Indian Takeaway (25 page)

Seven Indian sweets that are delicious

Rovi and I venture deeper into the dark city. It feels a little like Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley; strange characters lurk in shadowy corners, unfamiliar noises can be heard behind every wall and there is the smell of soured milk (maybe that wasn’t in J.K. Rowling’s books …). We have left Paratha ki Gully far behind and are now wandering towards Chandni Chowk. There is a famous old restaurant that started here back in the early part of the last century. Karim’s is regarded by Delhites as the best example of Moghul food anywhere to be found in India. We turn another corner and the road has become
smoother and cleaner. We have found it. A placard outside tells me that Karim’s was started in 1913 by Hafiz Karim Uddin. It was initially just a
tawa
off Kababian Street. A
tawa
is a flat steel skillet. It comes in a variety of sizes and has a multiplicity of uses in the north Indian house. Chapattis and parathas are cooked on it, small snacks are shallow fried on it, even chicken and lamb can be fried on it. The story suggests that the original Karims was an al fresco cooking experience nearly a century ago.

Rovi insists that we stop and have a small snack. My heart and my head would love to, but my stomach has other plans.

‘Not a great idea,’ I explain to Rovi, patting my distended belly.

‘You’re in Delhi, you have a bad belly. Delhi belly!’ He laughs. I can’t help joining in.

We wander back to the car, enjoying the scene in reverse. Outside one stall a dozen or so men sit on the ground, their hands stretched outward in supplication. Rovi explains that these wretched souls are waiting for someone to bestow a little charity on them. They are hoping that some rich individual might offer the stall holder the price of a meal on their behalf. Begging for food is more likely to meet with success than begging for money. At least the donor has some comfort in knowing that their contribution has been put to good use. I ask that price. Twenty rupees will feed a single man. About thirty pence. I feel physically sick. I think about how much I myself eat, and waste, the money I squander on half-eaten sandwiches and tepid cappuccinos. I leave enough money to feed twenty men but can’t bear to watch.

Driving around the city at night the traffic is blissfully unaware of the late hour. Delhi is a daunting city, constantly changing. One moment your horizon is wide, filled with
tree-lined boulevards and colonial architecture. A couple of left turns later you are in the midst of a medieval town, the imposing buildings blocking the moonlit sky. Urban India never sleeps, but Delhi seems to be urban India on espresso. It has the constant buzz of a city that is constant. Rovi tells me that I was lucky to miss Diwali last year; the traffic was unbearable. People left their cars and walked, carrying gifts for their families to celebrate Hindu New Year.

‘It was madness. Unbelievable madness. It took four hours to travel a few kilometres. Everyone was in their car taking presents everywhere.’

Rovi tells me that as a result of India’s newfound affluence, people have more money to spend. So when it comes to festivals like Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Light which is commonly regarded as their New Year, families decide to shower gifts on each other in a way that seems to embrace the free market more than the cleansing quality of light. This seems a far cry from the Delhi of my dad’s day. Even when I first came to Delhi as a boy you couldn’t get any products that weren’t made in India. It’s difficult to believe now but the only cola drinks you could buy were Indian-owned brands like Thums [sic] Up or Campa Cola. Now India is the bastard child of globalisation: there isn’t anything you can’t get here. It’s midnight and we are stuck in a traffic jam.

‘This is the other side of the economic boom,’ Rovi mutters, as irritated as his lovely nature will allow him to get. Of all the consequences of a burgeoning economy very bad traffic is not one I would have ever thought of. Rovi never seems to tire of fetching and carrying and bringing and delivering; for him to complain about traffic things must be bad.

‘Thank God for the metro.’

Delhi is India’s only city to have a subway system and it has been a massive success. Hundreds of thousands of Indians travel to and fro on a daily basis. The sweeping streets of the suburbs are smoothly and efficiently linked to the stone-built edifices of the bureaucratic heart of India. Journey times have been slashed. The train stations and the trains themselves are clean and reliable; two words not readily associated with all things Indian. The mind boggles as to what the state of the roads would be if Delhi didn’t have such an effectively elegant underground system. Delhi feels like another future for India, a future in which Bangalore is already playing a part. Between them it seems as if India will be more than capable of dealing with the unfolding century and the millennium ahead. But I am in Delhi to cook and hopefully also to find myself.

My plan is simple. It’s a massive place; there is no way I can find a single group of people to cook for that is at all representative of the entire city. Unlike Bombay with its world-renowned association with the movie business, Delhi has everything. Everything and politics. I don’t fancy cooking for politicians, so the next best thing might be to cook a small dinner party for a bunch of Delhi socialites. Delhi is full of old-money Indians; the city teems with the bolder and more beautiful children of the bold and beautiful and it would be fun to meet them. I have a contact from London, a lady with a great name: Lucky.

And what better to cook than soup? A lovely, traditional Scottish soup. Ever since I bottled it in Kovalam and failed to cook stovies, I have been rather remiss in preparing the food of Britain. What the Delhites need is cock-a-leekie soup. The soft, buttery leeks combining with those that still have some give all melded together in that lovely chicken broth. Everyone knows that any good soup is made better when allowed to sit for a
few hours, preferably overnight. A lady called Clara taught me this.

When I was at university in Glasgow, there was only one place to go and eat, the Grosvenor Café. To say the Grosvenor was a café is like saying Jimi Hendrix was a man who played the guitar; it barely begins to tell the story. The Grosvenor was an institution, a sanctuary, a way of life. I grew up in the Grosvenor, I lived in the Grosvenor, I loved in the Grosvenor but mostly I ate in the Grosvenor. When my wife was my girlfriend, we spent afternoons drinking coffee and chatting. So frequent a visitor was I that in the days before mobile phones, people would phone me at the Grosvenor.

The Grosvenor was run by an Italian family. The patriarch Renato, his wife Liliana and his sister Clara. There was something called the Grosvenor five-pound challenge. So cheap was the food at the Grosvenor that we students reckoned it was impossible for even the hungriest of us to eat
£
5 worth of Grosvenor food. To put this into some sort of perspective, back in the eighties when the fashion was terrible and the hair was big, to spend
£
5 on food at the Grosvenor meant the consumption of an egg burger (a beef burger with an egg), a croissant filled with tuna mayonnaise, two fried egg rolls, apple pie and ice cream and a thing called a ben loars (I don’t really know what a ben loars was but it was named after a small Scottish mountain, that’s how big it was). If you managed to scoff that much carbohydrate, it would cost you eight pence over
£
5. (I’m not sure I’ve eaten that much food in a day, let alone a single sitting, not even during my Sadhya meal extravaganza in Kovalam.) Not meaning to be boastful, I did hold the record for my time at university when it came to the Grosvenor challenge. I bet you didn’t realise you were reading the story of a man who achieved the high
£
3.80s
early in the winter of 1988. I was a ben loars and an egg roll short of the status of legend.

I would walk by the Grosvenor three or four times a day between lectures and I remember distinctly one day the most entrancing of aromas emanating from the tiny kitchen. It could only be one thing: Clara’s minestrone soup. Now, I know it was Glasgow and I know it was the 1980s, not perhaps a city or a time redolent of gastronomy, but the Scottish Italian community had been alive and kicking for decades at that point and we were very grateful to them for the food they brought. Chief amongst objects of gratitude was Clara’s minestrone soup. It was bloody delicious. And it came with a roll and butter. I’ve eaten at multi-Michelin-starred restaurants, I’ve eaten with royalty and ambassadors, but there are few things finer than Clara’s minestrone soup with a roll and butter.

Naturally, upon smelling the minestrone soup, I decided to miss the next lecture and have a bowl of this fine Italian broth. I ordered a bowl. I was salivating at the mere thought of the pasta, tomato and bean concoction. The waitress returned to my table to tell me that there was no minestrone soup. At the same time I saw a bowl of minestrone soup being delivered to the table next to me. Well, you can understand my confusion. I pointed to the adjoining table and told the waitress that their bowl of soup looked deceptively like minestrone. The waitress told me that Clara said I couldn’t have a bowl of minestrone soup. I was hurt. Deeply, deeply hurt. Clara came over. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Do I not get any minestrone soup?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘you can have the minestrone soup tomorrow, you can’t have it today.’

‘But you’ve given it to them,’ I protested insolently.

She leaned in and I’ll never forget what she said: ‘They can have soup today, it was made today, but you, you are special, you can only have the soup tomorrow. It’s better tomorrow.’

And do you know what? I
did
feel special. From that day on, I always had soup the day after it was made and it always tasted so much better.

Soup is a rural Scottish staple and I intend to cook it in the heart of an Indian metropolis. It is a beautiful juxtaposition. I should tell Lucky. I dial her number.

‘Hi, Lucky. It’s Hardeep here.’

‘Hi!’ Her voice crackles with life. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m good. Just got into town. I was hoping to come and cook for you guys tomorrow.’ I am intentionally vague about who she might invite.

‘What are you cooking? Something exciting, I hope. I’m a bit of a cook myself.’