Traditional and modern views of Indian food

There is a gulf between traditional and modern views of Indian food, but things are changing

A FEW WEEKS ago, I moderated a discussion between two of India’s most respected chefs at a chefs’ conference. They were discussing the apparent conflict between traditional Indian food and modern. And because they were the two seniormost working chefs in the country – the Taj’s world-famous Hemant Oberoi and ITC’s scholarly Manjit Gill – I guess they count as traditional chefs.
UPDATE, BUT DON’T REBOOT Indian cuisine no longer means butter chicken (left) or rogan josh (right), it now includes modern dishes like the Varqi Crab (centre)

In the course of the discussion, Hemant Oberoi made the point that young chefs who did not know how to make a basic curry came to him and said that they wanted to make spherified chaat using molecular gastronomic techniques. Manjit Gill complained about the failure of a new generation of chefs to learn the basics of Indian cuisine or to understand the principles on which it was based.

Talking to young chefs at the conference, I got the sense that there is a gulf between two views of Indian food.

Our food has never been considered the glamorous option for chefs who are starting out. The talented chefs have all preferred what used to be called “Continental cooking” because it seemed more in tune with global cooking trends. Many of the great Indian chefs of the last few decades – from Arvind Saraswat, Satish Arora, Ananda Solomon to Oberoi and Gill themselves – trained to be “Continental” chefs. Only later in their careers did they make the transition to the Indian kitchen.

But that attitude is now changing. Indian cuisine no longer means rogan josh and tandoori chicken. There is a more glamorous kind of Indian cooking and young chefs are being increasingly attracted to it. There is the global success of men like Gaggan Anand, who seem to be having fun while creating dishes that old-style chefs could never have dreamt of. Plus, there’s the influence of the great Manish Mehrotra and the growing popularity of such places as Farzi Café and Masala Library.

So younger chefs want to dabble in the hot new Indian cuisine and have less and less interest in traditional Indian food.

Both Manjit and Hemant railed against this trend. And of course they are right. You can’t expand the frontiers of a cuisine if you don’t understand its central principles. When the likes of Michel Guérard and Paul Bocuse revolutionised French cuisine in the Sixties and the Seventies, changing the presentation, going beyond the classic dishes and throwing out the flour-thickened sauces of old, they did this from a sound, classical footing. It was only because they had mastered traditional cooking that they could find ways of going beyond it.

So yes, I support what Hemant and Manjit said. Chefs should master their own cuisine, not wander off in search of canisters of liquid nitrogen to tart up their dishes.

On the other hand, I also think that many senior chefs take too rigid a view of Indian cuisine. At every chefs’ conference there will be complaints about our failure to standardise our recipes, about the absence of an Indian Larousse Gastronomique.

I understand where this is coming from. If you call a dish a rogan josh, then you must at least be clear about the elements that comprise a rogan josh.

But I also think that the chefs lose sight of an important distinction. France has two distinct cuisines: home cooking and restaurant cooking. Home cooking varies from region to region and the recipes can differ. Frenchmen will come to blows over the constituents of a perfect cassoulet, for instance.

But there’s also a well-documented restaurant or banquet cuisine which uses standard recipes – there is only one way to make a Béarnaise sauce, for instance.

India, on the other hand, has no great restaurant tradition. There may have been a great banquet cuisine in the days of the Mughal courts, for instance, but the recipes have been mostly lost.

And our home cuisine is too rich and varied to have any standard recipes. How can there be only one correct way to make a sambhar when the recipe for sambhar changes every twenty miles or so, from village to village?

So I am always a little leery when senior chefs try and impose the French disciplines they picked up at catering college on the rest of us. What makes sense in Paris or Lyon, does not necessarily hold true for Delhi or Bombay.
Photo: SANJAY SOLANKI

There is a second factor. What we call Indian cuisine is essentially a collection of dishes (biryani, korma, naan, etc.) French cuisine, on the other hand, may have its classical recipes, but it is essentially a collection of kitchen skills and techniques.

If an executive chef at an Indian hotel interviews a cook, he asks him to cook a basic dish, say a tandoori chicken or a rogan josh to judge his ability. But when a French chef is judged, nobody cares how good his Boeuf Bourguignon is. He will be judged on his creativity and on his ability to merge flavours and invent new dishes using the techniques of the French kitchen.

That’s a huge difference and it is one that chefs are slow to recognise. And yet, as restaurants have opened in India in the second half of the 20th century, a restaurant cuisine that has nothing or very little to do with home cooking has developed. Classic examples are of course tandoori chicken and butter chicken, two dishes that no Indian makes at home and which nobody had heard of till the 1950s.

You can say that there is a classic recipe for butter chicken because it is a restaurant dish, invented by a chef. But you can’t say that there is a single recipe for chicken curry, because that varies from home to home.

Chefs are also unwilling to accept how much they have played around with Indian food themselves, long before the molecular boys got here. Manjit was one of the brains behind the first Dum Pukht. Its standout dish was the biryani. But rather than serve a standard Lucknow biryani/pulao, Manjit and ITC’s chefs played around with the seasoning to add elements that would not normally be found in a Lucknow dish.

Most significantly, they changed the presentation. Biryani would normally be made in a large handi and portions would be ladled out of it. At Dum Pukht, they began the practice of cooking the last stage of the biryani in a singleportion clay pot and then sealing the pot with a wheat-flour purdah. The purdah would be broken at the table, allowing the aroma to escape.

That style of presentation has now been copied so widely that nobody realises that it dates only to the 1980s.

So it is with Hemant. His Varq was the first successful modern Indian restaurant in India and its greatest hit, the Varqi Crab, takes a South Indian crab dish, layers it between pastry sheets, tops it with a tandoori prawn and uses balsamic vinegar as part of the sauce. There is nothing traditional about the dish. It is Hemant’s creation. But it is one of the classics of Indian restaurant cuisine.

So here’s my view. Yes, you must never forget that only if you understand the basics of a cuisine can you create new dishes. But there’s too much confusion in the minds of some of the older chefs who rush to condemn “fusion” or argue that younger chefs are straying too far from the roots of Indian cuisine. In fact, if adventurous chefs had never experimented, then such great dishes as tandoori chicken would never have been invented. I admire chefs like Naren Thimmaiah of Bangalore’s Karavalli who have rediscovered old home recipes and preserved them for posterity.

But that’s only one part of a cuisine’s evolution. The other part must go beyond tradition and the past and seek to create and innovate. If some Indian cook had declared, in the 16th century, that he would not use tomatoes, potatoes or chillis because they were new-fangled foreign ingredients, then Indian cuisine, as we know it today, would not have existed.

Nor do I think it is wrong for the younger chefs to be attracted to the glamour of the new Indian cuisine. For too long, Indian chefs have faced a dilemma. Western food is glamorous, but at the end of the day, no matter how good an Indian chef is at Italian food, there will always be some Italian, who has grown up with the cuisine, who will be better than him. This is why all the Indian chefs who started out in the Continental section eventually made their way to the Indian kitchen.

The new Indian cuisine, on the other hand, is not boring; it allows chefs to express their creativity and, because it uses cutting-edge techniques, makes them feel part of the global food community in a way that churning out endless portions of chicken korma never did. Yes, there’s a lot of foolish experimentation out there. All too often, talentless chefs seem like kids who have been gifted chemistry sets for their birthday. But eventually, these guys will fail. And true talent will shine through.

The debate we are witnessing in India is not new. We saw a version of it in France when the nouvelle cuisine revolution took place. And it was repeated in Europe when Ferran Adrià challenged the French.

Each time, the old guard lost out and creativity and innovation won. That, I suspect, is exactly how this drama is going to play out in India.