On a kitchen date with celebrity chef Ranveer Brar

Hardly does an Indian chef write a cookbook, and rarely does a work in this genre necessitate more than a cursory look, because it turns out to be yet another deathless listing of recipes, most of them being impossible to replicate in regular homes, with very few insights and incidents from the writer's life to make the offering worth much shelf space.

Among Indian cookbook writers, I love reading Ritu Dalmia because she unfailingly combines recipes with entertaining stories from her kitchen or her travels, and more recently, I found Manish Mehrotra's Indian Accent Cookbook particularly useful because of the light he sheds on ingredients, especially those commonplace cereals and vegetables that are staging a comeback on our tables.

Television chef Ranveer Brar's Come Into My Kitchen (HarperCollins; Rs 599) therefore comes along as a whiff of early morning air because of the seamless prose he employs to narrate his life story - a Sikh boy growing up in Lucknow, falling in love with cooking at the local gurdwara's langar, and at age 17, becoming an apprentice to Ustad Munir Ahmed, a kebab shop owner on the lane behind Odeon cinema, to convince his parents that he was serious about pursuing a career in kitchens.

Today, he comes frozen in publicity shots with his chikna Punjabi munda looks and toothy smile, but Brar has hauled sacks of coal for his first ustad, topped the hotel management graduation exam nationwide, made 3,000 potato roestis in a day during a flash strike at a flight kitchen in his formative years, been a very young executive chef at The Claridges New Delhi, where I first met him in 2005, studied at the Culinary Institute of America, and run restaurants in the US.

Brar has since become a celebrity chef - and I have had the experience of our conversation being rudely interrupted by his female fans begging him for selfies and other such juvenile favours - and his most recent show, The Great Indian Rasoi, will be remembered for presenting Lucknow's famous cooks - Munir Ustad, Mohammad Abu Bakr of Idris ki biryani fame and the 95-year-old khansama Mubarak Ali - with as much feeling as when he presented the story of Shanti Devi, a young widow at a Bishnoi village near Jodhpur who made her living cooking rotis for a balwadi.

With a life as crowded as Brar's, the cookbook, unsurprisingly, is packed with stories narrated in a conversational style - I can almost hear Brar's baritone in the background as I read his words.

He also engages in an intellectual exercise that not many chefs, to the best of my knowledge, have attempted anywhere in the world (and this makes Come Into My Kitchen doubly relevant for serious students of the culinary arts).

Basing his model on American psychologist Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Brar develops his own theory of the Hierarchy of Taste, with taste sitting at the base on the pyramid, flavour coming above it (contrasting flavours, from salted caramel to Indore's poha-jalebi, getting a much-deserved mention), followed by texture (the Japanese have identified 432 food textures and even have a name for each), appearance (which makes Brar dwell upon the principles of plating), and aroma.

Seeking balance and harmony among these diverse blocks of the pyramid is the challenge that every chef worth his ladle wishes to rise up to day after day.

It is this balance that Brar attempts to achieve in his recipes, which are as wacky as they are inviting.

So you have the masaledar roesti with imli chutney salsa (a zingy take on the Swiss hardy perennial), the "spoil yourself French toast" (they call it Bombay Toast in Sri Lanka and Burma!), and tarbuz dosa stacks made, as they do on the Konkan coast, with watermelon rind for breakfast.

You also have the banana flower pineapple sliders, idli prawn sandwich with tender coconut salsa and the tandoori chicken momos, a Delhi University invention, which Brar omits to mention, and Thai corn bhel, whose recipe is preceded by the stunning revelation that dried lemongrass is an integral part of lazzat-e-taam, the foundational spice mix used in Lakhnavi kebabs.

And finally you get fish crusted with curry leaf pesto and served with daliya couscous, and gnocchi shorshe (Bengali mustard) with butter garlic crab khurchan, and banana leaf-wrapped fish paturi (a Bengali steamed fish preparation) with jhal noodles. After all this stimulation of the gastric juices, you deserve a mithai tiramisu. Welcome to Ranveer's kitchen.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

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