“If you really want to know Indian food, then you need to understand our
relationship with butter,” I was told by Camellia Panjabi, a lady of
formidable knowledge and even more formidable appetite. One of the nice
things about playing with your food, which is essentially what I do for a
living, is that you automatically become a member of a fascinating and
gluttonous dining club. Gourmands and epicureans aren’t always nice, and
they’re not always entirely sane, but they are always interesting — and the
best of them enlightening, in a way that transcends recipes and digestion.
The brotherhood of greed amounts to an introduction, so I wasn’t surprised to
find a note from a person I’d never met attached to a cookery book in my
Bombay hotel room last week. And Camellia wasn’t remotely surprised when I
called and suggested we should eat as much as possible, as soon as possible.
So she started with the butter. Indians think of butter as a semi-mystical
substance. Cows are sacred and all their by-products are blessed. Ghee, the
clarified butter for cooking, and the golden stuff itself “is the soul of
our food. It’s luxurious, extravagant, generous and the epitome of
goodness”.
But it just isn’t, I pointed out, pointlessly. Camellia took us to a street
stall, with a large wok in which a slab of about a pound of best butter
spluttered and sank into itself like a yellow Titanic. In the street, a chap
was cutting bread rolls in half, the sort of cheap, square white rolls that
they sell in packs of six and fill with grated cheese in canteens. Before
the English tipped up here, white bread had been brought to the Maharashtran
coast by the Portuguese, and ever since, the people of Bombay have taken it
to their hearts — quite literally. The split rolls were liberally dunked and
turned in the foaming butter, then set aside, while a melange of finely
chopped, masala’d vegetables were slopped into the well of unctuousness.
More fresh butter was added in 8oz slabs. The vegetables were mollycoddled
into the slick. “It’s important that the customers see how much butter is
being used in the cooking. They have to witness the extravagance, the
expense.”
We sat at a little Formica table and plates of vegetable mush — which I
conservatively guessed were, by this time, 40% butter — were plopped in
front of us, with slabs of yet more fresh butter sitting like a soft sunhat
on top. The glistening rolls were dipped in and ... bon appetit. As a taste
sensation, you couldn’t fault it. It was right up there with deep-fried Mars
bars: silky, delicious and repellent in equal measure. Coming from a culture
that lies awake at night listening to its arteries silt up, and for whom
cholesterol has replaced Beelzebub as the quintessence of evil, it wasn’t
naughty but nice — naughty but nice is a profiterole. It was a catastrophic
medical pile-up.
“Ah,” explained Camellia, as another plate appeared. “I just wanted you to try
this.” A thick layer of grated cheese covered more buttery vegetable curry.
Oh, and what’s this here, in the middle, hiding like an elephant behind a
palm tree? Another vast pat of butter. This was all, by the way, as an
addendum, a savoury, to lunch. “Snacks,” said Camellia. “Bombayans love
their snacks.” Out of the corner of my head, I remembered the end of Little
Black Sambo, where the tiger runs round and round the tree until he turns
into ghee. Fear magically becomes pleasure, rather like the dead lion
surrounded by bees on the Golden Syrup tin — “Out of strength came forth
sweetness”.
Anyway, back in London, wanting to extend the sojourn a meal longer, we went
to Amaya, a new Indian restaurant in a twee arcade off Motcomb Street. This
is one of the most expensive little corners of London. It has a large,
transient eastern population and the Pakistani embassy just round the
corner. We took my old friend Count Raben, the film designer Philippa Hart
and the real-life designer Nina Campbell.
The restaurant is a large, rather disjointed room that seems to have been put
together with exuberance and instinct rather than forethought. There’s no
building material known to Irishmen that hasn’t found some niche or cornice.
It’s not unattractive, just not very coherent. In the back are two, simple,
bucket tandoors: one for skewers, one for bread. Their speciality is nailed
meat and fish, and biryanis.
The menu, of course, comes with a mission that needs to be explained. It boils
down to: you order what you want, we bring it when it’s cooked, and then you
all share. I’ve never come across a menu’s mission statement that didn’t
come down to this, and I must say, at this point, I grew facetious at the
waiter’s expense, which is low. Lower than a dover sole’s gonads. Scoring
points and being flip with people who can’t answer back is slappable. So I’m
sorry. In fact, I was pretty grisly to everybody all through dinner.
But my mood couldn’t dull the quality and the good nature of the food. We
gluttonously overordered the grilled and marinated meats, even retracing our
steps for seconds. I’m not going to single out individual dishes, because
they were all exceptionally good (except for one thing that came on a skewer
and looked positively medical — like a strapadictomy).
Everything else was flavoured with an emphatic assurance. There’s nothing
tentative or compromised in the spicing, and it doesn’t come with that drab
uniform barbecue flavour that is so often the taste of tandoor. The variety
was various and filling, and by the time it came to biryanis in their own
sealed pots, there was a lot of rolling eyes and patted stomachs. But I
managed to force down a little by way of research. And a side order of offal
curry. And then, just a taste, the merest apostle spoon, of kulfi. This food
is as good and authentic as anything I’ve eaten in India. Camellia said she
thought that some of the best Indian food was to be had in London, and, by a
cross-my-heart coincidence, Amaya turns out to be owned by her sister.
I would add that, though we have some fine Asian food, it’s still desperately
limited. You’ll know the menu in every Indian from Portsmouth to Ullapool by
heart. The style and number of dishes we get are mostly from the north, the
border and the Punjab, and they’re cooked by chefs from too few states.
What’s astonishing about India is the discovery that it has such a complex
and varied regional cuisine. If you can’t make it to Maharashtra and you’d
like something out of India — and out of the ordinary — I couldn’t recommend
Amaya more.
Lunch, Mon-Sun, 12.30pm -2.30pm; Dinner, Mon-Sat, 6.30pm-10.30pm, Sun,
6.30pm-10.15pm
