On The Indian Spice Palette

originally posted to Instagram on January 22nd, 2021

There is no canonical guide to Indian cookery, except for prescriptive recipes in religious texts like the Vedas. Sure, you could look to KT Achaya, who wrote the only comprehensive treatise on Indian cuisine that I am aware of (Indian Food: A Historical Companion). But Achaya was a scientist and historian, not a cook, and he wrote sparingly about culinary technique. I wonder, why do Indians have no Escoffier — no central figure to standardize and codify recipes and technique deemed classically Indian? I’ll leave this question to the sociologists, but I think that spices lend a clue.

A few weeks ago, Genevieve Ko wrote an article for the New York Times imploring readers to follow recipes exactly as they have been written. I don’t entirely disagree with Ko’s premise. “By inserting my known likes and dislikes, I miss the opportunity to get to know another person, to see (and taste) her history and culture through her perspective. I want to experience a dish through the person most intimate with it,” Ko wrote. But perplexingly, she made her point in this article by cooking a vegetable korma recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s 2010 cookbook, “At Home With Madhur Jaffrey”.

Jaffrey is notably a generalist, not a specialist. While her achievements bringing Indian food to the West should not be diminished, cooking recipes from Jaffrey’s books exactly as she’s written them is putting way too much stock in her interpretation of Indian dishes. Especially in a book whose subtitle is, “Simple, delectable dishes from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.” Ko should not expect Jaffrey to be “most intimate” with anything from a book that might as well have been called “Madhur Jaffrey Approximates South Asian Flavors.”

Ask three Indians how they make masala chai, and you will get three different recipes. Spice is seasoning in Indian cuisine, and the way chai is made is the best example of this. Adjusting spices is part of the magic of Indian cookery. It’s why you can’t learn to cook Indian food from a book, but you can by tasting. If you don’t taste constituent components and tweak your spices, continuing to follow Jaffrey blindly into the void, you’ll eventually cook a recipe you don’t like without any knowledge of how to fix it. Like a painter who’s botched a piece of fruit in a still life, left with a palette full of colors but no idea what to do with them.

Breakfast Tacos

originally posted to Instagram on February 19th, 2021

I love breakfast tacos. The online discourse on them is fascinating and I’ve done the homework so you don’t have to. Here’s the deal:

First, to clarify, tacos for breakfast and breakfast tacos are two different things. As Gustavo Arellano wrote for OC Weekly, “we’re talking about 'breakfast tacos' as a quantifiable meal, not tacos for breakfast, which has happened in Mexico since time immemorial.”

In 2016, Eater published a piece by Matthew Sedacca, a New Yorker, arguing that while the origins of the breakfast taco can be traced to Mexican immigrant home kitchens in South Texas, Austin was the spiritual home of the breakfast taco in America. Sedacca went on to claim that Austin was also, “the birthplace of the phrase breakfast taco.”

People lost their shit. The Eater piece was derided, and a petition from Texans went up to dump Sedacca, “out of an unmarked van well outside the boundaries of the state.”

Behind the jokey faux-outrage at Sedacca was a valid criticism of the new-wave of Austin residents, though. Here was yet another example of hipsters appropriating something with no regard for its history or traditions, and then proclaiming to the country, if not the world, that they were the best at it.

What Sedacca missed in his reportage was clear evidence of the history of South Texas breakfast tacos. As the esteemed José Ralat — whose job title of Taco Editor is something I really want to see printed on a business card — pointed out, there are newspaper mentions of a San Antonio taquero named Joe Acosta selling breakfast tacos in 1959, decades before anyone was writing about Austin's breakfast tacos.

I'll stay clear of the breakfast taco turf wars and share that I love them in all shapes or sizes. Served here are mine, made with eggs, bacon and roasted potatoes.

Bak Kwa

One of the things I miss most about Singapore is this sort of uni-task specialization of food vendors. Like Japanese shokunin, or artisanal craftsmen, people tend to do one thing and get really really good at it. You see this most commonly at hawker centers; one vendor serving just one dish. And you see it with bak kwa, a sweet and salty marinated ground pork mixture formed into sheets before being dried and then barbecued.

In 1933, a gentleman named Teo Swee Ee started selling bak kwa from a food cart on the streets of Singapore. The snack originated in China’s Fujian province as an early method of pork preservation, and came to Singapore with the Hokkien immigrants who arrived in the area beginning in the 15th century.

Teo wasn’t the first to sell bak kwa in Singapore, but he was the absolute best. His bak kwa cart would grow into a market-dominating presence in Singapore called Bee Cheng Hiang, and despite an absurd R&D budget for a pork snack company (they spent $1.2 million Singapore dollars on new porcine treats in 2007 and bring an average of twenty products to market each year), their specialty remains the ubiquitous bright red, smoky, sticky, sweet, salty sheet of bak kwa. Everything else they sell is a distraction.

I attempted to recreate Bee Cheng Hiang’s bak kwa as best as I could, with ground pork, dark and light soy sauces, shaoxing wine, and sugar. After marinating the pork, I spread it in an extra-thin layer, and baked it for a bit to set. Then, I glazed it with honey and broiled it to develop the classic char of bak kwa. A fair proxy in flavor, but missing the smokiness, I decided to finish the second batch in a wood fired pizza oven. Pretty damn close to the original!

A Story About Xacuti

originally posted to Instagram on January 20th, 2021

Allow me to introduce Xacuti, a curry from Goa, India.

Goa is a southwestern coastal state (the country’s smallest, in fact), and was the longtime home to the overseas seat of the Portuguese government. They arrived in the 1500s and squatted on Indian land until they were expelled by the Indian army in 1961 (not that long ago!).

Portuguese influence in India is why I’m Catholic — though I prefer the term culturally Catholic, as I am a sinner whose skin burns when anointed with Holy water — and why I have the last name Fernandes (Fernandes is Portuguese, Fernandez is Spanish).

Colonial fetishists (including my own countrymen) love to exalt the Portuguese for blessing poor Indians with things like monotheistic religion, yeasted breads, vinegar, cashews, and tomatoes. But I love Xacuti as a concept because it’s firmly Indian. There is no vinegar in this dish. It’s not served with pão. There is no pork. Its foundation is in coconut, poppy seed, mustard seed, cinnamon, and turmeric (among other spices).

The Portuguese can keep the fact that the X in this dish’s name is pronounced with a ʃ (sh- sound), but this dish is firmly Indian. And very delicious.

An Immigrant Reflection on the Fourth of July

originally posted on Instagram on July 4th, 2020

Last year I shared a burger pic with some very saccharine thoughts about what it means to me to be an immigrant in America. You can find the original post here. Since then, my feelings about my identity as an Indian American have become decidedly more complicated. I am now and will forever be grateful to the promise that America makes to immigrants who seek to call this land home. Sadly, this promise is kept inconsistently at best, and is too often broken if you’re the wrong kind of immigrant or if you’re a Black citizen. I knew this last year, and I was wrong to gloss over it then.

I remember being praised by my high school Biology teacher because my family chose to come to this country “the right way.” I didn’t know how to react to what I now recognize as blatant xenophobia, so I smiled and nodded as I was told that “those illegal immigrants” were giving people like my family a bad name all because “they don’t want to do the paperwork.”

That should have been my first clue that American attitudes about immigrants are nuanced and varied. Even then, I could empathize with “those illegals”, who must know this about the complex nature of American ideals now more than ever. I, too, longed for the shores of this country despite the fact that I was not fleeing poverty or oppression. In fact it was quite the opposite. I left a first world country that provides tremendous opportunity to its citizens and to immigrants as well — like my parents, who moved to Singapore from India in the ‘70s.

All this is to say that being American and contending with the history and present of this country is complicated and uncomfortable. But I knew that when I signed up for this. Now it’s my responsibility to do what I can to make the American promise I was offered a reality for others. I’m not sure how exactly, but I will keep trying.