What happened to the one-dish meal? After a week of buffet meals on a recent trip, I found myself wondering whether we’ve lost the idea of a single, centrepiece dish, unmolested by needless accompaniments, as we pursue the ideal of variety.
Unlike Anthony Bourdain, I’m not a buffet sceptic. The Dutch Rijstaffel, the European cold collation and a well-planned Indian thali-on-a-sideboard meal can be excellent fare — a good buffet promises both choice and mystery. Hotels with delis attached or with at least two great in-house restaurants tend to do spectacular buffets — the Oberoi Grand in Calcutta and the Taj and Indigo in Bombay do their buffets with thought and care. I’m told Sarabeth’s in New York serves legendary buffets, with amazing muffins, while tapas bars in Barcelona see the buffet as an opportunity to show off the best possible produce and the most seasonal of delicacies.
But the grand ideal of the buffet is often betrayed in India. I love Rajasthan hotel buffets for their unpredictability — over the years various hotels have offered baked beans next to the rajma, glazed carrots at breakfast, mirchi pakoras in white sauce (don’t ask), and a porridge made of leftover daal baati. In Palakkad some years ago, the Indian hotel tendency to serve great local food alongside an “English” menu ripped from the pages of Mrs Beeton made for a mystifying meal: excellent beef and fish curries plus an outstanding prawn biryani, served alongside macaroni cheese, baked vegetables and a green jello chicken and corn salad-with tomato sauce topping.
The one-dish meal survives in restaurants in the form of the Family Dosa and the Family Naan, neither of which is ever strongly recommended. It doesn’t matter how good the skills of the chef in the kitchen are — expand a naan or dosa beyond a certain point, and it will never be as crisp or evenly cooked as it should be. It can also be seen in the return of the khao swey — though far too many restaurants get away with a hybrid Thai curry in the place of the classic Burmese dish, but that’s another story.
In Lucknow’s chowk, several of the old biryani shops would discourage you from ordering kababs as a side: biryani, as the Maharaja of Sailana explains and every aficionado knows, is meant to be eaten on its own, with only raita or a light salan as an accompaniment. In Bengal and Orissa, a classic party meal is just khichdi — the fancy version, cooked with spices and a plenitude of vegetables — served with hot ghee, sliced limes, and a side of fried brinjals (occasionally other fried vegetables). Theer sadaam — curd rice with papads and perhaps a roasted chilli — is another immensely satisfying meal; the Parsis have the dhansak tradition, where strictly speaking, dhansak and rice is all you need on the table. The one-dish meal tradition survives in homes, but it’s a rare host or hostess who would serve just one dish, no matter how well done, at a party or a social function.
The pinnacle of the grand buffet has the luxurious appeal of all excess. In Alexis Soyer’s famous Victorian dining room, he included, along with the roasts, removes and hors d’ouevres, “pates of game, galantine of turkey, poulardes, boars’ heads”, followed by “black and white truffles, asparagus, sea-kale, salsify, Jerusalem artichokes, endive and sorrel”. His signature sideboard dish was a buffet classic — exoticism on a reheatable platter — called Salade de Grouse a la Soyer: pieces of lightly cooked grouse in a creamy dressing, placed on a sharply flavoured salad and surrounded by hard boiled eggs.
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But the pleasures of a small table are different. In Malaysia some years ago, I abandoned my hotel’s splendid European-style breakfast buffet for another hotel’s breakfast menu. The first contained perhaps 40 dishes, the second only two: rice congee and bak kuh teh. The congee was a simple, soothing stew with an almost nursery flavour to it; the bak kuh teh was a rich, meaty soup with fried tofu pieces, noodles or strips of fried dumplings, and a range of accompaniments from fish balls to seasonal greens and herbs.
The food writer M F K Fisher put it best, in her discourse on eating fewer but better dishes. What we were looking for in the one-or-two dish meal as opposed to the wide grazing grounds of the buffet was: “A meal that may startle your company at first with its simplicity but will satisfy their hunger and their sense of fitness and of balance, all at once.”
The author is a Delhi-based freelance writer