeletable memories that will haunt me through my lifetime.
Around the same time, there was a chat vendor at Sarojini Nagar, who served a lethal cocktail of boiled potatoes, fried to a caramel crisp from a tiny stall in the midst of the crowded market. He would take the simple ingredients – diced fried potatoes, salt, pepper, lime juice and a tangy green chutney -- in a metal tumbler, hold a plate over it and shake it for all he was worth. The spice coated cubes would then be delivered to the waiting customer on a disposable plastic plate with a toothpick to eat them with. Not only did the potatoes scald the taste buds and make steam curl out of the ears, they also sent you with your tongue hanging out to the juice bar alongside for a mango shake or a cold coffee. And despite the torture, or maybe because of it, they hypnotized you into coming back for more next week. Long time since I went there. With fried potatoes acquiring a reputation for being deadly killers, sodium a sure shot recipe for heart attack, and cheap oil just getting on with the mission of clogging arteries, it is not easy to do that stunt anymore. Maybe that man is still around, setting people’s tongues on fire, but I have since lost the feel of immortality that comes only with the bravado of youth.
Buried in the sands of time (food always makes me poetic) are other memories like these. Like those of a solitary dhaba up in the hills of Pauri Garhwal, where I come from. With a naked side of the craggy brown mountain serving as the back wall and uncomfortable wood benches for customers, it sits on a bend in the road between Dugadda and Lansdowne, where the toll booth used to be. All that it dishes out, in porcelain bowls with edges chipped off from careless washing, is steaming hot black gram curry, ladled out of a gigantic iron pot simmering on a pine wood fire. I have been going there for 30 plus years and a more mature crowd much longer.
The old man who made it earlier is long gone. But I suspect ownership remains with the family because the recipe appears to be the same. And so do its connoisseurs – bent old men with frayed black umbrellas, forest bound ghaseris (grass gathering women) with sickles tucked into their waistbands, young village boys with sharp noses going to the town to give an entrance exam. And, sometimes, people like me. All of us lifting spoonfuls of gram curry and depositing it in our mouths till the only sound you hear is of steel spoon meeting porcelain bowl bottom. And sometimes, a bus horn blaring somewhere outside, desperately signalling that it is time to go. With the aroma of roasted spices floating in the air and mingling with the fragrant smell of pine cones, it is a moment of complete gastronomical surrender. Even as the bus driver continues to honk, all of us ignore him and finish our meal with a ribbed glass of sweet milky tea – an inseparable part of the ritual. And only after we have emptied the last drop in our mouths, do we move on to attend to the more cumbersome business of life. Can it get better than that? I doubt very much!
This article has appeared in Sizzling Pots, a fine dining magazine published from Houston http://mag.sizzlingpots.com/articles/87-roadside-rendezvous.html
I can speak for my generation. We grew up on crispy fried potatoes, diced papaya, slitted guava, longitudinally sliced cucumbers, even peeled white radish for the brave and the burpers. Dished out from a hand pushed cart or a wicker basket on the roadside, sprinkled with a mouthwatering mix of secret spices, they scalded the tongue, satiated hunger pangs, combated heat strokes and gave good friends yet another reason to hang out together. The fact that they made you poorer only by Rs 10 or less, added to their charm. To those of you who never did this and are crinkling their noses even as they read, I can only shake my head gravely and say, “Just too bad buddy. You’ll never know what you missed. A better life next time”.
Actually, to be honest, this was supposed to be an article about eating trends in young Indians. That was the rather clear brief I was given, along with a rather clear deadline. I completely missed both. Not only did the article get written late, it also shape shifted and turned into a gush piece on roadside snacks. And what is more, it got published. Which simply reinforces my belief that there is some magic in street food.
Anyone who has sampled it can tell you, just as I do, that street food in India has a taste and flavor of its own, very difficult to forget or even recreate, in the best of kitchens. In all the years I was working in Delhi with a newspaper office at ITO, I was loyal to a paranthawallah who, probably being a later riser, would open shop (in an about-to-fall-apart rickety old van) sometime before midnight near the Times of India building. Watching him work was a pleasure in itself. He would roll out balls of dough into large circles, slap one on a hot tava and then pour onto it a finely whipped froth of eggs, onion, coriander and green chillies. Letting it cook for a while till the egg started to set, he would lift another circle of rolled out dough and with a practiced hand, flip it like a lid on top of the bubbling omelette. When each side of the parantha started to acquire delicate dots of brown, he would shallow fry it in oil by holding a large spatula over it very firmly. Finally, it would come to my plate - golden brown and sizzling, with a cube of butter melting on top and a spoonful of bright orange pickled carrot on the side. So many years have passed since and I confess I have tried more than once to recreate that magic in my kitchen, failing miserably each time. The anda parantha of ITO is just another one of those indeletable memories that will haunt me through my lifetime.
Around the same time, there was a chat vendor at Sarojini Nagar, who served a lethal cocktail of boiled potatoes, fried to a caramel crisp from a tiny stall in the midst of the crowded market. He would take the simple ingredients – diced fried potatoes, salt, pepper, lime juice and a tangy green chutney -- in a metal tumbler, hold a plate over it and shake it for all he was worth. The spice coated cubes would then be delivered to the waiting customer on a disposable plastic plate with a toothpick to eat them with. Not only did the potatoes scald the taste buds and make steam curl out of the ears, they also sent you with your tongue hanging out to the juice bar alongside for a mango shake or a cold coffee. And despite the torture, or maybe because of it, they hypnotized you into coming back for more next week. Long time since I went there. With fried potatoes acquiring a reputation for being deadly killers, sodium a sure shot recipe for heart attack, and cheap oil just getting on with the mission of clogging arteries, it is not easy to do that stunt anymore. Maybe that man is still around, setting people’s tongues on fire, but I have since lost the feel of immortality that comes only with the bravado of youth.
Buried in the sands of time (food always makes me poetic) are other memories like these. Like those of a solitary dhaba up in the hills of Pauri Garhwal, where I come from. With a naked side of the craggy brown mountain serving as the back wall and uncomfortable wood benches for customers, it sits on a bend in the road between Dugadda and Lansdowne, where the toll booth used to be. All that it dishes out, in porcelain bowls with edges chipped off from careless washing, is steaming hot black gram curry, ladled out of a gigantic iron pot simmering on a pine wood fire. I have been going there for 30 plus years and a more mature crowd much longer.
The old man who made it earlier is long gone. But I suspect ownership remains with the family because the recipe appears to be the same. And so do its connoisseurs – bent old men with frayed black umbrellas, forest bound ghaseris (grass gathering women) with sickles tucked into their waistbands, young village boys with sharp noses going to the town to give an entrance exam. And, sometimes, people like me. All of us lifting spoonfuls of gram curry and depositing it in our mouths till the only sound you hear is of steel spoon meeting porcelain bowl bottom. And sometimes, a bus horn blaring somewhere outside, desperately signalling that it is time to go. With the aroma of roasted spices floating in the air and mingling with the fragrant smell of pine cones, it is a moment of complete gastronomical surrender. Even as the bus driver continues to honk, all of us ignore him and finish our meal with a ribbed glass of sweet milky tea – an inseparable part of the ritual. And only after we have emptied the last drop in our mouths, do we move on to attend to the more cumbersome business of life. Can it get better than that? I doubt very much!
This article has appeared in Sizzling Pots, a fine dining magazine published from Houston http://mag.sizzlingpots.com/articles/87-roadside-rendezvous.html
RSS Feed
