The Rice People

April 9, 2010 | Location: India | Leave a Comment 

A dosa and the spontaneous dance moves of a South Indian waiter led us here to Chennai.

We knew we wanted to visit India as far back as October 2009, when the Diwali lights, Indian sweets and the smiles of Singapore’s Little India unexpectedly charmed us. But it was in Melaka that we encountered the fermented rice pancake that would obsess us all the way from Malaysia to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Five months and three countries later, we finally sat in a South Indian restaurant and ordered a masala dosa. This time, I was the one who felt like dancing.

Due South

The cultural diversity of India boggles the mind. Although they all proudly claim their Indian heritage, the Indians at both ends of the country are separated by language, ethnicity and tradition. As we rode the train slowly from Kolkata in West Bengal to Tamil Nadu’s capital of Chennai, through the cities of Puri, Bhubaneswar, Visakhapatnam and Vijayawada, we traveled in four states, each with its own heritage, cuisine and language. As we made our way south along the coast, the languages became undecypherable, the alphabets alien, the people darker-skinned, supple, graceful. The familiar spices of Bengal gave way to a completely new and exciting blend, with frequent accents of chili, aniseed, asa fetida, cinnamon and fenugreek.

Whereas the northern Indians tend to claim Aryan origins, the southern Tamils are fiercely proud of their Dravidian roots. Hindi, the national language of India, is spoken less here than English, and the state boasts its own movie industry, Tollywood, with its own megastars and blockbusters, distinct from Mumbai’s Bollywood.

Hinduism remains the dominant religion in the south, but Christianity has proven a popular alternative to the rigid caste system. Legend holds that Saint Thomas the Apostle himself made his way here after Christ’s death, and was martyred within the limits of what would later become Chennai. Given the extensive history of the Tamil culture, San Tome, as he is known here, must have encountered people, food and traditions that have persisted from long before the birth of Christ to this day.

The Rice People

Given the starkness of the contrast between South India and elsewhere, it’s no wonder their food truly distinguishes itself as well. Whereas Punjabi cuisine in the north favors bread as well as meats in thick sauce, the south shines with its vegetarian cuisine that revolves around rice. The inventiveness of the South’s rice dishes is truly staggering: rice here is eaten in many forms, some barely recognizable, and all delicious, light, healthy and predominantly vegetarian.

The aforementionned dosa is a thin pancake made of fermented rice and lentil, served with sambal, a spicy soup-like sauce, and a thick coconut chutney, with occasional variations including chili or coriander. Dosa come with a variety of stuffings, including onions, coriander, or masala dosa, stuffed with curried potatoes and spices. The dosa in Melaka was good enough to send us dreaming of South India; the ones in Tamil Nadu confirmed the journey had been worthwhile.

Uttapam, a thicker pancake than the dosa, is pan-fried with vegetables and spices. It resembles a small pizza, and its fluffy, crispy thickness highlights the pleasant sourness of the dough.

Idli, a breakfast favorite, consists of small, oval rice flour patties or dumplings, which you dunk in sambal or coconut chutney. It provides a quick, light and tasty meal. The idli itself proves versatile: it can be deep-fried, or chopped and pan-fried in sauces and spices.

A Meal for the Senses

But the most straightforward yet grandiose expression of the South’s love of rice is, without a doubt, the meal.

A South Indian thali, called “meal” in the south, consists of a mountain of white rice, served heaping on a large, green banana leaf. The rice comes with several tasty vegetarian side dishes, ranging from sweet desserts and buttermilk, to fiery mango pickle, sambal, and thick vegetable curries.

As with all South Indian dishes, it is eaten with the right hand, which should be washed both before and after the meal at the sink provided for this purpose. You use this hand to mix the side dishes in your rice, and to scoop the resulting mixture to your lips.

The banana leaf reputedly imbues the rice and side dishes with its own flavor. Combined with the use of one’s right hand, it provides a surprisingly sensual lunch experience, as you get to feel the temperature and texture of your dishes with your fingertips. After a South Indian meal, utensils seem cold, sad instruments meant to segregate you from the true experience of food.

South Indian meals are found everywhere in Tamil Nadu, and at the unbelievable price of approximately 60 cents for an unlimited serving, they’re a popular lunch option for workers over the whole state.

Songs of the South

We spent two weeks in Chennai, our days punctuated by rice. Through our daily visits to Hotel New Suriyas, we befriended the staff who, in an echo of the waiter who first charmed us in Melaka, broke frequently into song, grinned happily at us, or mock-fought between themselves. As we walked around the Muslim area of Triplicane, we chased the choking heat with fresh fruit juices or lassis, retreating to our room until the evening call to prayer announced milder temperatures.

If we are what we eat, then for a time, we too were of the rice people.

And that’s something worth dancing about.

Where to go

“Hotels” (restaurants) serving South Indian meals are ubiquitous throughout the south, in particular in Chennai; but the one meal that drew us back day after day was at Hotel New Suriyas, near the Comfort Hotel in Triplicane. Their idli, dosa and meals are all above-par in my opinion. The restaurant features an adjoining juice bar, where you can enjoy a fabulous mango lassi or butter fruit juice, when in season.

Debu Takes His Time

March 19, 2010 | Location: India | 2 Comments 

The Honey Bee Bakery & Pizzeria in Puri teems with customers when we get there. It’s fourty degrees outside, though, and the promise of strong coffee, ice-cold gazpacho, and air conditioning is too good to resist. We sit down next to three Hare Krishna devotees in urban clothes, and smile to Wynn, the beaming New Zealand lady whom we keep meeting at every meal.

Helene spent the previous week recovering from stomach problems in Kolkata, so the first time she tried the Honey Bee’s green salad, an intense love affair was born that could only be quenched by two visits a day. When that proved insufficient we got up earlier, so she could squeeze in breakfast and lunch before the bakery closed for the afternoon.

Looking around, it’s obvious it’s gonna take a while before those gazpachos and green salads reach us. You don’t go to the Honey Bee hoping for a quick meal when it’s packed like this. But none of the regulars will tell you that’s a problem. As a matter of fact, it’s something of a feature.

You sit in the window, soak up the air conditioning between two power cuts, read the day’s newspaper, and watch the sacred cows and the bare-chested sadhus walk by outside.

The Rules of Freshness

Tall and supple, with bushy, salt-and-pepper hair and beard, Debu smiles easily as he slips out of the kitchen to take our order. He moves with the slow grace of a man at peace with the world, and his eyes shine when he smiles. When he talks about food, he does so from the heart, and he grows so uncompromising yet so humble that he asks forgiveness for standing by his culinary principles.

“I just cannot prepare things in advance,” says Debu. He will not accept anything short of absolute freshness in the meals he serves in his restaurant. If you order lasagna, he goes way beyond cutting the vegetables on order: he rolls the fresh pasta, too.

Debu’s dedication to freshness shines the brightest in his take on the cold summer soup gazpacho: Debu brings you the soup and the final ingredients separately, so that you may mix them in your soup yourself. Next to your bowl, still cooling down with a purified water ice cube, you get a plate of chopped bell pepper, onion and bread.

In other words, his gazpacho is so fresh, you finish the preparation yourself.

Slow Food

Given Debu’s uncompromising dedication to fresh food, it’s not a surprise that Italian tourists understand him well. When he apologized to Italian visitors for the time it would take to bake their lasagna, they didn’t quite understand the problem. Their country, after all, gave birth to the Slow Food Movement, to which Debu is a natural adherent.

But not everyone feels that way. We witnessed with sadness how some customers seemed oblivious to the charms of the place, and rushed through with an attitude. Given the town’s status as one of India’s four most sacred sites, you’d think the sanctity would rub off on all of its visitors.

If Debu were a chef in a five-star restaurant, he might be afforded the pride and arrogance to dismiss these criticisms. But that’s not Debu’s nature, so he just shakes his head. “I cannot prepare food otherwise. I can’t accept it.” Like an artist driven by passion, he apologizes but refuses to compromise. But at the end of a long day spent in a kitchen exposed directly to the relentless heat of Puri summer, Debu is too sensitive and kind-hearted not to take bad comments pretty hard, sometimes.

It’s made worse when Western tourists think they know better than this gentle Indian man who has not traveled to Europe. One time, a woman got upset when she ordered a moka, and received a stovetop Italian espresso with no trace of chocolate. She began to berate Debu for it, but Italian customers came to the rescue.

“You’re wrong, that’s a moka. We know: we’re Napolitan. That’s what a moka is.”

“This is not a moka! I should know, I work at Starbucks!”

“Starbucks does not make coffee!”

Good Food, Good People

Over the week Helene and I spent in Puri, we spent almost every meal at the Honey Bee. I tried to drag Helene away to other restaurants nearby, but she always pulled us back here, in the land of apple rolls and Italian coffee and green salads. Day by day, we explored Debu’s menu, and were almost always amazed by the results.

Our first surprise happened when Helene ordered a long espresso. Instead of getting an americano like anywhere else in Asia – even in Laos – Dabu nodded his head and brought Helene the real thing for the first time in six months. His coffee – floral and strong – comes from small plantations in the Indian state of Karnataka.

His tomato mozzarella salad features beautiful tomatoes, fresh basil, and a deliciously soft white cheese. “It’s a bit of a cheat,” Debu explained. “It’s not really mozzarella. It’s cow cheese made at high altitude in Darjeeling.” Somehow, that just made the dish and its elegant presentation better.

When I ordered scrambled eggs from the Honey Bee, I just raved about them with Debu. Scrambled eggs are a foodie obsession of mine, and I usually avoid them in restaurants because the cooks never understand how to make them fluffy and a bit humid. Not Debu: he nails it perfectly.

The green salad, Helene’s favorite dish, comes in a baked clay pot, and features either lettuce or spinach, depending on supply. Here, spinach and lettuce are seasonal products, and Debu brings them in from West Bengal when they’re available. His cream of spinach, when available, is a riot of green color and taste.

Day after day, the people who get Debu’s approach come back here. By the time we were ready to leave Puri, going to the Honey Bee Bakery & Pizzeria had morphed into a social event, where we spoke to everyone in the place and smiled at Debu whenever he would peek out of the kitchen. “Where do you think you’re going?” joked a young British tourist as Debu was about to step out after the breakfast rush. “You can’t go! You have to be here to make my lunch in two hours!”

Goodbye Green

On the day we left Puri, I thanked Debu once again for the foodie haven he has created in Puri. Indian food awaited us further down the east coast of India, but Debu’s restaurant gave Helene and me a respite from the heat and the adventure, provided us a home far away from home after six months on the road, where the food was fresh and familiar and delicious.

I know Debu worries about the time it takes to prepare his food. I write this blog post in the hope that he will read it, and look at it when a customer complains it takes too long to make, say, an amazing spinach pizza from scratch. I hope he just lets them walk away, freeing their spot for a soon-to-be regular like I was, who will understand the magic of the Honey Bee.

Keep on taking your time, Debu!

Where to Go

The Honey Bee Bakery & Pizzeria can be found in Puri’s Western tourist area, on Chakra Tirtha (C.T.) Road. The bakery is on the south side of the road, 200m west of Z Hotel.

Puri, in the Indian state of Orissa, is a pleasant town, where many Western visitors spend months at a time, enjoying the slow pace, the beach and the food. Puri is also the host of one of India’s most important pilgrimages sites, Jagannath Temple, a massive temple overflowing with human fervor and devotion a mere five minutes away by auto-rickshaw from the peace of the Honey Bee.

The Milk Alchemist

February 13, 2010 | Location: India | 8 Comments 

Manick boils the fresh buffalo milk in a wok over an open flame. He stirs, thoughtful, coaxing his father’s dessert out of the thickening liquid.

I ask him how he will know when the milk has boiled enough.

“The milk will tell me.”

His laughter, made gravelly by the smoke of biddies, spills from the tea stall, into the chaos of Sudder Street. Manick grins at his own magic.

Chai on the Sidewalk

Helene and I met Manick when we sat on the tired wooden bench of his streetside tea stall, inches away from the endless parade of honking taxi cabs, hawkers, beggars, motorcycles, musical instrument peddlers, rickshaw pullers and the occasional goat herd. Manick’s place stood as an oasis amidst the chaos, and his masala chai – milk tea boiled with cardamom, sugar, cinnamon, ginger, and a few other spices – quickly marked the pace of our days.

At any time between 6 AM and 11 PM, walk west on Sudder Street from Mirza Ghalib Street, and you’ll find Manick busy at his stall, a little distance away from the statue of Indira Gandhi. Tall and narrow, Manick stands straight and firm, a biddie at his fingertips. Although he was born in the Indian state of Bihar, he and his wife raised their five daughters and two sons in Kolkata.

Manick is one of thousands of street food vendors and entrepreneurs in Kolkata, providing for his family through hard, unrelenting work, every single day of the year. Manick exhudes quiet strength, dignity, and pride in his work.

One taste of his yogurt, and you understand why. “This is the best yogurt I’ve tasted,” I told Helene the first time I tried it. “Like, ever.”

I told Manick. His eyes lit up.

Making Ghee

Turns out my appreciation of Manick’s yogurt was no coincidence. Manick makes his own yogurt daily from fresh buffalo milk, delivered straight from the countryside. “One hundred percent original,” he said.

To illustrate the quality of his yogurt, Manick set a curd to cook in a wok over coals. While the curd itself turned dark over the flames, a light green layer of fat began to float to the top. This is ghee, used ubiquitously in Indian cooking, and the byproduct of a long chain of transformations of fresh milk. The product is an allegedly healthier form of animal fat that has more in common with the lightness and color of olive oil than butter.

From a seemingly useless blob of yogurt curd, Manick had extracted a vital and healthy ingredient of Indian cooking. But the man was not done yet; he scraped the blackened bottom of his wok, threw in a pinch of cane sugar, and handed this to me on a plate. I tasted milk, and its caramelized sugar content.

Manick grinned. “This is called India!”

Here, nothing goes to waste. People make use of anything, from plastic bags to the mud on the streets. Manick, himself, keeps a bag of dried mud in his stand, from which he bakes his own charcoal ovens. By the time he’s done with them, they have turned red, baked for thousands of hours into the color of bricks.

Buffalo Milk Magic

Not content with making ghee, Manick makes a deal with us. I pay him in advance for two liters of buffalo milk, and return in the evening.

Manick’s father was a sweets maker, and knew no less than fifty-six sweets recipes. This recipe is one of them: with just two liters of buffalo milk, and a few spoonfuls of sugar, Manick sets about invoking some of his father’s magic. He sets the milk to boil slowly over coals.

After an hour of diligent stirring from Manick, his wife and two of his daughters, the milk acquires a shade of yellow. As the water boils away from the milk, the fat, sweet content begins to thicken. When the mixture reaches the consistency of cooking dough, I’m staring in amazement and disbelief.

After spreading it carefully about the wok until it looks like maple sugar, Manick throws in a few tablespoons of cane sugar, and forms the condensed buffalo milk into small, yellow balls.

He calls them amrit laddu, sweets made of amrit. The ambrosial substance is the antithesis of poison: whereas poison kills all those who ingest it, amrit nourishes anyone who feeds from it. Manick is right to call it thus: with a refreshingly low amount of unrefined sugar, even diabetics can enjoy the amazingly complex, delicate and fabulous concoction he has coaxed out of a simple jug of milk.

Sharing the Magic

I can see in his eyes that Manick is proud of his accomplishment. When he shares some with his daughters, they exclaim their enthusiasm. “Mind-blowing! You should be called Sweets-Maker.”

I joke to Manick that he will now have to bake amrit laddu every day for his children. Manick smiles, but shakes his head: he doesn’t have the money to make the sweets his father made on a regular basis. At $2 per pound, and two hours of preparation, they are too costly for him, both in terms of cost and time. And without a restaurant of his own, Manick cannot easily bake the recipe, which he could hope to sell for $8 at the market with some effort. So he goes on making tea, yogurt, chapati, rice and curry on the side of the street, day in and day out.

By financing the milk, I’ve given Manick a rare chance to practice his alchemy of milk. But sitting at his stall, watching his tired but shining eyes, sharing sweets and smiles with Manick and his family, I have no illusion about which of us was the most generous.

“Every man should know everything,” says Manick, who can bake his own ovens, prepare Ayurvedic medicine for his children, and coax amazing sweets out of milk. Watching him sift another pot of chai, I have to agree: my existence is richer for knowing him.

Where to Go

You can find Manick’s stall on Kolkota’s Sudder Street, near the corner of Chowringhee Lane. You will recognize the stand from the words “TEA STALL AND RESTAURANT” painted on the front.

Manick’s stall is unique on a backpacker-heavy street for catering mostly to locals. During mealtimes, you’ll see them crowding the benches, eating rice and vegetable curry.

I’ve seen a few tourists for whom the experience was a tad overwhelming and perhaps too much of India in one sitting. My one advice to you is this: sit on that bench, and stick with it. Once you taste Manick’s food, it will all be worth it. Plus, you often get to chat with local workers on tea break; and at 12 cents per glass of chai, that’s quite the deal.

Life in Exuberance: Kolkata Moments

February 5, 2010 | Location: India | 7 Comments 

A middle-aged woman in a saree squats barefoot in the dirt of the sidewalk. She sings to herself softly, in spite of her hard life; the sound barely rises above the roar of cabs and the furor of the city’s life.

Her name is India, and I’m in love with her.

Life in Exuberance

For many travelers coming to India, poverty immediately strikes them and overwhelms their impression of the country. This is especially true of Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta,) whose suffering was painfully highlighted by the work of Mother Teresa. The poverty definitely persists in the West Bengal capital; it stares at you at every street corner, not only in the plight of professional beggars, but also in the short, hard lives of manual workers, rickshaw pullers, and tea stall boys.

But left untold in so many tragic travel tales is the joy and exuberance that pushes through. Look close enough at the teeming mass of humanity, and there is joy poking through the grit. Life shines through in the songs of the people, in the laughter and the smiles that soften faces caked by hardship.

It’s not to say that this joy nullifies the hardness of their lives. If anything, it puts them in sharp contrast. But I cannot overstate the beauty of the joy that resonates through the city, day and night. For the first week, it has made my heart soar and ache at the same time, and I spent long moments with inexplicable tears of joy in my eyes.

Instead of trying – and failing – to capture my impressions of Kolkata in broad, unfair statements, here are some of the moments that touched my heart over the last week. I hope they give you a sense of the spiritual wonder, the joy, the pain and the immensity that is India.

Kolkata Moments

Shared Papad
I drink chai on a bench on the sidewalk, oblivious to the screams of car horns and the bells of rickshaw pullers. A mentally handicapped young man walks by, laughing to himself. A cab driver shares his papad with him, and laughs along; and my heart soars with joy.

The Booksellers
It takes one woman and six men to sell me the book. The woman writes an extensive receipt for five minutes. A man next to her sticks a price tag on the back cover; the next one runs the book to the bagging counter, where number three will bag it; the fourth man, smiling, takes my money to the cashier at the back. The sixth snores softly at the counter, his head against a towering pile of books.

The Goatherds
We follow the goatherds the moment they cross under the elevated overpass. For once, the taxis are quiet, weary of startling the flock as it encircles them. The goatherds stop in front of a decrepit church: one of them milks a goat, storing the milk in a plastic water bottle.

The Exhibit
We sit in the grand hall of Kolkata’s Indian Museum. A woman in a red saree approaches Helene. ‘May I take your picture?’ The woman flashes her cellphone. Later, her husband convinces their daughter to stand between us for another photo. Somehow, surrounded by centuries-old works of art, we have become the main attraction.

Sharing Tea
Judging from the peace in his eyes, the tourist on the next bench has been here a while. A rickshaw puller rings his bell for him. ‘Please give this man a chai,’ says the tourist to the stall owner. The owner throws in a cookie as well. The puller grins, eyes bright; he’s lucked out, for a brief moment in his short, hard life.

A Strange Sight
“Look!!” says the Indian teenager; she laughs and points. Ten amazing things jump at me at once, but I can’t see what she wants me to see. “Look! A foreign woman in a saree!” The entire street, blind to the chaos and wonder of its own existence, laughs and waves as the blonde woman walks by.

A Tea Tray
The tea boy hands me steaming chai in two baked mud cups. I burn my fingers on them, and put them down on a low brick wall. The rickshaw puller tugs at the newspaper under my arm; he helps me prop it up as a tray, then sets me off with a grin and a pat on the back. I spill some tea on my shoes, but Helene gets most of it intact.