The best way to learn a language is to have a love affair with a native speaker; the best way to learn a country is to spend time in its markets, restaurants and homes, until you have it on your palate.
Food and travel are inextricable; with the exception of Pico Iyer, who maintains a monkish disinterest in the contents of his plate, I rarely trust a travel writer who lacks a passion for food. Two books and a classic essay drove that point home in 2009.
Simon Majumdar’s midlife crisis fuelled Eat My Globe (John Murray); where mere mortals would have bought the sports car or found solace in the arms of a willing nymphette, the Great Majumdar is made of sterner stuff. He chucked up his job and his comfortable life — and kitchen, and proximity to locales in London where the finest Madagascar vanilla beans are always available — in order to eat his way across the globe.
This was not your average fine dining gourmand experience; Majumdar is a pork pie man himself and steered resolutely clear of the world’s most famous restaurants, aided by the relative slenderness of his budget. Instead, he finds epiphanies in street food in Thailand, unspeakable Icelandic snacks and artery-busting Philly cheese steak.
He also eats dog, cane rat and cod sperm for the obligatory “ew” moments, and one can only be grateful that he eats them so that we don’t have to. Majumdar’s enthusiasm in India is balanced by the perils of travel — and dodgy eating experiences — in China and Russia, and while the book can feel like a whistlestop round-the-world tour, it succeeds in his primary aim. This is to get the most adventurous of us thinking about what it would be like to sample as many of the world’s cuisines as possible.
Not sharing either the Great Majumdar’s ambition or his gargantuan appetite, I’m planning a mini-midlife crisis over the next few years — one continent would be enough.
Hardeep Singh Kohli’s Indian Takeaway is much more a travelling-back-to-my-roots book, as the man with the most robust appetite in the UK returns to the country of his origins. Kohli’s prose can be simplistic to the point of banality, and the endless stream of cliches grate after a while. But the whimsicality of his quest pulls him through — he’s here in India to sample the thalis of the subcontinent, true, but he’s also here to cook his way through the country.
As he struggles with the problems of making haggis sans easily available sheep’s intestines or Indianises his shepherd’s pie with a generous dose of chilli and mint, you sense that this is a truly heroic endeavour. The attempt, centuries after the Quit India movement, to bring back the cuisine of Britain and to get Indians to love it as much as Kohli himself does, is a noble, if doomed one. Those who’ve read the food classic The Raj at Table will know instinctively what we kept and what we discarded: mulligatawny, yes, (if increasingly only for show), leathery sardines on toast as the dreaded savoury, no.
For a great example of food writing, though, there’s Stephen Metcalf’s Cocina Confidential, in the New York Times winter 2009 travel issue. Metcalf’s trawl through Argentina’s bodegones allows him access to the food, literary and political memories of the country. If Naipaul’s The Return of Eva Peron provides one way of seeing Argentina, writers like Uki Goni and directors like Ruben Guzman offer a view of the “homemade” cafes, where you eat with your sleeves rolled up. And Metcalf, with them, breathes the history of Buenos Aires, the “real history”— as close as any visitor can ever get to the beating pulse of any country.
The last recommendation for 2009 is an old classic, reissued. Edited by Amanda Hesser, Eat, Memory is a collection of the best essays on food culled from the NYT magazine over the years. Manil Suri proves his global credentials by cooking an expansively French meal for his parents, Pico Iyer deconstructs the wrappings of food items at a Japanese convenience store, Yiyun Li meditates on China via empty Tang bottles, George Saunders presents a tongue-in-cheek recipe for air. This is one of those books in my food collection destined to have its pages dog-eared and smudged.
