How cooking at home is making a comeback
When I most recently met Chef Vicky Ratnani, the celebrity chef and television star who's now better known for creating Burger King India's Chicken Tandoori Grill Burger, he said he trawls Facebook and blogosphere to dip into the hundreds of thousands of recipes that homemakers are busy sharing round the clock. Ratnani said it gave him an insight into how our taste buds were evolving with the passage of time.
Cooking has become fashionable again. It is the new conversation icebreaker and stress buster; it gives you bragging rights (today, there's even a Nespresso caste system - those who get their pods from Dubai every month versus those who pay a hefty premium to buy them at Khan Market!); it makes you different, it puts you in a league of people who stand out in a crowd, it makes you proud, like an owner of the Royal Enfield.
I got this feeling at the Hyatt Culinary Challenge 2014, where I was one of a panel of three judges (one of them was Pooja Bhatt, so I got a lot of unintended attention from photographers and cameramen!) sitting in judgement over ten men and women from across the country cooking their dream dishes in front of a live audience within the stipulated time of an hour.
I got talking to Viveck Verma from Hyderabad, the executive director of the Karvy Insurance Repository, and he said it was his third time in his life in a kitchen. He was making a seafood preparation, which I remember for its aioli, and he said he had taken to cooking because he couldn't think of a better way to beat stress. "Call it midlife crisis," he said, getting back to a prawn that demanded his attention.
The motley group consisted of very different people brought together on an unfamiliar stage by their love for cooking. There was the Embassy of Israel's head of administration and he won the coveted prize, a ticket to Paris, for his "Mediterranean-style fish" served with a refreshing feta cheese salad. Cisco's sales and operations vice-president from Kolkata made a memorable dish he called Chicken Genghis Khan. A Bengali insurance executive from Raipur prepared a "South Indian" mutton curry in honour of her Malayali mother-in-law. An expat country head of a logistics company from Mumbai did a ponzu chicken that didn't quite impress us. A Castrol territory manager from Pune dished up a memorable shahi khichda. An interior designer from Ahmedabad prepared corn cigar shots served imaginatively in a haze of smoke.
The 20-something Russian Cultural Centre vice-consul from Chennai struggled with his elaborate plow (the Russian pulao), but, egged on his by his brother, a MiG salesman, he saw it through till the end. The wife of the managing director of a real estate consultancy prepared a chicken dish she named after the Faroe Islands, the birthplace of her godmother, which I learnt later is an autonomous country within the kingdom of Denmark. And an aspiring Bollywood producer served us a wholesome Pathani Mutton Yakhni, a bowl of which I wolfed down in a manner unbecoming of a judge in a culinary competition.
The intensity with which the ten home cooks went about their business reminded me of the debates that rage on Sikandalous Cuisine, Facebook's largest Indian recipe-sharing community nurtured by Atul Sikand, who cashed out of his family's real estate business to live his dream life of rearing cows, growing vegetables, trying out recipes in his kitchen, which is as big as his living room in his art museum of a house, and collecting cookbooks from across the world. Only on Sikandalous Cuisine would you run into scholarly discussions on squash (the vegetable) and Nepalese timur (the sub-continent's Sichuan peppers), or spirited discussions such matters as the right way to cook the Bengali prawn malai (a corruption of Malay) curry. Not surprisingly, chefs such as Vicky Ratnani get more out of home cooks than from their jaded peers.