Notions of authenticity differ when it comes to food

If you have grandparents who are interested in food, here are some questions you can ask them.

If they are from Mangalore or even Malvan, you can ask them if they ever ate crab in butter garlic at home. If they are Punjabis, ask them how much cream they put in their mutton curry or even if they put lots of tomatoes in their black dal.

 

If they are from Tamil Nadu, ask if they ate home-made masala dosas when they were children. In nearly every case, I suspect, you will be met with looks of mystification.

 

  Does this mean that these dishes are fake?

 

   No. It doesn’t.

 

   I have often said that there is a fundamental problem with all debates about the authenticity of food. For a cuisine to advance, new dishes have to be created, old recipes have to be tweaked and new ingredients incorporated. So can any cuisine ever remain the same as it was 50 years ago? And why should it? Frankly, it’s fine if your grandmother is mystified by what has happened to the cuisine of her childhood.

 

   On the other hand, when we go to a regional cuisine restaurant, don’t we expect to get the traditional cuisine of the region? Why should we be satisfied with made-up dishes invented recently, far away from the region in question which have nothing to do with the traditional cuisine?

 

   There are strong arguments on both sides.

 

   The French make a clear and sensible distinction. There are many traditional dishes and regional specialities and the French will insist that these are cooked according to the prescribed recipes. For instance Frenchmen can come to blows over the recipe for pot-au-feu. There have been endless debates about the correct ingredients for cassoulet.

 

   As heated as these debates can get, there is another side to the issue. If a great chef only made cassoulet, boeuf bourguignon and other traditional dishes, he would cease to be regarded as a great chef. His job as a top chef is not just to reproduce his grandmother’s cooking but to create new dishes.

 

   So the French distinguish between traditional cooking and restaurant cooking. There is a whole list of French restaurant dishes that nobody ever ate at home, but which are now considered classics. For instance, most chefs will have cooked tournedos rossini (beef in a truffle-Madeira sauce topped with foie gras) at some stage of their careers but their mothers never made it at home.

 

   But even those classic restaurant dishes now have to be reinvented, tarted up or made ironically (as Alain Ducasse did with his version of tournedos rossini) to get on to the menu of a good restaurant. Creativity is everything in fine French cooking.

 

   I have always liked the French distinction: If you are cooking a traditional dish, stick to the original recipe. When it comes to restaurant cuisine, try to be original.

 

   Sadly, most cuisines do not make that distinction. In Italy, for instance, they spent years ascribing bogus ancient origins to recently invented dishes. Pasta carbonara, for instance, was invented only in the late 1940s (perhaps to feed American GI’s who were posted to Italy after the Second World War, and it was made from their bacon and egg rations) and became popular only in the 1950s. But you will be told that it is an ancient working man’s dish.

 

   Tiramisu was invented in 1969 (or even later) and took a few decades to become a global craze. But you will hear a lot of nonsense about how it is a traditional dish from the bordellos of Venice. Actually it has damn all to do with ancient Venice. It was invented in a restaurant in Treviso.

 

"So notions of authenticity differ. And they can be time bound. So, use the term with caution. It means less than we think."

   We are less concerned with authenticity or tradition in India. We just take things for granted and imagine that dishes have always been around. Let’s take the most famous examples. Tandoori chicken was invented in a restaurant in Peshawar as late as the 1930s. Butter chicken did not become popular until the 1960s (though it may have been invented in the 1950s). More significantly, Punjabis did not put tomatoes in their dal because tomatoes rarely turn up in traditional Punjabi cooking. The so-called Punjabi black dal that we all love (as dal bukhara, dal makhni or whatever) only became popular in the 1960s when Delhi’s Moti Mahal started adding tomatoes to it. And it took off as a restaurant staple only after Bukhara opened in 1978. And yet, many (most, perhaps) Punjabis who make black dal at home will now add tomatoes to it.

 

   So, are all these dishes authentic? Well, they are classics of Indian restaurant cuisine. But because we don’t make the French distinction between restaurant cuisine and home food, we are never quite sure whether to regard them as entirely authentic or not.

 

   Or take the masala dosa, as much a classic of Indian cuisine as tandoori chicken. It is not a traditional Tamil dish as North Indians often assume. The dish spread all over India largely because of restaurateurs from Karnataka who took the humble South Indian dosa and played around with it to create cheap and filling restaurant dishes. The modern masala dosa was created by a restaurant cook, not by somebody’s grandmother. (Probably a cook at the Woodlands chain.)

 

   So, is a masala dosa authentic? The same distinction between home food and restaurant food applies.

 

   Which brings us to slightly slippery territory. Only in Mumbai could you get away with serving a dish like crab butter garlic and claiming that it comes from Malvan or Mangalore. It’s the same with prawns koliwada. (The name should be a clue: Koliwada is a suburb of Mumbai). This is also a made-up dish, invented in a restaurant kitchen. (It was inspired by Mumbai’s fish koliwada which in turn was inspired by the river-fish dishes of Amritsar.)

 

   As I wrote some weeks ago, very little of the food served at Mumbai’s so-called coastal restaurants is remotely authentic, no matter what the restaurateurs tell you.

 

   But does it matter?

 

   It doesn’t if you distinguish between restaurant food and home food which, as we have seen, we don’t. But even if you do make that distinction, because we have very little in the way of written recipes from way back, we also have very few standard methods for making iconic dishes.

 

   Take rogan josh, possibly the most famous Indian curry. Even in Kashmir, which lays claim to the dish, there are two distinctive recipes. The Muslim version uses garlic. The Hindu version has no garlic, no onions and lots of hing. By the time the dish got to Punjab, there were more versions of rogan josh than there are chinar trees in Kashmir.

 

   Contrast our approach with the Spanish who will bore you with pedantry about the correct ingredients for paella: You can’t put chorizo, you must use rabbit etc. In fact, there are now many regional versions of paella so it is hard to find a single, authentic recipe. But that does not stop them from fighting about it.

 

   I have grown to care about authenticity — whatever that means — only in a very limited sense. If I am going to a Chinese restaurant in India and the restaurant serves food that no Chinese person will recognise, then yes, I will think twice before going there, because I happen to like real Chinese food.

 

   I would also not go to a curry house in Britain that serves curries meant only for Brits. But I accept that such restaurants have their fans and respect their success as long as I don’t have to eat there.

 

   Of course the food at such restaurants is not authentic. But it’s worth remembering that inauthentic dishes have a way of suddenly becoming authentic. The bolognaise sauce we are familiar with has nothing to do with the ragu they make in Bologna. But because it has become so globally popular, you will now find it at restaurants in Bologna. Chicken Kiev was invented in New York. But now, it is a menu staple in Kiev.

 

   So notions of authenticity differ. And they can be time bound. So, use the term with caution. It means less than we think.