Indian Takeaway (26 page)

I feel more than a little pressure.

‘I have all of Gordon Ramsay’s books, you know.’

Of course she does.

‘So what will you be rustling up? I love all British food, apart from soup. I hate soup.’

‘I’d never cook soup in India,’ I say and then laugh just a little too hard. ‘How do you feel about shepherd’s pie?’

‘I love shepherd’s pie.’ She sounds genuinely happy.

‘Great!’ I say, still trying to work out why I have bottled it. Again.

My father’s words are yet again ringing in my ears.

‘Son, if British food was all that good, then there would be no Indian restaurants in Britain … ’

I’m feeling vulnerable right now. In Delhi, with all the memories of my childhood, of my dad, I can’t help but feel more than a little foolish. Why am I cooking shepherd’s pie for a bunch of cosmopolitan Indian glitterati who have no doubt eaten at the finest restaurants across a handful of continents? Why on earth would they want to eat my shepherd’s pie?

I try to remind myself that this journey is not actually about the food. The food is a mechanism to unlock doors to people who might be able to shed some light on who I am. Why would a bunch of Indian socialites come out for an evening’s Indian food? Where is the fun in that? The shepherd’s pie is the quirky enticement, the edge to the evening. I can’t imagine they have ever been invited out for meat pie before. There’s probably a good reason why …

These socialites are my contemporaries. They are who I might have been had I been born in India and raised here. They are all better looking and eminently more successful than me but they should prove to be an invaluable touchstone to my own sense of self. How similar are these upper-middle class Indians to this middle-class me? I will endeavour to find out through the gift of shepherd’s pie.

Where do you begin with shepherd’s pie? It’s all about the meat. For my money, there’s only one type of meat for shepherd’s pie and that’s lamb. I’ve arranged to meet Lucky at INA market in the centre of New Delhi. This is widely regarded as the most upmarket of all the markets the city has to offer; it’s where all the foreigners shop. And as soon as you enter you understand why. The place is a temple to imported goods and produce: tahini paste, pastas, pak choi, fresh herbs, even rocket; this is clearly a place designed for European cuisine and is wholly unIndian. Apart from the imported products, most of the market seems to offer seafood. I don’t think I’ve
ever seen such amazing king prawns in all my life, some as big as my hand (and I have substantial hands). Beautiful-looking catfish, delicious tilapia, sizeable sea bass, pomfret, lobster and squid. This couldn’t be less like the market in Goa. The range of produce here is mind-boggling and perhaps more refl ective of the fact that Delhi has long been the home to international politicians and business people. Whereas in Goa I struggled to find potatoes, in INA market I can get hold of two types of anchovy paste and a tin of artichoke hearts. Impressive.

As we walk through this undersea world I can see the meat section ahead. On a raised area two men sit, one with chickens dangling dead and upside down above his head. He plays nonchalantly with a knife as he awaits his next customer. I shall not be bothering him today. My attentions are with the other man who sits cross-legged surrounded by mutton. I manage to get a decent-looking leg of lamb, leaving two sorrier-looking specimens hanging in the otherwise bare room. A tray of offal lies lazily in front of the wooden chopping block.

The picture is a bit like the early work of David Lynch, with hanging carcasses and blood everywhere. Or perhaps that’s more Peter Greenaway. I order two kilos of lamb leg and instruct the butcher to cut the lamb into cubes. He is accustomed to cutting lamb into cubes for Indian curries, but they are too big for my needs. But I decide against entering into a dialogue with him; in this instance, size really doesn’t matter. (I know many of you will be expecting mince in shepherd’s pie; I, however, am a firm believer of nugget-sized mouthfuls of lamb. The texture of minced lamb is less interesting than the variegated chunks of gravy-covered delight that, to my mind, makes the finest shepherd’s pie.)

Now, I have bought meat in three continents on dozens of occasions. I have visited Tokyo butchers and witnessed their art
and craft; the meat men of Peru displayed their skills to me, and Khalid at KRK on Woodlands Road in Glasgow is no stranger to me, but in all my travels in all my time I have never seen a man prepare meat the way the butcher at INA market prepares it. Never. He sits cross-legged with the knife lodged firmly between his big and second toe, the sharp edge pointing away from him. The blade is held strong, unmoving, as he pulls the mutton towards him. He is like the human version of a meat-cutting machine in a delicatessen, the sort that shaves slivers of parma ham. The blade does not move as he dextrously cubes my leg of lamb using his two free hands. There’s something fundamentally wrong about a man cutting red meat using his feet.

Having purchased some carrots and potatoes and a bag of frozen peas (which seems utterly incongruous in India), Lucky and I head back to her apartment. Lucky’s apartment is nothing short of breathtaking. She left London a year ago having lived and loved the city for the best part of a decade. After reading history and English at Oxford she joined the world of publishing. She misses London but what’s to miss? She has a massive three-bedroom apartment with a terrace that itself is the size of a two-bedroom flat in Pimlico, and it is on this terrace we will dine this evening.

Fresh from the memory of the foot-chopping butcher, I wash the lamb more thoroughly than normal. (Although, he did have surprisingly clean feet, considering.) While the potatoes come to the boil in plenty of salted water, I concentrate on sorting the lamb out. Ordinarily when I’m cooking lamb curry there is nothing finer than marrowbone and cartilage mixed in with the meat. This adds another depth of flavour, another flesh experience to enjoy and devour. Perhaps the acceptability of bones in Indian food is linked to the way in which we eat.
We pick up food with our fingers, so we are more able to select flesh from bone. Perhaps that’s why bones seem to work so readily in that form. However, a big bit of bone and marrow in a shepherd’s pie would be an altogether different experience and not a terribly pleasant one. I therefore remove the bones, some cartilage but not all the fat; the fat gives great flavour to shepherd’s pie. I then chop the pieces down further still and fry them in a little olive oil, having tossed them in some seasoned flour.

I’m well aware of the fact that pretty much any cuisine in the world will taste bland in comparison to Indian food. So, in the interests of self-preservation, I throw in a couple of green chillies. What did you expect? The lamb is sealed after which I add salt and pepper and a glass and a half of a 2003 Pinotage. (I am aware of how pretentious that just sounded.) Having reduced the liquor by half, I add two really good dashes of Worcester sauce, some diced red peppers and a good handful of chopped mint. Strictly speaking, peppers and mint don’t belong in shepherd’s pie, but if you break shepherd’s pie down to its constituent parts, it’s basically meat and potatoes with a bit of sauce. The glitterati of young Delhi society have been asked to come round for dinner. I can’t just give them meat and potatoes and some sauce.

The lamb is turned out into a casserole dish and allowed to cool. This, my friends, is possibly the most crucial point in the preparation of shepherd’s pie. Trust me. If you do not allow the lamb mixture to cool and dive straight in with your butter-soft mashed potato top, the mashed potato will sink into the hot lamb, thereby rendering the separation of parts useless. Who wants lamby potatoes on top of potatoey lamb? The interface between the lamb and the potatoes is what makes the shepherd’s pie work, else we would just mix them altogether and put
them in the oven, wouldn’t we? Nothing is more crucial than this separation.

Actually, there is one thing that is more crucial than this separation; that might be having enough potatoes to actually cover the lamb.

So preoccupied was I with making sure the lamb was correctly salted, correctly sized and sufficiently spiced, I hadn’t realised the paucity of potatoes I’d put on to boil. Embarrassingly it would appear I don’t have nearly enough potatoes to create the pie-like crust that is the single component that elevates the pie of a shepherd into a higher realm of eating. It’s at times like this I wish my mum were here. She would know exactly what to do. Somehow, using a hairpin, an old battery and a courgette, she would fashion a device that could puncture the space-time continuum and create instant mashed potato without a robot in sight. Instead, I face ignominy. It will be an incomplete mashed potato top. I check my watch; it’s not too late to do a runner.

As I consider my options, the doorbell rings. It would appear I now only have the one option: dinner must be served.

With the top of my shepherd’s pie looking like the later work of Pablo Picasso, I place it in the oven. In thirty minutes hopefully it won’t look too much like a Jackson Pollock. I try to console myself with quality accoutrements. Boiled carrots in butter with pepper and mushrooms in a white wine and fresh coriander sauce, finished with butter; butter in everything. I now have time to kill. The guests have gathered on the beautiful candlelit terrace; the views over the city are sublime. We make the necessary small talk as vodka is sipped and beer is glugged. I can’t begin to tell you how much I feel like I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. I zone out of the conversation for a moment as the vodka works its magic and I spin thirty years
back in my head to one of my earliest memories of Delhi at night …

If ever there was a story that epitomised my love and respect for my father, this is surely it; the story of Mr Muker. My dad’s a very generous man and he always endeavours to visit family and extend gifts wherever possible. It transpired that in 1981 a cousin’s cousin had found themselves in Delhi. We were visiting, too, so my father took it upon himself to visit this cousin’s cousin, one Mr Muker. Of course, it would have been helpful if my father had had a phone number or an address or any details or clues about this Mr Muker. All my father knew was that Mr Muker worked for the government. In India, in the eighties, most people worked for the government; so this information barely narrowed our search. However, my father has never let a lack of information stand in the way of visiting family. He discovered a Mr Muker lived in an adjoining suburb to Manore Uncle. With presents under his arm (a dress for a five-year-old girl and a toy for a two-year-old boy) all six feet two inches of my father, sixteen stone of Manore Uncle and twelve-year-old me placed ourselves upon a 125 cc Bajaj scooter and took to the nocturnal streets of Delhi. We moved around the city like the wind; a slow, slightly lardy wind, and a not particularly comfortable wind, if the truth be told. But in less than an hour, we were knocking on the door of Mr Muker.

Now, there’s something you need to know about Indian hospitality. In polite western society, you would never imagine pitching up at somebody’s house at nine o’clock in the evening unannounced, uninvited, unexpected. The Indian way is the opposite: whoever turns up at your door, whenever they turn up at your door and whoever they may be with are to be welcomed, given a cup of tea at the least, (although whisky or rum would not be considered inappropriate) and would be fed
Indian sweetmeats if not offered a full-blown meal. This perhaps explains the eagerness with which the invading marauders of the British Empire were welcomed; I mean, if a nation is going to give you tea and sweetmeats, there’s every chance they’ll give you their mineral resources and man power, too.

We were ushered in by a rather surly servant. We sat in an empty drawing room, my father still clutching the presents excitedly. To say Mr Muker looked disgruntled would be an understatement. He looked really pissed off. Compared to his harridan of a wife, however, he was sweetness and light. Tea and sweetmeats came without beckoning and the conversation was a little stilted. In an attempt to break the ice, my father handed the presents over hoping to see a five-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy. The children of the house were somewhat older and of slightly different genders. There were two girls, one eight and one nine. The dress for the five-year-old girl may have stretched to fit the eight year old but the gift for a small boy would surely be lost on the elder daughter. However, it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?

Obviously, Mr Muker required some context, some frame of reference for this unsolicited social scenario. My father started explaining who he was. The mention of the mutual cousin and the name Babbi fell on deaf ears. Mr Muker didn’t have a cousin called Babbi. My dad asked whether Mr Muker worked for the Indian government. Not only did Mr Muker work for the Indian government, Mr Muker was the commissioner of traffic for New Delhi and surrounding areas; one of the most influential jobs in the whole of India’s civil service. My dad expressed astonishment at how high Mr Muker had risen since leaving his home town of Faridkot only a few years ago. Mr Muker straightened his back, sat forward in his chair and said
sternly that not only was he not from Faridkot, he had never
been
to Faridkot.