Celebrity TV chef and writer Manju Malhi tells Anoothi Vishal about her spicy “Indi-Brit” cuisine, plans to open up gastro pubs and promote British brands.
As a celebrity TV chef in Britain and a popular cookbook writer, Manju Malhi is used to comparisions with Madhur Jaffrey — even though her culinary style itself is pretty distinctive.
Malhi’s forte is “Indi-Brit” cooking, essentially easy-to-do Indian food, using ingredients commonly available in the UK, a style she developed as a result of her upbringing in London, with constant urgings by friends to “spice up” the fare they ate.
On the other hand, if you watch cookery shows on Indian television, you may have caught Malhi doing quite the reverse: Easy-to-do Western food. Malhi’s show on NDTV is now more than a year old.
When it had launched, I hadn’t been charitable about it. But instead of holding a grudge, Malhi is good-humoured enough to invite me over to her friend, educationist Abha Adam’s home, which will be her temporary base in New Delhi for all manner of enterprise.
We sit sipping tea quite amicably, over Britannia 50-50 biscuits, if you please, because these are what Malhi loves best —loyalty to British brands notwithstanding. But we’ll come to that in a bit.
More From This Section
A couple of days prior to this meeting, Malhi had been demonstrating how to cook with beer at an event in New Delhi: Fish and chips, the batter done with Blonde ale, tandoori chicken, marinated in Pale ale and chocolate and cinnamon cup cakes with Stout icing, not to mention chilli paneer with Bitter. She is happy sharing these recipes. But the reason behind these innnovations is, well, economics.
British brands are now keen to gain a foothold into the Indian market quite in the manner of French, Italian and Spanish ones, and Malhi’s cooking with beer (only British brands) has been part of the promotional initiative by the representative trade body.
Beer apart, there are other brands being highlighted. But only high-end ones, Malhi mentions Walkers shortbreads and Dorset cereal, “which would not be so easily available even in the UK”. Given the downturn, this may not be quite the right time for such initiatives, I point out and Malhi acknowledges this. But then, because I have been rude to her in the past, she says in jest, “You can be rude about me but not about British brands.” I give her my word.
The other interesting thing that this TV chef is now exploring is a chain of British-style “gastro” pubs in India. Malhi is in talks with the Beer and Pub Association in Britain (even though the state of the world’s economies may play spoilsport here too) and plans to do quintessentially UK food with Indian accents: Say a masala shepherd’s pie (or its vegetarian version with soya mince), Sunday roast dinners, bread and butter pudding with saffron. And, of course, British beer brands.
The food Malhi grew up with was pretty much the same as that she does today. With a working mother — a nurse who would work in shifts — focus was on easy-to-cook recipes rustled up at home from ingredients easy to find on the supermarket shelves.
“But I loved to spice up a lot of the food that we ate,” she tells me, stuff like baked beans with chapatis. And she would, some times, even have ketchup for dinner!
When she began working for the BBC as a voice- over artist, friends would similarly ask her for samplings of food she got from home. So sometimes it would be pakoras and samosas, at other times, snacks from Maharashtra, from where her mother hailed.
In 1999, Malhi won a reality TV competition — “sort of like Indian Idol meets Master Chefs” — where she had to send in a video of herself cooking. That was to finally result in her getting hired to do her own show.
Our talk moves on to trends in the time of recession. Malhi is happy that instead of takeaway, it is “fakeaway” that is gathering steam in the UK. Essentially, this means, that people — because of money worries but also health concerns — are preferring to put together their own meals instead of takeaway or ready-to-eat convenience meals bought from stores.
In India, of course, it’s a different story, a different trend.
