A Brief Critique of Food

Or, "Crib Crib Crib!"

I live in the Greater Boston Area. It is usually bitterly cold, chillingly windy, and depressingly rainy. Since I come from a place that is murderously hot, horribly stuffy, and in equal parts refreshingly and distressingly rainy, it took some polar-oppositising to settle in. F'rinstance, no sooner had I sweated my luggage down a flight of steep stairs and gone to town to buy a table-fan, that the sun went down on the crisp autumn day and the place suddenly became Calcutta in wintertime. I dropped the new fan and scurried for blankets, of which I hadn't any. I slept the night in my school cardigan (which I still wear, six years after) and two thin cotton bedsheets folded double and wrapped tightly around. And woke up the next morning, sweating profusely and gasping for breath in the bleeding bright sunshine. New England is, in short, a very climatically confused place that can't tell it's own sunshine from it's rainclouds.

And matching it every step of the way is its wonderfully "diverse" food. Never before have I seen main courses being advertised as "entrées" on restaurant menucards. Or been expected to eat my salad before I am served the aforementioned "entrées". It's all very disorienting and fascinating, because frankly, I hadn't expected America to be quite this different. But more importantly, I hadn't expected 'foreign food' to put on such completely unrecognisable costumes and still dare to masquerade as authentic cooking. I did not expect to see the day when I tasted the first forkful of a Chinese noodle dish, and thought I'd been served dessert a course too soon. And when I bit into an actual dessert, I certainly did not imagine I would yearn for the quasi-bitter semi-sweetness of Kookie Jar. If there's one thing I can identify as culinarily American, it is the sweetness. The chilli chicken is sweet, the pork fried rice is sweet, the saag paneer tastes like a bowlful sugar has been upended in it, and the pastries can knock a tooth out, easy. Now, some people love it. Clearly the average American does, hence the pervasive sweetness. But so does my friend Deep, him of the savoury Indian street-food patronage. But then he tells me he used to sneak handfuls of sugar into his mouth as a child, so really, what can one expect?

But this sweetness of most things Oriental on the one hand, the deep-fried mayo-dipped burgers on the other, and the ridiculously overspiced curries on the third have driven me up the wall. I shall not even bother to comment on the local biryani. Tossing onions, tomatoes and meat with fully-cooked rice does not biriyani make, my lads. Go back to being an unemployed engineer and leave the sacred cooking to the suitably revential (and talented). People who slaughter biriyani with such careless contempt should be tied to a chair and tickled relentlessly.

But to go back to "driven me up the wall", it's a pity my tastebuds developed in Calcutta. Leaving the city was like having a vital part of my existence torn out. I miss my phuchka and my rolls. I miss the jhalmuri with boiled potato and coconut slices, extra-hot chanachur and chopped onions and green chillies, mixed with a thin tangy-sweet tamarind chutney and topped with a dash of salt and squeeze of the tenth of a bright green lemon, all of it flavoured with a judicious amount of mustard oil. I miss the alur chop and beguni and lonkar chop with their thin outer later of crisply fried byashon (besan). I miss the subtly sweet roshomalai and the hot-off-the-flames roshogolla. Everyone knows only a skilless sweetmaker will try to cover up for it by making the mishtis extra sweet. And by gods, I miss real tea, made by soaking real Darjeeling leaves in boiling water, somtimes with milk and sugar, sometimes with lemon juice, sometimes by itself. If I have to drink one more cup of mango-flavoured green tea enhanced by the flavour of juniper berries and enriched by added antioxidants...I swear there shall be Consequences. Just give me my regular tea , strong enough to beat back a headache with a stick, and thin biscuits to dip into it. On a winter's or monsoon's evening add piping hot phuluri with muri and lonka, and it's within throwing distance of heaven. Gods, with the rising temperatures I even miss titaar daal (a soothing, cooling moog daal cooked with mustard seeds and large pieces of papaya and kumro, which is called "squash" here instead of "pumpkin"), which my mum would have to force-feed me earlier. Give me this day my daily daal-bhaat, preferably cooked by someone else, is all I cry to the heavens these days.

And paradoxically, my own cooking--not to be mocked at in the days of yore--has become a curiously homogenised, undifferentiated mess of overboiled vegetables and overspiced gravy. I can no longer tell the difference between my phulkopir daalna and my alu-beguner jhol. And I've been so far influenced by a growing temporal distance from the subtly spiced, varied Bengali palette that I no longer even care. I merely throw the mess away--a thing I would never have done back home, throwing away food, haw!--and order pizza from the local Greek folks. I detest pizza, but the the shop-people like me and I them, so I suppose there is some inherent goodness to the extra-cheesy, extra-oily meat-filled plate of dough. It's often said in my family that a helping of green chilli paste takes care of below-par cooking. In the absence of green chillies, I suppose a cheerful smile and happy banter makes up for inedibility.

Well, not really. But when I am out of culinary options, I will take the one that comes with the smile. Without 'fries' and 'soda', thank you.

(Get me home! And turn on the monsoons!)