You are not what you eat

THE FOOD CLUB

Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are, where you live and your country's history, claims the cover story in the latest issue of Time magazine, a veritable collector's item.

Fair enough. That's common wisdom. However, another story in the food section goes on to recount how the Japanese author's Spanish husband's grandmother's village cooked a chicken that had been baked for hours in a pot of salt. I was thunderstruck. The recipe is exactly the one that Chinese restaurateurs give for Beggar's Chicken, in which a wily beggar in a village in China wanted to hide his crime, and did so by disguising the bird with a thick coat of salt and burying it underground.

Indeed, in a few minutes of thinking, I had a list of foods that are prepared thousands of miles away from each other. They are culinary enigmas: they give lie to the theory that you can tell where a person lives by what he eats. What do the villagers in Vilar near the Galicia Mountains of Spain have in common with a beggar in China?

Yet, two groups of people, on either side of the globe, manage to mimic with astonishing verisimilitude, a favourite dish.

How about Scotch eggs? Boiled eggs, shelled and coated thickly with finely ground lamb mince, then fried, does sound like a classic of British cookery.

Yet, this is precisely what nargisi koftas are, except that like many dishes in Indian cookery, nargisi koftas are gently lowered into a gravy so that they can be eaten as a main course. So what are the similarities between Scotland and Lucknow, assuming that Lucknow was the birthplace of the nargisi kofta? That one has a town named Paisley and the other uses paisley motifs in its embroideries?

Or what about Spanish paella and Moplah biryani? North Kerala's Muslim biryanis just have to be the best-kept secrets in Indian food, but the tiny grains of rice that find favour here combined with the plethora of seafood always remind me irresistibly of Spain's national dish, except that Moplah biryani is not runny the way that paella is.

You'll encounter coy explanations about uttapam on South Indian menus. They're called Indian pizzas. Well, for my money, they're practically the same thing. Both are a hearty snack by themselves, not to be eaten as a course in a meal. Pizza dough is made from refined flour and is baked, but the griddle-fried uttapam is a pizza with an Asian heart with its crunchy vegetable bits.

Finally, if ceviche and sushi aren't twins separated at birth, what are they? The Netherlands famously consumed raw herrings, but sushi is not just about raw fish lowered into your mouth as you stand on a blustery North Sea beach.

And ceviche, with its delicate dressings, comes so close to the Japanese dish that it's difficult to believe that half the globe separates them.

marryamhreshii@yahoo.co.in