Food, Glorious Food (Part I)
Yet another milestone in the long-term Asian travel experience is homesickness. They say that after a certain point in one’s travels a particular kind of culture shock sets in, and the only cure is a short expensive stay in a “Western” style hotel with all the amenities, including Western style food. Jeff Greenwald, in his travel books, relates the apocryphal tale of a woman traveler who would phone a local restaurant that actually made pizza but didn’t deliver, order food for delivery, and abuse whatever poor sod was on the other end of the phone for not delivering. The point was not that pizza wasn’t available, but that it needed to be DELIVERED, piping hot, to be a real pizza.
This morning in the Hotel Room de MommyWizards, the topic of foods we miss came up. I realized that I had a mild case of culinary homesickness already, spurred by some foods that were favorites, and others that I craved simply because I can’t have them. They are not available anywhere near this tiny hill town in Northern India, unless Superman (or maybe Krrish?) makes house deliveries.
So here are the foods I miss. Your list may be very different from mine, and that’s okay. For all I know, somebody in the next hill town over is fighting off cravings for haggis, or poutine, or lutefisk.
SUSHI. Even more than pasta, even more than chocolate, I miss the clean tender texture of fresh salmon or tuna. Hell, I’d even settle for a little lox or gravlax, at this point. In the Himalayan foothills the prospect of eating raw fish seems like a fantasy. I actually had a wet dream about being in a place supplied with all of the sushi I could eat. This dream was shortly followed by a nightmare in which I was trapped in a restaurant that promised me sushi, but only had expensive bar drinks available. Go figure. I miss the crispy nori, pickled daikon, tender flying fish roe, the simple, salty taste of sushi cuisine….which reminds me:
SOY SAUCE. The real stuff. From Japan. And stored properly. Refrigeration space is at such a premium for most restaurants that things that don’t absolutely require refrigeration don’t get it. In India this means that soy sauce containers sit on shelves and tables until much of the water evaporates. What’s left is a thick goopy sludge with a concentrated flavor. If the original sauce didn’t come from Japan, the evaporated concentrate bears only a passing resemblance to any salt-and-soy combination I know of.
PIG FAT. In Mexico, at least, the ubiquitous chicharrones were always available. Here, nobody eats pig in any form, except for folks in the big cities, and Goa. This craving is the result of being raised on pure, sho-nuf’ Southern Black cooking–no matter how much traveling I do, no matter how many sophisticated sushi meals I may swallow down, every so often I need those infusions of eggs-cooked-with-bacon, greens-cooked-with fatback, and so on. It’s a pork thang, you wouldn’t understand….
“CHURCH LADY”-STYLE SOUL FOOD. Y’all who went to those church brunches know what I”m talkin’ about. Those groaning steam tables filled with macaroni-and-cheese (made with the cheap government cheese that no gourmet chef can possibly reproduce), “dirty” rice, red beans, greens, okra, pork chops, fried chicken. Okra is in season here–which means every produce vendor in town has bushels of the stuff right now–and there are folks in Rewalsar who can cook it without turning it into a slimy mess. With other discoveries we weren’t so lucky. Poor Joy found “fried chicken” on the menu here in Rewalsar. What finally arrived was a small plate of chicken bits fried up in pakora batter in a way the Colonel would never have recognized.
DENNY’S BREAKFAST. Some folks get cravings for Taco Bell, totally cognizant of the fact that they’re not craving Mexican food. This is something similar. It’s not fine healthy American cuisine–it’s DINER food, a totally different thing. In the States, whenever I feel uprooted from overtraveling or overworking, I usually stop into a place like Denny’s (or the local greasy spoon equivalent) for breakfast. The point is that if you stop into Denny’s for breakfast, you know exactly what you will get when you order. It’s a certain combination of proteins, carbohydrates, grease and salt that you are guaranteed to get, whether you’re in Vancouver, Canada, or Paris, Texas. Crispy hash browns, cooked up with lard and salt; runny eggs over easy (and look! no prospect of salmonella!), lumpy sausages with just the right amounts of pork meat, gristle, and fat…
COLD, CRUNCHY SALADS Spinach and bacon salad, lettuce wedges slathered with creamy bleu cheese dressing, simple spontaneous creations based on whatever’s handy in the refrigerator–aha. In the remoter parts of India, the salad concept suffers from a few drawbacks:
- Eating raw produce is a calculated risk done after giving stuff a thorough washing and peeling. After that much work, you might as well cook it.
- Produce is always subject to geography and meteorology. Corn, in April? Tomatoes in November? Fresh mushrooms in June? Nope, if it’s outta season, it’s outta stock.
- Produce never gets refrigerated here–you’re supposed to buy what you need for today and maybe tomorrow.
- Salad dressing? What’s that? And it’s supposed to take up refrigerator space?
As VIPs (about which Joy has more to say in her blog) we rate an actual refrigerator in our room. So Lena has concocted a cold salad of cucumber, tomatoes, onions, a bit of raw garlic, chunks of canned cheese, salt, oil, and vinegar that does well to stave off the cold-crunchy cravings. Even in restaurants a salad is usually a plateful of cucumber, onions and tomato. The closest thing we ever saw to salad dressing was a jar of mayonnaise Lena spotted, that looked like “preserved cheese floating in seasoned oil”…not an encouraging sight.
BEEF. Cows are revered beings who are allowed to wander where they will, and eat all the garbage they wish. They supply plenty ‘o’ dairy product, in the form of milk, butter, yogurt, and paneer, but are not cultivated for eating purposes. Admittedly after watching a few bovines nose rotten produce out of the gutters, the prospect of vegetarianism starts to look a litle more sensible. But the omnivore in me still hankers for the occasional slab ‘o’ steak, medium rare, with enough blood still in it to indicate the cow probably stopped mooing within the last 5 minutes. Egad, just remembering the steak with blue cheese butter at Sauls delicatessen is enough to get the saliva flowing.
“CHEESES.” YES, PLURAL. As in having a wide variety available. It’s so easy for Bay Area residents to get spoiled about this kind of thing. A good friend of ours works in the cheese department at Rainbow grocery; of a slow Tuesday afternoon I would stop in, and she would treat me to a few tastings of different cheeses that were on sale. Goat cheese from France, stinky and flavorful; little-known creations from Spain; “boutique” cheeses from small farms in the California wine country. Here, well…Swiss? Gouda? Gruyere? Fuggedaboutit. In Rewalsar yer basic cheese choices are four: Paneer–glistening white Indian fresh cheese; Amul canned cheese–the local equivalent to Velveeta, except it’s white; Amul cheese spread–the local equivalent to Cheese Whiz, except it’s white; and chura–a stone-like Tibetan cheese that’s the equivalent of Parmesan. (Go on, guess what color it is.) Tibetan chura is deliberately dried to an adamantine consistency in a bead form so it can be strung on necklaces and carried about; it’s the nomad way. The weather here isn’t conducive to keeping dairy products about in any kind of moist form without refrigeration. Paneer is super-fresh stuff that should be eaten right away; chura, on the other hand, has been known to last for centuries (a 200-year-old specimen went up for auction at Sotheby’s a few years back).
One item I brought to the wives on my trip over was a pound of cheddar cheese powder from King Arthur–when the comfort food cravings get too bad, we make noodles with cheese, and think good thoughts about the kitchens of the West.
