A friend of filmmaker Ismail Merchant, a great cook, a gossipy raconteur, and now a novelist, Richard C Morais serves up a fare of words for elevenses to Kishore Singh.
Richard C Morais has an idyllic life, the kind every journalist would give an arm and a leg to have. He works from home (“I hate commuting”) and is disciplined enough to manage it (because “I’m not terribly efficient in office, I gossip a lot”), using the hours skimmed off as a result of it to devote to fiction.
“I have a fantastic job at Forbes,” he explains — he can travel anywhere in the world to write on any subject he chooses — “but it does have a narrow focus in that I have to write business stories.”
He’s glowing in the Delhi heat on the first floor verandah of a guest house, the remains of breakfast strewn on a table close by, on this, his second visit to India. On his first one, he’d reported on the ship breaking yards of Alangh, and spent a half-day getting intimate with Indian cuisine in the kitchen of Mumbai restaurant Khyber.
This latter was intended as research for his gastronomic novel The Hundred-Foot Journey, at one level simply a story of migration, at another about the clash of cultures and the inevitable test that puts on families and on relationships. “How you stay true to your heritage and yet renew yourself at work — that,” says Morais, “is Hassan’s story.”
The voice throughout the book belongs to Indian immigrant Hassan Haji, whose culinary adventures begin long before his birth, resonant in his grandmother’s cooking and learning what the British soldiers stationed in Mumbai want, and later in the restaurant business his father, Abbas Haji, creates till, one day, it is destroyed in a communal arson and the family migrates to London.
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Abbas Haji is “a man of large appetites” patterned, says Morais, on film producer and his close friend Ismail Merchant who, like Morais himself, “was a great and intuitive cook”. Like him, and like his own father, Morais enjoys cooking and associates it with “special, joyous, festive occasions”, his father having taught his mother to cook, and Morais having performed a similar service with his wife. “Food,” he says, “is the glue of my family.”
The hundred feet that Hassan traverses from his father’s Indian restaurant in a beautiful part of France (where the Haji family has now settled) to Madame Gertrude Mallory’s French restaurant, the two Michelin star The Weeping Willow, forms the crux of this book.
“It is,” muses Morais, “about finding your true calling in life, even if it is at odds with your family or cultural heritage. You may pay a price for it, you may have to give up on things, but it is what you have to do.”
For gastronomes, or at least for those readers who enjoy gastronomy almost as a serious pursuit, the underlying text is about food snobbishness, the snob described by Madame Mallory’s father as “a person utterly lacking in good taste”.
It is a lesson she is destined to forget; it is a lesson she remembers just in time to pass on, along with her skills in the kitchen, to the immigrant Hassan, who will use it to conquer the tightly guarded frontiers of haute cuisine in Paris.
“French chefs,” says Morais, “have lost their way. Their haute cuisine has become sterile, ossified, just like their golden age of painting, when they produced the Impressionists, remains their pinnacle.”
But the nationalistic French have done best when they have let in outsiders, he points out, as in the case of haute couture, where “they’ve taken the best of the world.”
Hassan breaches the frontiers of French gastronomy after his friend and chef, Paul Verdun, commits suicide because of a drop in his Michelin rating, but leaves behind a will that asks Hassan to cook a memorial dinner for a hundred of France’s who’s who of haute cuisine.
It is Verdun’s way of scoring off against those promoting post-modernist, deconstructed food while mentoring Hassan and allowing in a refreshing breath of experimentation into French classical cuisine.
What I expect, I tell Morais, and don’t find in the novel are the culinary lessons that Madame Mallory might have taught young Hassan, the rigours of the French kitchen, the excitement of the perfectly created dish, the despair of something turned out not quite right.
“Forbes,” he defends himself, “has taught me to write short pieces. Nor do I have the leisure of writing my novel eight hours a day.”
He did not want to write, he says, an epic. “Fiction has its own tempo, it comes from the heart.” But already, he’s working on a more sweeping work, one in which he hopes “to create a story-telling story set in Davos,” a place he’s familiar with from having grown up in Switzerland, and through repeated visits to the annual World Economic Forum.
This one, he says, is “an ambitious piece”, based in some ways on two of his favourite reads, Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.
While he labours over a longer novel, there’s nothing, Morais says, he enjoys more than spending time with his family. And cooking for them?
“The Europeans have taught me,” says the American who’s lived the major part of his life outside America, and rates Portuguese food as that continent’s most underrated cuisine, “there are few things as fine as sitting down in a garden with friends over a good meal. Nothing else has as much elegance…” Readers might agree.
THE HUNDRED-FOOT JOURNEY
Author: Richard C Morais
Publisher: HarperCollins
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 180