A Kerala Shaadi

Its always a good idea to cultivate marriageable Mallu friends, or at least friends willing to be married to Mallus. The last time this yielded dividends was at Anjali’s wedding – Chennai, but a wonderful, payasam-loaded affair – and it took half a decade to find another candidate.

And so I landed in Thrissur, home to temple, elephants, tons of big fat jewelers and the ridiculously named Lulu Garden Hotel (35 rooms and a helipad) working off my work obligations before jumping into the revelry. I checked in late, only a dull ‘working’ lunch in my belly, but with sleep deprivation and little appetite for adventure decided to eat in (hotel kitchens are usually dull, I thought, but rarely fatal). Two hours later, I was weeping and sniffling like a baby. The food was, much to my surprise, excellent. It was also blazingly, killingly, blazingly (have I already said that?) spicy - even the raita given to cool things off had pieces of chilly. The mutton olathiyathu sang with flavour, the prawn biriyani danced with aromas and the karimeen was worth every bit of its pollichathu - it was, in other words, a thoroughly satisfactory meal for all the fire and brimstone you waded through.

The shaadi was all about mundus and veg food. While my friends tried to figure out how to climb steps with their fancy dresses, I investigated the food options. The cornerstone, of course, was avial – but there was a whole array of rapidly served veggies that I no longer remember the names of. Pumpkin was involved, as was raw mango, pineaple. banana stem and a procession of other unknown vegetables in liquid, paste and dry forms. Rasam, sambar, rice, achaar, all danced about on the banana leaf glammed up with coconut and loads of spices. The two payasams that followed somehow forced its way down overstuffed gullets.

Kerala is one of the great cuisines of the world. Distinctive, delicious and with unending variety; its going to take a lot more than two weddings to get to any level of familiarity here. Unfortunately, its not a food well represented in Mumbai (though there are exceptions to this rule). There’s a huddle of them in the fort area, and a smaller cluster in Mahim. Maybe my next food route will be about those joints.

Hidden Gold

One hardly ever comes across anything worth talking about that has not already been talked about. Mumbai's bloggers are quite an active lot, usually out-writing me with ease. It was with some satisfaction, therefore, that I discovered hidden gold in the heart of Girgaum.

Of course, being entirely undiscovered was too much to ask. I first made aware of it by a MumbaiBoss column by Roshni Bajaj Singhvi but what really intrigued me was that no one else seemed to have even so much as mentioned it anywhere else. Stalwarts like Zomato and Burrp were silent, and every other mention on the great big cloud were rehashings of the same aforementioned column. All other search results spent their time insisting that Sharma Bhelpuri or some such other was better. Golden, it seemed, was hidden even from Google.

Back on my bicycle last week, I headed straight to Girgaum. The directions in the article were a bit sketchy so a bit of asking around led me to Sicka Nagar (yes, that is indeed the name), a red art-deco landmark that must at some point have been quite a talking point. Enquiries (as Wodehouse might have put it) yielded more than I hoped – two golden bhel sellers (apparently a spinoff from the original was operating in the area too). Spinoff turned out to be steps away, and he did indeed have golden bhel – a thick yellow mustardy sauce coupled with flattened (rather than the usual puffed) rice. It was unusual and blazingly spicy but disappointingly pedestrian.

I nearly wrote off the adventure at this stage. You can’t make a tale out of pedestrian, even if it is hidden away from google’s eyes  but fortified by a nice-ish roadside kesar milk, enthusiasm renewed, I set off again - in search, this time, of only the original. Roshni Bajaj Singhvi had warned me that the original managed to survive over seventy years – surely something more than pedestrian must be going on.

Vegetable guy told me that GBH was inside the gates of Sicka Nagar, but all I could see inside was an elaborately decorated building that turned out to be Modern School. After a few minutes of architectural admiration, I refocused my energies and found a kindly security guard to lead me to GBH – and discovered why it was so hard to find. It is, quite literally, tucked inside the awning behind the Sicka Nagar gate – there’s no way to come by it unless you know where to go. I approached a rather unrushed (and empty stall) run by a boy more interested in a DVD player than pushing any bhel my way; the ‘golden’ liquid in plain sight looking far more watery than spinoff’s version did. This looked a very unlikely bearer of any kind of bloggable legacy but at least it was cheap and hard to find so I ordered.

 

 

And the verdict – GBH is much better than spinoff. It is distinctive, flavourful and quite interesting indeed. The crispy flattened rice makes for a nice change from regular puffedrice bhel, and the chutney is quite different from the sweetish tomato punch of normal bhel. Spicy, complex, unusually textured – its certainly worth a 73-year legacy.

Monday: Castles and Casseroles

Carcassone, I was told, attracted a million visitors a year so I decided to add myself to the millions and see what all the fuss was about. The day started bright and crisp and the GPS dutifully sent me hurtling towards my destination. Halfway through, I stopped at a nice bright boulangerie and discovered that croque monsieur was even better than previously experienced.



I found the centre of Carcassone without too much fuss, parked in a nice underground facility and walked about for a bit. There were the usual narrow lanes, the usual medieval buildings, the usual largish church. I found a nice fountain to photograph and a bar full of locals to have a coffee in. I was, to tell you the truth, a little bit disappointed; nothing here seemed worth the millions any more than a hundred other European towns. It was all a bit puzzling. I settled down with a coffee and set out to write an article on technology for a magazine. Wait and see, maybe Cinderella would appear at noon and start dancing, or something.





Next door was a brasserie where I, like all the others in the bar seemed to go for lunch, so I did too. And dutifully ordered what I had been told was THE thing to have - cassoulet. I thought the waitress gave the faintest of shrugs, but I stuck to my guns and eventually a large pot of the stuff did indeed grace my table. I knew it to be a white bean stew, and indeed that is what came, covered with breadcrumbs and baked to a crust. Inside was a leg of duck, a sausage and a piece of pork. I dutifully dug in, and discovered that I had stumbled upon the rarest of French experiences - a boring meal.



It was amazing how dull the cassoulet was. The right ingredients were all in - beans, duck leg, sausage, fatty chunk of pork rib - only the excitement had been left out. This was the top of the line version; you can get one sans confit - no duck, no sausage, I wonder why that exists at all. If anything it reminded me of discount cans of chilli-con-carne from an American supermarket - lots of promise on the label, bland, sweet and unending once you start.

This was turning out to be a bit of a strange day; neither sights nor tastes seem to have gone the way I expected. Scratching my head, I turned to Wikipedia for help, and was immediately informed that the town is, in fact, not the Carcassone I had come to see. That was a fort outside the city, a monstrosity of towers and walls that I had somehow failed to see on the way in. Armed with this insight, I made short work of locating it, and spent the rest of the afternoon walking the ramparts.



There is no myth in the million-tourist story; even the chilly depths of a cold wave on a Monday in October had not kept the hordes out. After days of having places pretty much to myself, I was finally faced with competition for views, photo angles, restrooms. The castle was quite worth the effort, thoug - very imposing, massive even by Indian standards and extremely well preserved. Unlike other places I had seen in France, Carcassone was a true monument - no one actually lived in the castle any more. It was full of restaurants, patissiers, cholocatiers, creperies, trinket shops...and lots of cassoulet.

This struck me first as odd, then increasingly as very wierd. For something I had just compared to gloop in a can, the French seemed to take it very seriously. Cassoulet seemed a bit of religion here; every other eatery advertised it prominently, indeed made quite a fuss about how great their version was. Whole restaurants where pegging their reputations on cassoulet, advertising awards for cassoulet, even displaying a route cassoulet (which seemed to imply pilgrimages of the stuff). Either the French had visited mickey mouse once too often or, again, I was missing something.

One word that seemed repeatedly to attach itself to cassoulet was Castelnaudary. I first thought it was something to do with the castle (an impression helped along by the innumerable signs for the stuff inside the castle) but I was wrong. It was, the road signs told me, actually a town - and obviously cassoulet from there was a really big deal because even the road sign showed a steaming bowl. Where other towns had drawings of churches, castles or mountains, Castelnaudary was firmly about the stew. Curious about the fame of the stuff, I steered off the highway and was immediately greeted by a McDonalds fighting with not one but two huge cassoulet signs - you certainly could not mistake the belle of the ball here. Six or seven more signs (and many promises of traditionelle later) I was in the centre of town. The shortest of walks from the parking lot got me to Maison du Cassoulet (cuisine de bistrot & specialites, six branches nearby).



This time, the dish did redeem itself. Still beans, leg of duck, sausage and fatty pork rib but this was not sweet, tasteless gloop. And everyone, including the people reading French newspapers and rolling the merci effortlessly off the tongue was ordering it (six of the nine people at that restaurant certainly, in what seemed the only open place in town). Unlike the mush I had previously been subjected to, these beans had some actual flavour. It wasn't sweet, it wasn't gluey, it was, in fact, quite nice.

Here's my verdict on the matter - yes it is indeed quite nice. The beans are soft, whole tiny bites infused generously with flavour. The duck and the pork, soaking in starch, are juicy, and melting. When in Castelnaudary there is absolutely no reason not to order it again. If the cassoulet were to tap me on the shoulder and say hello, I would greet it warmly - I would not, however, be standing under any windows hoping for a glimpse.