Floyd’s

India

Keith Floyd

Location photographs by Kim Sayer

Introduction

Once upon a time a 14-year-old boy caught a perch in a lake near Bishop’s Lydeard in Somerset. It was late summer, early autumn. There were blackberries in the hedgerows and beechnuts underfoot. In his tackle bag the young angler had a loaf of stale bread from the Golden Hill bakery in Wiveliscombe. This he soaked in water to make small pellets of bread paste for bait. He had cycled 12 miles from before dawn to be at the lake at sunrise. By noon his keep net contained six perch, one crutian carp and two small tench.

Contented, he opened the saddle bag on his bicyle to take out the sandwiches that his father had prepared. The thermos flask of coffee was there with a twist of blue sugar paper with sugar inside, but not the sandwiches. He had forgotten the picnic, but he did have a packet of 10 Nelson filter-tipped cigarettes and a box of Swan matches.

With his sheath knife, he scaled, de-finned and gutted a couple of perch. He cut some twigs from a tree and made things that later in life he discovered were kebab sticks. He picked blackberries and shelled beechnuts and stuffed them into the soaked stale bread, then he formed the bread into patties and toasted them over a fire of pine cones. He speared the fish on the twigs and sat cross-legged as he held them over the fire until they were cooked. With his hands, he ate the scorched fruit-and-nut-stuffed bread patties and succulent morsels of barbecued perch.

A hundred years later, by the most bizarre route, that boy became a restaurateur and what is obscenely called, not only obscenely but totally without justification, a television celebrity chef. Over 16 or 17 years he travelled the world, eating, cooking and learning, watching the legs being ripped off live frogs in a Singapore market, drinking the blood and the still-pulsating heart of a cobra in Vietnam, cooking salmon fishcakes wrapped in pig’s caul in Northern Ireland, staring at the Southern Cross in the top end of Australia, eating ribs of beef and living in fear of being bitten by a king brown (one of the world’s most poisonous snakes–Australia has eight out of ten of the most poisonous ones). He cooked pasta in Bologna, couscous in Morocco, moussaka in Greece, jambalaya in New Orleans, paella in Spain, bouillabaisse in France, dumplings in Prague, goulash in Budapest, puffins in the Arctic Circle, bear on the Russian border, carp in Czechoslavakia, hog’s pudding and lava bread in Wales, salmon and haggis on the banks of the river Tay, Nile perch stuffed with raisins and nuts in Luxor, and freshwater crayfish cooked in beer in Sweden on a mad midsummer night. He prepared tom yang kum in Bangkok and beef rendang in Kotabura in Malaysia, stewed wildebeest in a poiki pot in Zambia, cooked cakes and schnitzels in Vienna, cooked pig’s trotters (crubeans) and bacon and cabbage in Cork city, and the rest and more.

Weary of airports and hotel lobbies, taxis and studios, absurd locations and television directors, producers and book editors who know absolutely bog all about the subject (except that it is popular)[not us, surely? Eds], this boy–who is now a man but still remembers being 14 and remembers the words of Confucius, ‘Give a man a fish and he will live for a day, teach a man to fish and he will live forever'–has had enough. He decides to move to the Mediterranean, where the olive, the lemon, the tomato, the aubergine and the wine are the jewels in the glittering culinary crown. Then, one fine day, he gets a fax, ‘Go and do a series on India', it says. ‘I don’t know anything about India', he replies. ‘Don’t worry', they say. ‘We will send you all the information. All you have to do is pop on to a plane and get cooking.’ And so they did. The facts as presented to me by Nick Patten, my director, and my esteemed researcher, Raj Ram, I have incorporated into my letter from India that starts on page 12.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

Letter from India

Kerala…sketches from coconut country

Goa

Madras (now known as Chennai)

Bombay (now known as Mumbai)

Rajasthan…of polo, midnight feasts and other stories

Calcutta and West Bengal

The Punjab

The Recipes

Madame Masala

The Vexed Subject of Rice

Thali

Chicken Dishes

Tandoori Dishes

Fish

Meat Dishes

Vegetable Dishes

Chutneys, Pickles and Relishes

Sweets and Drinks

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

Letter from India

Kerala…sketches from coconut country

The big orange sun is rising slowly, illuminating the hazy morning as the plane begins a series of long, slow, gentle swoops downwards to Cochin airport in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Endless coconut plantations shimmer grey-silver, slate and green as the sun washes through whisps of cloud and beams on endless meandering waterways, alternately gold and silver, stretching far away. On the slopes there are coffee and tea plantations. Whitewashed colonial Portuguese or Dutch churches are scattered in clearings. Neat villas and verandahed farmhouses pop up in shafts of bright sunlight. Cows, bullocks and goats wander across extinct dried-up deltas that criss-cross the verdant landscape. The twisting waterways and lagoons give way to huge wide rivers and estuaries. Big rusting ships glide lazily along, while all manner of brightly coloured ferries, fishing boats and traditional craft, lanteen-rigged, double-ended, high prows and sterns sweeping up like a cobra poised to strike, sail serenely, outrageously overladen with mountains of hay or sculpted pyramids of coconuts, precariously but precisely stacked, edging steadily into harbour.

As the plane sweeps low over the water for its final approach, I can see loincloth-clad, sinewy men throwing big circular nets from the tiny narrow canoes under the long concrete bridge that the spans the mainland and Willingdon Island. The bridge is teeming with pedestrians, turmeric-coloured tuktuks and brightly painted, overladen trucks piled high with hessian sacks of rice and pepper, coconuts or bananas. On top of their cargo, their backs to the oncoming traffic, sit the workers, huddled against the morning smog and dust, their mouths wrapped in bright bandannas.

Images from Kerala.

Even at this early hour, the air is hot and slightly choking as we walk across the tarmac of the neat yellow airport. The runways are fringed with coconut palms and, although quite new, the airport buildings have the quaint, unhurried air of a genteel colonial outpost.

You present papers, tickets, passport and boarding cards several times to officials, soldiers and policemen. They are polite, insistent and bewildering. Behind the barrier in the baggage hall, hotel touts, porters, relatives, more soldiers, taxi drivers, nuns, hippies and beggars jostle. In the confusion I am met by two, but rival, chauffeurs, each sent by a different company to pick up Tess, my wife, and me and our 12 pieces of luggage. A polite man in a safari shirt and pressed chinos, carrying a clipboard and briefcase, settles the dispute, I think! But do I pay him too?

One driver will take Tess and me, and the other our luggage, but not before our trolleys have been hijacked by about six itinerant porters. Lesson one: carry bundles of small denomination notes or hold on to your luggage like hell and, more importantly, make sure the man who says he is here to escort you is genuine! They all want to take you somewhere, so don’t arrive drunk or you may end up anywhere!

The aerial view I had enjoyed as we came into land appears. But soon we are bouncing along the centre left or right of the road, charging at oncoming window-less, garish buses like a wounded buffalo or swerving past on the inside of fume-belching trucks and weaving crazily between the streams of tuktuks, scooters and motorbikes, wildly and narrowly missing the oxen, buffaloes, cows and goats (goats, aka mutton, not lamb, on menus). Huge elephants, carrying their breakfast under their trunks–they eat about 300 kilograms of fodder per day–pad morosely towards their daily toil.

And all the while our driver, Johnny P.J. (as I came to know him in the course of our visit), has his hand firmly pressed on his five-tone horn.

I light up a fag, my first for hours, shut my eyes and hope for the best.

The tossing, turning, jolting, stomach-churning jeep slows down. After nearly an hour of relatively rapid progress, we are entering the morning rush in Cochin. The din, mayhem and confusion is infernal, yet strangely peaceful. There is a gentle feeling. Brightly clad women and neatly uniformed school kids walk steadily along the dusty streets. The stalls and shops are sleepily opening. Mud forecourts are being swept with short-handled stick brushes. The traffic is, in fact, not aggressive, it is just the noise from their horns, not the drivers themselves. It seems to be a case of let live, let die, but without malice of any kind. I ask Johnny P.J. if he knows somewhere good where we can stop for breakfast.

He shakes his head sideways, and a few moments later pulls up in front of a single-storey building on the corner of a very crowded junction.

‘Why are we stopping?’ I ask.

‘You said breakfast.’

Now that’s a curried egg!!

‘But, you said No’, I reply.

He shakes his head sideways again. I am beginning to understand. He opens the door and we duck into the low doorway of the Hotel Unikrishna.

Above faded red formica tables on spindly and teetery metal legs, three-winged fans spin lazily from stretched wires to stir the fetid air, while chattering loinclothed men squat, right-handedly eating their breakfast.

Waiters, barefoot or in sandals, carry steaming tin plates. In a corner behind a ramshackle barthe car (tea) boys juggle with long-spouted tin teapots, a huge urn of boiling milk and a cauldron of boiling water, pouring both milk and tea from a great height simultaneously into glasses and tin mugs with the panache of a New York city cocktail barman.

I have not been able to take curried eggs seriously as a dish because of the Goon Show catch phrase, ‘No more curried eggs for me’, but hard-boiled eggs masala — i.e. with a curry sauce–served with uppama (a cake of steamed semolina stuffed with curry leaves, mustard seeds and chillies) and coconut and coriander chutney is a terrific way to start the day. (In fact, I was so taken with spicy vegetarian Indian breakfasts that I did not eat a European-style breakfast for the entire two and a half months of my visit.)

There are other good dishes too, such as idli, a steamed rice sponge cake served with vegetable masala, chickpeas, lentils and potatoes in a rich onion and tomato-based gravy; appam, a rice flour pancake with spicy potatoes simmered in coconut milk and chillies; and idiappam, thin rice noodles garnished with grated fresh coconut, served with black bean masala. These and many, many other dishes are available for an average cost of a few pennies.

I drink fresh lime juice with soda and salt (if you like sweet drinks, thin honey can be substituted for the salt). The tea, made strong and with hot boiled milk, is too rich for me. There are a dozen cooks in the lean-to shack that is the kitchen. It is fiercely hot and gloomy, with just a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Before a long low stone, through which blazes a fire fuelled by wood and coconut husks, the cooks squat, sweating over huge brass or aluminium pots, stirring the contents. They wear only a small piece of grubby sheet tied around their waist. In another corner a boy sits cross-legged, peeling and chopping a mountain of tiny, tangy red shallots. On makeshift griddles over wood fires, cooks are rolling out pancakes, cauldrons bubble and gurgle, and steam rises chokingly into the ceiling with the acrid taste of eye-watering wood smoke. The tin plates, once empty, are rinsed under a cold water tap mounted on the wall above an open drain. A veritable black culinary hole of Cochin and not a place for the weak-stomached or the faint-hearted.

After breakfast we visit the banana market and the produce market, which is dirty, fly-infested and stinking like the fetid, polluted river Styx, yet peopled by brightly dressed, cheerful shoppers who stare curiously, uncomprehendingly at me as I do the director’s bidding. For example, buying a bunch of curry leaves four times from the same stallholder, who has clearly not been on a television course — much to the frustration of Nick, the director — and, instead of obediently serving me in this absurd way (with no explanation as to why), keeps looking at the camera. A cardinal sin in a director’s eyes!

Just as the stallholder has recovered from this bizarre intrusion into his daily business, Kim, our stills photographer, manifests himself from behind the bewildered crowd of onlookers and asks him to repeat the process. ‘Please, just for me, if you don’t mind. Thank you.’ He clicks the shutter. The man relaxes.

‘Just one more, please. No, please don’t look at the camera. Just look at Mr. Floyd.’

I can sense him thinking, ‘Who the is Mr. Floyd’.

‘Thanks, lovely. I’m just going to change the lens.’

I can hear the man thinking ‘Change the lens. For a bunch of curry leaves? Why the?!’

‘Terrific, thank you. Now I’ll just do a wide angle. No, don’t look at the camera. Just explain to Mr. Floyd the joy of um…’ (aside to me, ‘What are those things?’)

‘Curry leaves.’

‘Oh, yes, curry leaves.’

Click, click.

‘Thank you.’

Throughout the hot, hazy afternoon we tramp round to the pepper exchange, take tuktuk rides and shoot emotive pictures of this bustling city. As the sun begins to sink, even Big Mike, the camerman, is wilting under the weight of his camera and the oppressive heat. Gratefully, we clamber into our vehicles and head, albeit slowly, through dense cacophonous traffic and the streaming pedestrians back to the tranquillity of our hotel, a bath, change of clothes, a stiff drink and dinner. We have been travelling and working since 3.00am. and by 9.00pm everyone in the crew has gone to bed. Tomorrow we start at 4.00am.

From the balcony of our room, I overlook the outlet of the Vembanad Lake, which flows into the Arabian Sea. Across the sound, the lighthouse flashes its pale light, occasionally illuminating a ghostly container ship slipping out on the night tide to the Middle East, Africa and beyond. The rooks that chattered so harshly in the red-flowered Mayflower trees are asleep and silent, and a security guard in a neatly pressed uniform is leaning against a tree having a smoke as he stares across the black water. I finish my drink and climb happily into a cool, firm bed.

Situated along India’s southwest coast, Kerala is a lush, green tropical paradise. From the fabled Malabar Spice Coast, it stretches east to the mountain peaks of the Western Ghats. Kerala is 603 kilometres long but only 75 kilometres wide at its broadest point. The interior is riddled with inland waterways known as the backwaters, extending from the coast far inland and, as in Venice, these act as roads. Houses and schools are built on the banks and people travel by boat and bursting water buses. These areas are full of coconut palms and paddy fields — rice is Kerala’s main grain and is eaten at every meal. Indeed, Kerala means ‘Land of the Coconuts’, and coconut is a common flavouring in the local food. Another widespread tree is the curry leaf tree, whose sweet and spicy leaves give the local dishes a distinctive aromatic flavour. The local flavourings of coconut and spices are combined with meat, fish and vegetables in dishes such as prawn ularthiyathu (prawns in coconut milk), beef ularthiyathu (a dry beef curry), or vegetable stew (called avial), traditionally garnished with quickly fried fresh curry leaves (see pages 114, 134 and 155).

The contrast between the little communities and villages clustered along the water’s edge, or in cleared compounds under the coconut palms and cashew trees, and the city is strikingly vivid. The shallow waterways are covered in lilies and, as you glide past the little settlements with their neat gardens of vegetables and the black pigs, chickens, ducks and goats munching in the undergrowth, kids are playing cricket with homemade bats and bamboo sticks for stumps. Women, waist-deep in water, beat and rinse the washing. Men throw nets from narrow canoes. Huge, brilliant kingfishers swoop like Mirage jets just above the tranquil water and nilgiri birds — known as the laughing thrush–screech hysterically in the rich, tangled bamboo. School children, immaculate in blue shorts or skirts, white shirts and blue ties, clamber on to the little ferries that cross the river to take them home from school.

Hard work – but the coconut is essential in the Indian kitchen

While rice and coconuts are the main crops, on the higher ground grow the more valuable coffee, tea, cocoa, rubber, pepper and cardamom. Kerala is the home of many spices and these have attracted merchants from all over the world. It is the natural habitat of black pepper and cardamom, and ginger and turmeric are also grown. India produces one third of the world’s pepper and much of it comes from Kerala. Before the Portuguese introduced chillies into India in the 16th century, the Indians only had pepper to heat up their dishes. There is a interesting wholesale spice market in Cochin and the city also has the distinction of having the first church built by Europeans in India, St Francis Church, which was started in 1503. Tropical fruits are also abundant in Kerala, in particular pineapples and bananas, including the rare red-skinned variety that is supposed to be good for your health.

All the while, almost in a dream, I am sitting on the shaded deck of a highly polished and varnished rice barge, sipping a cool beer under a lazy fan, waiting for my meal of cabbage and mustard seeds cooked in coconut milk, beetroot with chillies, fresh coconut bread and chicken. This long, elegant craft once transported rice and fruits, nuts, bananas, hay or building materials the length and breadth of the area. In former times the hulls were fastened with coconut twine. Not a rivet or a metal fastening was used and, on the open stretches, a single, huge, pregnant sail drew them gracefully along. Today, we drift gently along with a 25hp outboard motor fixed on the side, and where once the rice was stored, there are now quaint, charming, wooden bedrooms and a plant potted in a brass urn. This is paradise.

Or, rather, it would be if I did not have to do pieces to camera and pose, cheerfully, thoughtfully, happily or excitedly as I deliver what are supposed to be words rich in information, with wit and enthusiasm, and describe my food without speaking with my mouth full, or having a fag! OK, it’s one hell of a job. But, as they say, someone has to do it.

Looming suddenly round the bend is a huge floating hay rick 6 or 7 metres high, amazingly piled on to a narrow-beamed, 12-metre rice boat. The hay overhangs the bulwarks either side. It has been loaded on to the boat with incredible precision and it passes us without the slightest wobble or even the remotest chance that it could topple over. One man is sitting smoking on the long-necked prow, another sits in the stern, his feet trailing in the water as he steers the tiny outboard engine that propels the vessel.

Apart from some birds laughing in the jungle and the lap of the water rushing under the hull, all is peaceful. Bugger the director. I think I’ll have a fag and a slurp.

The deck hand places a bottle of Indian whisky, a bottle of mineral water and a bucket of ice on the mahogany table. The sun is going down fast over the Chinese fishing nets, their cadaverous cantilever limbs loom in a sinister way like huge praying mantises in the fast-falling dusk. The coastline is dotted with these vast fishing nets that were introduced to the area by merchants in the time of Kublai Khan. Consisting of five teak poles rising up to 30 metres in the air, they scoop up fish as they swim by at high tide. The nets are considered so valuable that brides’ families even offer them as dowries in marriage.

Fish is the speciality here and makes up a large part of the Keralan diet. Munambam Harbour is the location of one of the many local fish auctions. Fishing boats that left in the middle of the night return in the late afternoon as the sun casts its golden evening hue over the Arabian Sea. Boats crowd the docks, five or six deep, and as soon as the day’s catch hits the land the auction starts. The noise is terrific as buyers shout out prices and fishermen haggle over the value of the catch. The nearby prawn factory has no mechanisation at all. About 160 women squat on the ground, peeling prawns at lightening speed and sorting them into different sizes. They are paid by weight so they wield their sharp knives with superb precision and can peel up to 60 prawns a minute.

Soon the idyll is over and it is time to start the job for which I have travelled to India: to learn to cook Indian food. At 9.00am, two days later, I present myself to the executive chef of the luxury Taj Malabar hotel on Willingdon Island, M.A. Rasheed (where I am, of course, staying in unbridled luxury with Tess and the rest of the gang), put on my apron and begin to learn about masalas. Talk about walking over hot coals, more like walking over hot chillies!

Opposite India’s opening batsman, Lords 2012… Below left to right Floating down the backwaters. Cooking on the beach. At the fish market.

Give a man a fish and he will live for a day, teach a man to fish and he will live forever. Chinese proverb. Chinese nets, Fort Cochin.

Goa

From Kerala we went north–to Goa. There we had a lot of fun on our brief visit. We stayed at the Taj Fort Aguada beach resort where we were given a fabulous bungalow which had been built, along with several others, specifically for visiting heads of state for a Commonwealth conference some years previously. I was quite tickled to be given the bungalow that Mrs Thatcher had stayed in. This was the second time our virtual paths had crossed. The last time was in the bodegas (cellars) of Gonzales Byas in Jerez, Spain where I was invited to sign a barrel in the hall of fame adjacent to a barrel signed by Mrs T. Please note this is not a sign of my political leanings in any sense of the word, but I think it is about time she came back as the President of Great Britain.

Goa is a tropical idyll with superb sandy beaches, which have made it a favourite winter sun destination. Colva Beach, 25 kilometres of pure white sands, is one of south Asia’s most spectacular beaches. The beaches are, however, only part of the picture. Inland is a lush patchwork of paddy fields and coconut, cashew and areca plantations. Further east are the jungle-covered hills of the Western Ghats and the drier Deccan Plateau. The Dudhsagar waterfall on the Goa/Karnataka border is the second highest waterfall in India — 600 metres from top to bottom.

The tiny state of Goa feels quite different from the rest of India, due to the fact that for 451 years, while the rest of India was under Mogul and British rule, Goa was a Portuguese stronghold. The influence of the Portuguese occupation is plain to see through the charming brightly painted villas and farmhouses in the pretty towns and villages. It is this southern European influence that is said to account for the difference in the general attitude of its people and the food that they eat. Wherever you go, you can find traces of Portuguese domination. The food blends a Latin love of meat and fish with India’s predilection for spices. Goans add vinegar to many dishes, giving them a very distinctive flavour. Alcohol is also prevalent — more than 6,000 bars around the state are licensed to serve alcohol, including the local brew, Feni, a rocket fuel spirit distilled from coconut sap or cashew fruit.

Below left to right One of the many beautiful beaches in Goa. Panjim market. Marigolds in the Latin quarter.

Away from the coast are the ruins of the Portuguese capital Old Goa, a sprawl of Catholic cathedrals, convents and churches that draws Christian pilgrims from all over India. Soaring above the canopy of palm groves, the colossal, cream cathedral towers, belfries and domes welcome you to one of the finest groups of Renaissance architecture in the world. Further inland, the thickly wooded countryside around Ponda harbours numerous temples. Spices have always been one of the area’s principal exports, even before the Portuguese arrived, and there are several large spice plantations around Ponda that can be visited.

Festivals celebrated in Goa include Id-ul-Fitr, in January/February, a Muslim feast to celebrate the end of Ramadan; the carnival in February/March, which is three days of Feni-induced mayhem, and Shigmo, held in February/March. This is Goa’s version of the Hindi holy festival held over the full moon period to mark the onset of spring. It includes processions of floats, music and dancing, as well as the usual throwing of paint bombs.

In Goa it is quite funny to see that the pony-tailed, bandanna-wearing flower children of the sixties are now in their sixties and still having a ball, although the pony tails have turned grey or indeed white. It was here that we met a couple of excellent eccentrics, Derek and Beryl — he a retired stockbroker of the old school, and Beryl who was just lovely, kind, cheerful and totally passionate about India and the Indians. They spent six months of every year travelling throughout India. Because they were such long-standing guests of the hotel, they were accorded all kinds of privileges, one of which was an outrageously delicious mango chutney sent down from Mumbai specifically for their use. So, every night we would meet for evening tiffin — I don’t care what you think tiffin is, as far as I am concerned it’s a large Bombay Sapphire gin with tonic and fresh lime — and devour a pile of freshly made poppadoms covered in the best chutney I have ever tasted.

Oh, and by the way, talking about food, I recommend to you two great Goan dishes, the Goan lobster curry and the beef or chicken vindaloo, a dish that bears no relationship to the ones that we all used to eat with a belly full of beer on Saturday nights many years ago.

Betim fish market.

Madras (now known as Chennai)

Back in the sixties in England, office dress code was relaxed on Saturdays and you could do your morning’s work wearing a sports jacket or a blazer instead of the Monday-to-Friday suit. Chaps tended to wear their sports club ties and hastened quickly through their desks to be in the White Elephant by 12.30pm. They stood in their dozens, kit bags at their feet, foaming pints in hand. Boys drank I.P.A., the men drank Worthington E. Objective: to down as many pints as possible before piling into old bangers or shiny M.G.s and heading for one of the many Bristol Combination Rugby Football grounds where, in the amicable brutality of Club Rugby (Bristol Combination style) they would, in the hot and sweaty scrum, gag on the Worthington-flavoured farts, throw up at half-time, eat an orange and have a quick drag on a Senior or a Nelson.

After you had lost and taken the communal bath, diplomatic relations were restored between the two sides. Bruised and broken, as one they piled back into the motors and headed off to the memorial ground to watch the last 15 minutes of Bristol thrashing Cardiff or Llanelli, Harlequins or Coventry and, clutching more pints, you would wonder why Bill Redwood and John Blake had not been selected for the England side. As time went by, the bar got hotter, tales of Rugby daring got louder, pints were spilt, voices were raised, and birds were eyed but not pulled because they were for the great men of the Bristol 1st XV.

In those, some say, halcyon days, Bristol was in Gloucestershire and the pubs shut at 10.30pm, but, minutes away, across the Clifton suspension bridge was Somerset, where the splendid hostelries stayed open until 11.00pm and there was the possibility that the landlord might just serve one more after time as he rang the bell. Everybody, by now, was in complete disarray. Everybody had probably drunk between 10 and 20 pints of beer since the first dignified pint in the White Elephant. Two or three would have fallen by the wayside, quite literally; some of the sensible ones would have returned to their wives, but the single guys were hungry. A leader always emerges at a time of crisis. It was the one who stood on the table, pint in hand, tie unknotted, shirt undone, who, bright eyed and sweating, called out ‘Who’s for the Curry House?’ And so, once again, we piled back into the vehicles, more crowded than before because one or two had disappeared, and headed back over the Clifton suspension bridge, down to the city centre, past the bus station and along to Stokes Croft where a flickering yellow neon sign announced the existence of the Koh I Noor Indian Restaurant.

Below left and right Images from Madras. Middle Cleaning silverware.

Inside the dining room, with its 14 tables standing on a slightly sticky, thick carpet, each table had a slightly soiled but very starched tablecloth. The walls were covered in tawdry flock and the exhausted waiters, in their stained dinner jackets which were almost a deep, dark green through years of wear, adjusted their clip-on bow ties and prepared for the onslaught. They had an air of resigned acquiescence. Each table was dressed simply with a salt and pepper pot and a stainless steel sugar bowl filled with white sugar lumps. The call was for–because that’s all there really was — six chicken vindaloo, nine meat Madras, four plates of evil smelling, deep-fried, crispy Bombay duck and mango chutney and, of course, 15 pints of lager. The bewildered waiter wrote the order on a series of little duplicate pads and headed for the kitchen only to be called back by the blue-eyed fly-half with crinkly blond hair, who was training to be an accountant, and from his position of authority on the main table he would say, ‘Make that 30 pints.’

Eventually, on white plates, the pungent curries and mountains of plain boiled rice arrived. There was, of course, not enough cheap stainless steel cutlery to go round. The Madras was hot, fiery and acrid, the vindaloo was diabolical. One by one, chaps would go to the bog but, one by one, they didn’t return because the old hands knew that you could climb out of the window and then you wouldn’t have to pay your share of the bill. So, every Saturday night was a mad Madras night.

Well, dear reader, that was in another time. It was before Indian restaurants became a culinary force to be reckoned with, before silver leaf garnished fragrant biryanis. It was before Britain had ever heard of a tandoor oven, but it was at a time not so long after India gained independence from Great Britain and the country was still awash with ex-colonials who wanted to continue eating their meat Madras or chicken Madras and their Bombay duck. In reality, the concept of a meat Madras is entirely a figment of the British imagination, but that is something I learnt much later in life.

In the meantime, and hoping to fulfil some kind of youthful gastronomic holy grail, I left the west coast full of anticipation for my visit to Madras. But, they’ve changed the name! Yes, okay, Madras was the first important British settlement in India and yes, quite correctly, the Indians have given it back its original name, Chennai, but how can you now go into your favourite curry shop after a hard game and say, ‘9 meat Chennais and 30 pints of lager, please’?

Above left to right Taxis Madras-style. A little wood burner. In the paddy fields.

Chennai is India’s fourth largest city, the capital of Tamil Nadu. It is a young city by Indian standards. Its foundation in the 17th century by the East India Company also marked the foundation of the British empire. When the fortification — called Fort St George — was completed in 1640 the walls protected the East India Company’s factory and other European trading settlements. Its function was to serve as a base for British agents to prevent local merchants controlling the price of goods. It later became the city of Madras. As it grew, the local Tamil people assigned the name Chennai to the city, whereas the British stuck to Madras. In recent years, however, it has been decided that the official name of the city should be Chennai.

The city is the home of curry powder, which was originally developed in Madras for the nostalgic British wishing to re-capture the flavours of India after they returned home from the Raj. Huge quantities of curry powder are still manufactured in machines that resemble concrete mixers, but it is all for export. No Indian cook would dream of using it.

British buildings dominate the area. The Ice House was built to store ice imported from Boston until it was used to cool the gin and tonics of the British residents. The Madras Club was built as a place where the British elite could drink the G & Ts. The chief reminder of colonial days, however, is the High Court, the largest court of law building in the world outside London. To the south, 20 hectares of narrow lanes form the city’s largest market, Kothawal Chavadi, which includes a colourful fruit and flower section. On the outskirts of the city is Asia’s biggest film studio complex, just beyond the jaws of a fake shark which guards MGR Film City. On this enormous site, funded by the state government, are 36 sets standing ready for use. Tourists are sometimes invited to be extras, especially in Raj-era films.

Now, in the intervening 40 years between eating my first meat Madras and my first visit to Chennai, I have learned a lot and I certainly was not expecting to find an authentic meat Madras in Madras, any more than I would expect to find a spaghetti Bolognese in Bologna or a chop suey in Beijing. These, and many other internationally known dishes are, again, concoctions created by bewildered ex-patriots. I did, however, expect to find exquisite food, but I was disappointed. As with all big cities the world over, it is hard–not to say nearly impossible–to find the gastronomic heart of that place. I stayed at the Connemara Hotel where they had a specialist restaurant devoted to the Chettinad cuisine, which is fiery, hot and spicy and should be delicious, but it was not.

Away from the crowded streets.

Using all the resources available to me, I sought out the so-called good restaurants but, quite frankly, you will probably eat better in Southall or Birmingham, and that is not to mention how hard it is to put up with the inexorable poverty and squalor which gives birth to begging and harassment. So then you have to ask yourself, if you are finding this so offensive, why are you here in the first place. Well, the fact is the cooking in India can be one of the great experiences of life but it is best enjoyed at the home of Indians, no matter how rich or poor they might be. They treat their produce with such love and such care. They prepare their masalas with the same sort of love with which Van Gogh must have mixed his oils.

I spent some time at a magnificent palace where a family of four or six people were attended by over two hundred staff. The dichotomy lies in the fact that the poor can’t afford to eat in restaurants, so there are just absolutely fundamentally basic squalid soup kitchens, while the rich are so well off they can afford to have cooks at home, so no matter what you read in the otherwise absolutely essential Lonely Planet Guide to India, take their restaurant entries with a pinch of chillies.

If you do eat in the streets of any of the big three cities, Chennai, Calcutta and Mumbai, and you choose a place which is very, very busy, you will usually eat well for a few pennies, cents or dimes.

However, if you are in Chennai, make a point of eating at Hotel Saravana Bhavan. This is the ultimate in Indian fast food restaurants. They have a menu of over three hundred different dishes, mostly vegetarian. They serve up to 4,000 meals a day (by the way, it is not a hotel, the word ‘hotel’ in many parts of India means restaurant or canteen). You get a tray on which are eight, nine or ten little dishes, savoury, sweet, hot, sour. It is called a thali and the first person who replicates this brilliant concept (in many ways not dissimilar to Spanish tapas) in London will make a fortune and change the gastronomic mindset of a nation already obsessed with Indian food. Anybody prepared to put several million quid into my idea can buy not only my expertise, my knowledge and my passion but they will also have the exclusive rights to the name of this amazing chain of eateries and, with due apologies to Paul Scott, it will be known as ‘The Last Days of the Floyd’.

We ground out of Chennai through the appalling traffic to the village of Sriperumbudur where, from a distance, you can see water buffaloes bathing and high-rise ancient temples which, if you squint, remind you of Gotham City. We saw the ancient reservoirs, so-called tanks, where the lepers cleanse themselves and the locals do their washing, but it ain’t like a visit to Salisbury Cathedral!

It was quite funny on the day that we all went there to film what is actually a very beautiful and fascinating place. On the way my beloved director, Nick, somehow got it into his head that the Indians grow a lot of rice and we should acknowledge that fact in our telvision programme. You have to remember, however, that there is nothing real in television land. Some 30 or 40 hapless Indian women were planting rice in a paddy field but, quel horreur, on the shady side of the field. This is, of course, totally unacceptable; for television purposes they must be in the sunshine to avoid shadows, so that the colours are bright and vibrant. To make matters worse, it was impossible to get a shot of these people from the road because the camera angle would not be correct. So, at the behest of Nick, our long-suffering researcher, Raj, was instructed to tell the semailleurs — which is French for seed sowers–to move over to the other side of the field and replant what they had already planted for the benefit of our camera. In the meantime, Stan, my manager, on this day dressed in combat kit, drawing on a cigar and for all the world looking like Stormin’ Norman, hijacked and occupied the adjacent hospital. He stormed the operating theatre, where bewildered surgeons were bullied into allowing him–in mid-operation–to place the camera on the roof so that the world could see something that they have probably never seen before, since the dawn of television, a load of women planting rice.

Sriperumbudur Temple and Tank.

Above left to right One of the many temples at Kanchipuram. Bogged down at Muttukadu.

Interlude at Kanchipuram

Some 40 or 50 minutes out of Madras there is a splendid Taj hotel called Fisherman’s Cove at Covelong Beach, near Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu. The beaches are unspoilt, there are spectacular views, regular rooms in the hotel complex and utterly enchanting guest bungalows on the beach. Here, with Tess, I spent six magnificent days as the guest of Sarabjeet Singh, the general manager. During that time I learnt how to make some exquisite dishes, including the subzi poriyal (crunch spicy beetroot with coconut) and kathirikai kara kulambu (a spicy aubergine dish) on pages 153 and 156, from the hotel’s executive chef, Fabian. I seem to remember he had a couple of hits in the charts in the late fifties. (Joke! Rock-’n-rollers know what I mean.)

Kanchipuram is the Golden Town of 1,000 Temples, one of India’s seven most sacred cities. Nowadays only 126 temples survive, but five of these are considered outstanding. They are closed between noon and 3.00pm and are best visited in the afternoon. On the same stretch of coastline as Covelong Beach is the famous Shore Temple at Mamallapuram, probably the best-known sight in southern India.

A Bombay market.

Bombay (now known as Mumbai)

So, on a high from the Fisherman’s Cove, our culinary circus rolled on to Bombay (or Mumbai as it is now known), birthplace of Rudyard Kipling in 1865, and a city famous for its red double-decker buses. Home of the wealthy and glamorous, Mumbai is the commercial hub of India. Here there is a huge contrast between the rich and the poor. The city claims more millionaires than Manhattan, and there is indeed an almost ostentatious display of wealth, and yet two million people in the city do not have access to a toilet, six million go without access to drinking water and over half the city’s population of 16 million people live in slums or on the street.

The huge natural harbour is the reason why commerce blossomed in Mumbai, helped by the opening of India’s first railway line which started in Mumbai. Elephanta Island in the middle of the harbour has magnificent rock-cut cave temples, one of the city’s main tourist attractions, and in February a festival of music and dance is held at these cave temples.

Mumbai is also the home of Bollywood, the Indian version of Hollywood, which produces more films than any other city in the world — 120 feature films per year. In Mumbai you can still savour the glamour attached to the notion of going to the movies at one of the glorious art deco cinemas.

The Gateway of India.

Above left to right Lunch box delivery.

The city also has over 50 laughter clubs. Members gather in parks all over the city each morning and laugh themselves silly, in the belief that happiness and health are connected and drawing on ancient yogic texts that highlight the beneficial effects of laughter.

Mumbai has a unique lunch service. Hot lunches are delivered to workers in their offices direct from their homes by something akin to a postal service. Before noon, dabbas, ever-hot lunch boxes, containing a home-cooked meal are collected from residencies by dabbawallas. They are sent to the city by train and dropped at various stations for lunchtime delivery by other teams of dabbawallas. Ownership and location of each lunch box is identified by markings decipherable by the dabbawallas alone. After lunch the whole process is reversed.

Crawford Market and the bazaars of Kalbadevi and Bhuleshwar sell everything from mangoes to tobacco to Alsatian puppies; if you can eat it or stroke it, you can probably find it here.

We stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel on the waterfront next to the Gateway of India, a huge triumphal arch built in 1924 to commemorate a visit by George V and Queen Mary. The last of the British troops leaving India by sea passed through this arch. Nowadays the massive stone arch is used mainly as an embarkation point for ferries taking tourist to the Elephanta caves or down the coast to Goa. According to the Lonely Planet Guide to India (quote) Places to stay — Top End, ‘The Taj Mahal Hotel, next to the Gateway of India is one of the best hotels in the country … the Taj is second home to Mumbai’s elite and has every conceivable facility, including three quality restaurants, several bars, a coffee shop, swimming pool, gymnasium and nightclub.’ While I am the greatest fan of the Lonely Planet guides, I can only disagree with their description of the Taj Mahal Hotel — I think it is the worst hotel I have ever stayed in.

The original flying dhobi.

One of the few delights of staying in an Indian hotel is the excellent laundry service. My grease-splattered, turmeric-stained shirts would come whizzing back, splendidly clean and immaculately pressed, and very quickly and cheaply too. But, they are not washed in gleaming Launderettes–they are literally flogged clean in Bombay’s municipal laundry, locally known as the Dhobi Ghat at Mahalaxmi. Here, in a labyrinth of open-air stone and concrete basins, thousands of men scrub, wash, rinse and dry tons of dirty clothes brought from all over the city all day. Then, after they have been through hand-operated spin dryers, the clothes are spread out on some rusty old roof to dry, after which they are immaculately pressed, with charcoal-fired smoothing irons. You get a great view of this phenomenal place from the railway bridge near Mahalaxmi Station which is five stops up from Churchgate Station.

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