More About Food

Food and cooking in India are of continual interest to me. I have recently read Eating India by Chitrita Banerji, an odyssey to many places in India where she tries local foods and combines historical details with the food. At home I have the book Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham (thanks to a farewell gift from the Central Virginia Curry Club). Curry also packs a lot of history into its discussion of Indian food and its influences from all around the world. Neither of these books has recipes, but I already own more than my share of Indian cookbooks.

The Landour Center Community Cookbook was first published in 1930 and has remained popular on the Hillside and with Woodstock staff ever since. (For more information, see Philip McEldowney’s site at http://people.virginia.edu/~pm9k/59/landourcookbook.html) Many of the recipes in the LCC are adaptations of American recipes using ingredients available in India at the time. In the last 20 years or so, the variety of imported foods available here has grown exponentially. There is almost nothing you can’t get now if you are willing to pay for it.

Our cook in the 1970s, Bhag Chand, had his own style of cooking. He tended to want us to eat boiled meat and potatoes more than we wanted to – he just wasn’t sure how appropriate it was for us to eat Indian food as much as we’d have liked. He was pretty creative. Our family all remember clearly the night he smilingly presented us with a pizza. It looked a little strange, but we cut and dug in. Well, it was interesting all right. The crust was pie dough and the topping was ground-up left-over liver mixed with some peas and grated carrots and maybe a bit of ketchup. He was so proud of it that we could hardly bear to tell him how awful it was.

Last evening we had dinner with some staff friends (delicious soup and biscuits). For dessert the neighbors brought over a lemon dish that looked like lemon pie topping on a crust. One of the women had taught her cook to make a peanut-butter crust with a chocolate topping and the cook decided that would work well for lemon as well. Oddly enough, peanut butter and lemon topping (gelatin?) don’t really mix all that well. I guess we can’t expect palates of other cultures to understand our strange likes and dislikes.