Is Indian cuisine showing the way for our planet?
India is in a wonderful position to teach the rest of the world about how we will have to enjoy our food in the future. Its population of 1.45 billion is growing and increasingly confident. The average age is under 30. And of that huge number, roughly 40% are vegetarian – not for modern, fashionable reasons, but often for long, firmly held religious beliefs.
The consequences are immediately obvious. Every menu has to have a vegetarian option. There is no question of a chef just sticking a couple of vegetarian dishes on to the menu as a sop; that would be economic suicide. There is of course the argument that with a market of five or six hundred million vegetarians, chefs in India have a much greater choice of ingredients than their counterparts elsewhere. The many spices add several extra dimensions to whichever vegetables the chef chooses, and India has a long history of great recipes for vegetables. But with meat-farming proving an impediment to the environment and the world’s oceans being all too swiftly overfished, an increase in vegetarian cooking looks essential.
Here are three examples of Indian chefs’ ingenuity with vegetables: first of all in New Delhi; then at 33,000 ft en route from Delhi to Mumbai; and finally at an outstanding restaurant in Mumbai that just happens to be vegetarian.
The Chambers, New Delhi
The Chambers is one of several posh restaurants in the Taj Hotel, on the eighth floor, with terrific views across a city looking gloriously, and atypically, verdant after the monsoons, as you can see in the main picture above. It is one of several outlets managed by executive chef Arun Sundararaj, a man blessed with a constant and heartfelt smile and an obvious love of food and feeding his many customers.
He came across to our table, as our hostess knows him, and offered to suggest a few dishes for our lunch, a proposal to which we happily agreed. Our main course was a trio of excellent kebabs – prawn, lamb and nut – all of which were first class, but these three dishes were outclassed by the vegetable dish Sundararaj sent along.
Kurkuri bhindi is a quintessentially Indian way with okra or ladies’ fingers. This relatively simple dish features this green vegetable sliced into the thinnest of strips, covered in spices, and deep-fried so that it becomes a light brown with the green just peeping through. It was absolutely delicious and apart from the spicing and the heat of the deep frying, relatively easy to prepare at home.
Here is the recipe, with thanks to Sundararaj and Prashant Singh. Incidentally, when I first complimented Sundararaj on this dish, his response was that it is invariably the recipes of his vegetarian dishes that his non-Indian customers ask for.
Kurkuri Bhindi (serves one)
80 g bhindi (okra)
20 g gram flour
30 g cornflour
2 g salt
2 g red chilli powder
2 g crushed whole coriander
2 g chaat masala
2 g coriander powder
2 g turmeric powder
30 ml oil
Slice okra very thin lengthwise. Mix together the flours and spices and add the okra slices, tossing to coat.
Heat the oil in a deep pan, then fry the okra until golden. Drain and serve hot.
Air India, Delhi to Mumbai
The breakfast menu in business class was initially as baffling to me as it was to prove enticing. There was upma with coconut chutney, idli with sambar and a side dish of aloo-stuffed paratha. The first is a dish of porridge made from Kerala semolina with plenty of nuts through it. Idli is another common breakfast dish of fluffy cakes served with a lentil stew, a sambar. The third is similar to a pancake and was served stuffed with spicy potatoes.
Each is nutritious, inexpensive and easy to serve. Collectively and individually they made for an excellent breakfast, one that does not require bacon, sausages or eggs (has anybody enjoyed their eggs at 33,000 ft?). It was food that would have delighted David Stockton, the man in charge of British Airways Culinary Council on which I served for a decade alongside chefs such as the late Michel Roux, Mark Edwards, Richard Corrigan, Shaun Hill and Australia’s Liam Tomlin.
Having read their recipes and tasted their proposed dishes, Stockton would analyse them according to one unchangeable principle which he dubbed ‘DOB’, letters which stood for ‘doable on board’. This was the one criterion which every dish had to pass. It seems to me that very many Indian vegetarian dishes meet this vital – and obvious – criterion.
Soam, Mumbai
Mumbai, effectively a bustling city under constant construction, houses over 22 million inhabitants including an extremely voluble and highly passionate number who care about what they eat and drink. They seem quick to praise and equally quick to criticise.
When I mentioned one evening at a wine dinner at the justifiably popular Masque restaurant that I had had lunch at Soam, there was universal approval round the table.
Soam was opened almost two decades ago by Pinky Chandan Dixit. Its location on a street corner in the Chowpatty district must have been appealing, even if its interior, up a short flight of stairs, appeared less so. But over time she and her team have circumvented this challenge by laying out this workmanlike restaurant’s essentials in a highly functional and appealing way. In the main room there are rows of tables, comfortable chairs, a fluid cast of smartly dressed floor-moppers and waiters with those in yellow shirts carrying the takeaway food out for delivery. Supervising them all is one man whose outsized stomach must to a certain extent bear tribute to the excellent quality of Soam’s kitchen.
The menu is entirely vegetarian (and Soam does not accept bookings) but there was a buzz in the room from the outset with a central table occupied by nine Indian women. The restaurant also makes full use of Indian craftsmanship in the pewter platters on which all the food is served. Large, flat leaves of sal trees are dried and stitched together to act as most effective place mats. And then there is the menu.
Soam’s menu is vast and draws its inspiration from all over India, but principally from Gujarat. We began with dahi puri, crisp shells stuffed with potatoes, onions, tomatoes and curd; delicious paanki, wafer-thin yellow lentil pancakes cooked in banana leaves which the waiter peeled off before serving us, as below; a farsan platter, a Gujarati-inspired array of steamed and fried snacks including delicious spinach samosas; shakarkand chaat, a dish of sweet potatoes topped with pomegranate seeds and chutneys; and turiya patra, a dish of green gourds topped with garlic, ginger, lemon – and chillies, of course.
By now, we were extremely satisfied, but not completely as I announced that it was my third day in India and I still had not eaten any kulfi, a situation that was immediately remedied with an order for a saffron and pistachio kulfi and a malai chikki version of these sweet Indian ices that was deliciously made of roasted peanuts and jaggery. I paid a bill for three of 3,180 rupees (£32.70), without service but including one lassi, extremely happily.
The UK has shown that it has the enthusiasm and the appetite for modern Indian food in the warmth with which it has embraced over ten branches of Dishoom. Soam would be equally welcome, and possibly even better for the future of the planet.
The Chambers Business Club, Taj Mahal Hotel, 1 Mansingh Road, New Delhi, India; tel: +91 116656 6162
Soam Babulnath Road opposite Babulnath Temple, Chowpatty, Mumbai, India; tel: +91 98199 90400
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.