By Aakar Patel
Because this cooking is purely by following instructions, if one ingredient out of 10 is unavailable, I am in despair because I am convinced it will not turn out right -- and it won't. So I usually turn the page and look for something else. I soldier on, because cooking makes me feel civilised.
Few things are more satisfying than having made a meal that people liked and, importantly, finished. My mother spent a couple of hours at lunch and perhaps three at dinner in the kitchen, and I do not remember her grudge that work. But of course we think of our mothers as belonging in the kitchen. One day, many years ago, I bought her a cookbook for her birthday and she said to me: 'I thought the present was for me, not you.'
Perhaps some of us like cooking because we have the option of not doing it on most days. And there is great pleasure to be got from shopping for ingredients.
I live in a part of Bombay called Bandra, the Catholic heart of the city. Bandra has neighbourhoods with tradition, and shopping in them is excellent. It is also one of the few places in India where you can buy both pork and beef.
In the last few years, Indians have begun cooking European food and it's now easier for us to get the right ingredients. Rocket leaf, avocado, red and yellow peppers, and herbs like basil, parsley, rosemary, tarragon, oregano and thyme.
The European thing I cook most often is steak. In Bandra you can get a very good and tender undercut of beef, which I marinate in olive oil, pepper corns, garlic slivers and mustard. This sits in the fridge for a day if possible and then is grilled.
I have two beautiful vessels, a casserole and a grill, made by Le Creuset. These are very heavy and made of cast iron. I use the casserole only when I cook European food. This is because it has an enamel bottom and is not meant to be scraped clean regularly but lightly washed. There is some logic to this that I do not understand. But this isn't possible for Indian food, which is strongly spiced and transfers its flavours to the pan.
The grill is what I cook the steaks on, because its ridges leave those lined marks on the meat that makes it look more appealing. The steaks are had with a side salad of avocado, rocket and red and yellow peppers, and perhaps a load of bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar splashed over it. Often also with a bottle of wine, even when I'm alone. Putting a half-open bottle back in the fridge is, according to the TV chef Keith Floyd who died recently, "a disgusting habit", a sentiment I agree with.
Bandra has many fish markets and though I'm not entirely comfortable in them, or in a butcher's shop, I go when I can because the sights are quite good. Last month I bought some lobsters. They were about 10 inches long with their shell but containing only about four inches of flesh. I have never figured out how to cook them right and it's difficult to find recipes for lobsters. Easier to cook (and clean) are the large prawns, which these days are farmed and rather tasteless. These I steam lightly, losing as little flavour as possible, and serve with a sauce of soya and shredded ginger. If I have it, I also add a dollop of Wasabi, the stinging Japanese paste made of horse-radish.
I like eating with chopsticks, though I'm not particularly skilled at using them.
Of the places I do my shopping in, one is expensive, a delicatessen called Sante. It is where a lot of Bollywood people buy their food and one evening I saw Jaya Bachchan in it. Sante is where I occasionally buy my cheese: clumps of smelly cheese like Rocquefort and Gorgonzola, crumbly ones like Feta and thin sliced ones spiced with cumin or chilly. Cheese is great because it can just be unwrapped and put on a platter and served with wine. There are some cheeses that can be cooked, and of those I like Haloumi, the Lebanese goat's cheese that is served grilled.
Cheeses are about Rs200 for 100 grams, and the deli slices off little bits from the large wheels for you to taste.
The cheese I eat most often is Boursin. This is a soft, pasty cheese that comes in one of three flavours, garlic, pepper or chives. A box costs Rs375 and I serve it with bhakri, which is a baked, biscuit-like hard roti that Gujaratis make. The other thing to eat cheese with is lavash, the flat bread from the middle-east. The area produces many varieties of yeast-less bread, possibly because of the commandment to Jews in Exodus when God told them to mark their flight from Egypt by not using yeast for one week in the year.
For some reason, the cheeses don't taste good the next day and I must be refrigerating them wrongly. Someone once gifted me a wooden box of Camembert, which I would look at longingly every time I opened the fridge and when finally I decided to have it one evening it had gone bad.
My favourite is a plain one called Old Amsterdam. The other favourite is to be got in only one place: Calcutta's New Market. There you can buy a superb cheese called Bandel, which is smoked with cow pats. It was first made by the Dutch in their colony in Bengal. Someone told me that other than paneer it is the only cheese local to India. It is golf-ball sized discs and is had after soaking it for a few hours, and then slicing it.
The other thing I like in New Market is a brownie made in Nahoum, a bakery run by Armenian Jews. Sante also stocks caviar, which I love, but it's too expensive to eat regularly. A tin of 50 grams costs Rs3,000. Some people have it on a cracker with cream cheese but I just spoon it straight from the tin. I understand it used to be available quite freely and cheaply in Indian cities when Russia was communist, but no longer, alas.
I like cooking Indian food too and do this mainly from books written by Madhur Jaffrey, the TV chef who used to be married to the actor Saeed Jaffrey. I also use chef Sanjeev Kapoor's recipe for Mirchi ka Salan, which is made with a peanut sauce. This is too teekha to serve foreigners, but I love really hot food.
The thing about Indian food is that there is no recipe which cannot be improved considerably by adding extra Ghee, the food of Gods.
Some people cook because it gives them joy. My business partner is a Sindhi married to a Catholic, one of Bandra's old families. Her name is Genesia, and she has five siblings: Grenald, Gynelle, Glenard and twins Glynn and Glynda.
Glenard and Gynelle run a service called love lunch. They cook and pack lunch for dozens of executives and it's delivered to them at 12:45 by Bombay's superb dabba service. This dabba service is a network of 4,500 men which picks up the tiffins prepared at home and delivers them to offices every weekday for Rs 200 a month.
Love lunch is so good that they have been featured in the New York Times and the Financial Times.
They are real chefs of course, and practitioners of this great art that separates us from animals.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar @hillroadmedia.com