Simple Pleasures
Brun pao, fresh and crusty, lavished with butter and honey to accompany a steaming hot cup of chai. Or batasa biscuits, buttery and flavoured with cumin, dropped into the tea up until just the right moment when the tea has been sucked into each part of the biscuit but just before the structure gives up and dissolves into the dregs.
Khichdi, hot and almost porridge like, with a dollop of ghee and some gongura pickle or homemade mango chundo on the side. Or the same khichdi, a little firmer perhaps, not quite so porridgey, with a serving of spicy sweet and sour prawn patio, almost but not really a chutney.
Freshly fried fish head, rawas preferably. So that the bones are crispy but crunchy and the brain melts in your mouth. Or the same fish head, cooked in a curry until the cheeks are of the most delicate texture and the brain is a delicious mass of fat and pure taste.
When the winter green garlic is in season, the sauteed chopped garlic and green chillies to which are added cream and eggs and milk to make soft, creamy scrambled eggs. Or the same garlic, chopped in large quantities and cooked into mutton mince with loads of ghee and green masala.
A freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. Crisp edged, chewy centre with chocolate bits still melting inside. Or bread, just out of the oven, smelling so heavenly that it has to be eaten right there and then. Or a well made sponge cake, light and fragrant with vanilla or orange peel.
Coffee. Bittersweet and strong, a splash of milk to give it depth. With the rain battering the trees outside and the wind howling between the cracks in the windows. Or frothy, milky and sweet, served in a little tumbler and dabara set as good filter coffee ought to be. After a breakfast of steaming idlis and vadai, or a crisp ghee roast dosai. Tea as I remember it at a wayside stall on a plantation going up to Kodaikanal. A mist rising up the valley, the ghats green and lush, the early morning air with a fresh bite to it, washing the upturned face with a needle sharp haze of rain. The cup of hot tea, brewed from leaves picked recently from the surrounding bushes. The taste of it, indescribable and unforgettable.
The thin, crisp potato wafers and salli (potato slivers) as only a few remaining shops in Mumbai can fry up. The closest equivalents are British crisps and American chips. Though both these are slightly thicker and weightier than our light as air wafers. And salli has no equivalent at all, not even in the rest of India. It is addictive, and like bacon or butter, makes everything better. You sprinkle a handful over spicy kheema or apricot mutton or even just plain yellow dal and rice and the salli elevates each to a new height of gastronomic perfection. A bowlful of salli, with a few drops of tomato ketchup added, makes for a crispy yet slightly soggy clandestine snack.
Deep fried onion slivers, dark brown and golden, caramelized until sweet and with a crunch beyond compare. Sprinkled over a mound of white rice and a plain yellow dal. A tadka of garlic and jeera in pure ghee. Or the mutton floss which is again so unique to Bombay’s Bohri community. Spiced mutton is cooked until dry, further dehydrated under a hot sun and then shredded to the finest possible floss. A handful of this, like salli, transports ordinary scrambled eggs or dal or just about any dish to the realms of gastronomic Valhalla.
There are more not so simple pleasures – biryani, malai na khaja, banoffee pie, but these are for another day, another post.
Simple pleasures. Not to be indulged in every day, except for the tea, but which come around season after season, little sparkling highlights that transform the mundane into the magical, that keep a jaded cook enthusiastic and eager to explore the world of food and create the next meal.