Over the past 20-25 years, among the three of us, we’ve lived in six cities across India: Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Chandigarh, Delhi and Bangalore. It wasn’t planned, of course, but our lives on wheels have fashioned us in unforeseen ways, taken us closer to parts of the country we’d have never known otherwise, and also kindled a thirst for travel and all that it brings.
But first, some background. Joy’s (as Jayaditya is known) and Bikramjit’s families were friends from way back but the two weren’t really friendly, given the four-year age difference. Sumana met Joy at The Statesman, Kolkata, which was the first place of employment for both. A year or so down the line, Joy and Sumana had moved to Ahmedabad with new jobs at a newspaper. Bikramjit, meanwhile, was also dabbling in journalism in Kolkata. When a position opened up in the newspaper in Ahmedabad, he, too, made the cross-country trek. (And lest one thinks this is an unholy menage-a-trois, let it be clarified that there were at least two other members of the travelling circus; it just happened that some of us hit it off better than the others. Oh, and somewhere along the way, Sumana and Joy got married; Bikramjit missed out on the wedding because their common boss wouldn’t give him leave.)
We’ve driven each other mad with our idiosyncrasies, fought over perceived slights and injustices but always been bound together by the love of food. This is how it happened.
Joy: I think our first common food experience would have been cooking in our chummery in Ahmedabad. This was in 1995. Which is funny because none of us really knew how to cook (or maybe Bikramjit did but he didn’t let on). But we had to cook because it was cheaper than eating out—and, crucially, because cooking gave us a smidgin of familiarity in an otherwise totally alien terrain. If I had to pick out the a-ha moment, it would probably be the rice that we left on the burner while we went to watch Khamoshi. Halfway through the movie, and halfway across the city, we remembered it was on the stove. I think that was the first and last time we burnt anything to a cinder.
I don’t think Ahmedabad is given enough credit for being a food city. It was great for us, living away from home on a few thousand a month. We ate well—veg, non-veg and everything in between and beyond.
Sumana: Even before we had the gas stove, we had a kerosene stove. I have some nightmarish memories associated with that: one, I couldn’t cook; two, I had no idea how to control the heat on the stove; and three, the aloo in the aloo dum was just not behaving the way it was supposed to—half of it was burnt and the other half raw. So much for my surprise for my flatmates. I still recall my sense of relief when they breezed in, summed up my plight with one look and announced that we were going to eat out (to celebrate some completely fake occasion).
Bikramjit: I think the first thing I remember about the chummery was the stark, bare kitchen, something I never really got used to. I did not cook much probably because I wasn’t in the mood.
Sumana: If we managed to finish work at a respectable hour, though, there was only one place to go: Aunty’s. Her tiny eatery had a formal name, La Bella, but we never knew the name of this little, wizened lady in a blue dress who ran it with an iron hand and a Man Friday. She had four tables, a blackboard menu, and if you came late, you went hungry. And that was that. Her menu wasn’t inventive: chicken masala, mutton masala, rice and fish (fry or gravy), but it was wholesome, filling and almost ridiculously inexpensive. No wonder anyone who ever studied in Ahmedabad—and it had a lot of institutes even then—has a special corner in their heart for Aunty.
Bikramjit: Besides La Bella, I especially remember Bhatiyar Gali (the cooks’ lane) and sweating in the summer heat while consuming large helpings of spicy food. I was introduced to La Bella by my brother, but I really became a regular with Joy and Sumana. I think for me cooking came more gradually, as I got to know my friends better.
Joy: What helped us in our culinary adventures was the relative safety of Ahmedabad, a city that came to life at sunset and was very safe to explore even at the dead of night. We could take an auto from the new city—where we lived—to the old, fill up on the cheap and delicious food in the gallis there, and come back, four in an auto. Sometimes we went to the Cama (the posh hotel across the Sabarmati), and on a Rs 100 per head budget eat ‘shroom steak’ and Death by Chocolate.
Bikramjit: Ah, the Rs 100 per head splurge after night duty. As far as I remember, it came to a little over Rs 100, but I had generous friends who ‘lent’ me the cash.
Joy: Despite all those attractions, we learnt how to cook. There are two dishes we cooked that cling to my mind even today: a beef buffath and a prawn curry. And both because of the excellence of the raw protein. We got the beef from a tiny shop in the old city whose main business was selling auto spares, and we got the prawns from the main fish market (which was a revelation—the seafood was fresh and relatively cheap).
Sumana: I think the random eating out we did on lean budgets in the early days of our friendship cemented our bond, besides laying the foundation for future food adventures. We realized we liked good food and had no compunctions travelling for or spending—or not spending, given our perpetual penury in those days—on it. Our likes and dislikes were still being formed, but we began to appreciate and respect each other’s opinions and suggestions.
Bikramjit: And we picked up ideas from everywhere. I remember being told by a colleague of ours how to find out if the fish were really fresh by looking at their anuses. It’s pretty failsafe. We cooked largely vegetarian food at home, except when we had a party. I remember making crab malai curry once: we used buckets to cook the crabs because we didn’t have utensils large enough! But things looked up when we moved to Baroda (all three of us quit the Ahmedabad newspaper and our new job took us to Baroda, barely two hours away). For the first time, we set up a proper kitchen. Our parents came over and, deeply moved by our impoverished state, generously bought us utensils and implements, including decent serving spoons. On a friend’s recommendation, we employed a middle-aged Marathi lady, Muktabai; she brought her mother, daughter-in-law and granddaughter (four generations in all!) and they cleaned and cooked for us, so our chummery began resembling the home we had left behind. It was in Baroda that we started cooking for the sake of flavour, not just to fill our tummies. We started taking lunch to office and Sumana started baking in an oven.
Sumana: I still have that oven! It’s only about twenty years old now and still in regular use. I agree, Baroda was the turning point: it’s where each of us took baby steps into our specialized areas. Bikramjit, we realized, was brilliant when he was in the mood and had to cook for parties. I found out that I could follow a recipe. And Joy we treasured for his knife skills and his palate. A balance that works very well for us many years hence.
Joy: It’s possibly in Baroda that we all realized how important food was to our lives, to be seen not merely as a daily necessity but as something to plan the day around. Muktabai would cook Gujarati/Marathi/Sindhi dishes, largely vegetarian and very seasonal. The cooking implements Bikramjit’s parents bought us made the kitchen more personal, and what definitely helped was the plan of the kitchen itself—large, airy, with two huge windows that looked out to the horizon, where in the distance you could see the hill of Pavagadh. A kitchen to spend lots of time in. And we did.
Bikramjit: Baroda was also the time when Sumana and Joy got married and I moved to a tiny flat nearby, much to their chagrin. And it was where Sumana and I began our cookbook collection, which still exists, though now broken up between two cities.
Joy: The one other food-related function of Baroda in our lives was that we started having favourite restaurants and favourite dishes. San’s Sizzlers was where we first had iced tea and teppanyaki (or what passed off as it). Sandeep, the avuncular owner, indulged us and was a reason we kept going back. Down the road was the Welcomgroup Vadodara, which is where we would go after night shift for their mutton curry. That’s also where we had our first taste of Mexican food: two chefs, Roberto and Antonio, had come down for a food festival. The standout dish was a chicken cooked in chocolate, which was mind-bending in terms of understanding how chocolate could taste so different. It was in Gujarat that we learnt that the smaller cities can surprise you with the variety and quality of food.
Bikramjit: We then moved to Chandigarh, in 2000, which is where Sumana came into her own as a cook; without Muktabai and with specific ideas of what she wanted, she had no option but to start cooking on a daily basis. That Chandigarh stint was quite idyllic; the mountains were only a couple of hours away and we would drive up for lunch to Giani da Dhaba on the Shimla Highway and get back in time for work. We were often unaccountably delayed and our boss soon got used to the excuses of flat tyres and jammed highways.
Sumana: Despite Bikramjit’s evident talent with meat and fish, the most memorable meal he ever cooked for us was purely vegetarian and, ironically, in the land of butter chicken. I remember Joy and I were on night shift and starving. It was winter, the kind of quiet, crystal-clear, bone-freezing night that’s common in northern India, when all sane people ensure they’re tucked under multiple blankets by 9 p.m. Bikramjit cooked us a hot meal of dal and rice. It was simple and it was superb.
Joy: What stood out in this meal was the freshness, the simplicity and the authenticity, and I think that has been our ‘food philosophy’—if one can use such a grand phrase for such a basic activity—in the years that followed. We enjoy eating together because we look for the same things in food. It means that we are very fussy about where we eat out, preferring places that specialize in a particular cuisine and have a reputation for authenticity; multi-cuisine restaurants are only a last resort. Of course, we argue and differ over choice of cuisine and though that rules out some cuisines from common meals, especially Middle-Eastern, there’s still enough to go around. A chicken sandwich at Koshy’s in Bangalore or a roti and dal at Giani’s dhaba has given us as much pleasure as the sashimi at Megu in Delhi.
Sumana: Which is why one of the things we really enjoy doing—be it singly or together—is discovering markets and shopping for food, be it at home or abroad. Over time, we’ve learnt to identify and pick good vegetables—the whole exotic-organic trend of produce began on our watch—and meats. I remember the excitement when the first organic vegetable store opened in downtown Baroda around the turn of the millennium; there was a sense, even in that small town, that this was the beginning of something new.
Bikramjit: I have always loved the process of putting together a meal. Like looking for a specific cut of meat or a size of prawn, and then building up the dish from there, with the various herbs and spices. For a majority of the time we were in the same city (from 1995 to 2006, give or take a few months), shopping on Saturday with Sumana was a highlight of sorts. We had sussed out the shopkeepers and got ones with whom we vibed to source the produce we wanted.
Joy: Going to the market was a part of my childhood. From the age of eight or so I would accompany my mother and grandmother to New Market in Kolkata every Saturday morning—to the meat section (where the butcher had those huge mutton-chop whiskers), the chicken stalls, the fruit and veg, the grocery store (where I would sometimes be plonked down and given a cold drink while the store owner and I chatted at length about Mohun Bagan and East Bengal). Our childhood holidays used to be in Kalimpong, in the Darjeeling hills, and the haat there was full of fungi and ferns that one never saw anywhere else. I still try and squeeze in a Saturday-morning market trip when in Kolkata; I’m always blown away by the sheer variety of produce, especially the greens. And I realize the importance of building relationships with the stall-holders, some of whom have nothing more than a plastic sheet spread on the ground. They will always give you their best stuff.
Sumana: My family had a holiday home in Madhupur, in what is now Jharkhand. While the shopping in Kolkata was largely left to our old cook, who’d been with the family for years, in Madhupur my father made a morning ritual of going to the market. I loved tagging along with him. In the 1980s, Madhupur was the quintessential heartland town, with a market overflowing with the freshest produce, be it locally grown rice or locally reared goats. My father had a good eye for vegetables, meat and fish; he also loved his sweets. Normally a reserved man, he always enjoyed a good banter with the shopkeepers, who, I think, also appreciated a connoisseur. Unlike many parents nowadays, he never shied away from exposing me to the blood and gore of the fish and meat markets; I think it was important for him that we see where our food came from, so that we respected it and made the most of it.
Our house in Madhupur also had a large orchard of mango, litchi, banana, custard-apple, cashew and other fruit trees, besides a front flower garden. I remember him taking me around, pointing out the various varieties and teaching me to distinguish between one and the other by the leaves. In retrospect, I know this is why I’ve always associated food with farming.
Bikramjit: Shopping done, cooking is the easy part. Because we cook for each other, we have a fairly good idea of each other’s tastes. If I eat something I think is amazing, I can recommend it to either Joy or Sumana, because I can predict whether they will like it or not. Similarly, they are also good at knowing what I like to eat or enjoy doing in the kitchen. I think the culmination of our food interests was our trip to South Africa in 2010, where we had what is now called a curated holiday. Where we went and what we did was decided to a large extent by what we wanted to eat.
Joy: Sumana’s grouse is that we didn’t have any ‘South African’ food in South Africa, but I think we went one step ahead—we had some of the freshest produce served in the most interesting and innovative ways. That was the first time I tasted sorrel, which was an unexpected explosion of flavour in the palate. And it was there that we realized that the best food (and these were some of the world’s top-rated restaurants) is not necessarily served in grand settings by snooty waiters and with a black-tie dress code but is accessible to anyone who takes an interest. At La Colombe, the atmosphere is of a farmyard kitchen; the waiters are friendly and helpful. We went after a day’s traipsing round Cape Town but our slightly dishevelled look didn’t seem to raise any eyebrows. Most gratifying (apart from the food) was to see a man sitting on his own, very much at ease, reading a book and slowly making his way through his meal, in complete communion with his senses. That is true fine dining.
Sumana: I was a solo diner, actually, at Central, Lima, in 2014. But we saw several of them at fine dining places in many cities. There’s nothing quite like eating with like-minded people, but sometimes—especially for business travellers—your own company is all you can fall back on. And rather that, than someone who doesn’t appreciate the food!
Joy: The informality in South Africa suited us, given that we are notoriously unable to subscribe to time and dress codes! But it opened up a new world for us. A couple of years ago we were in Edinburgh and had reservations for dinner at The Kitchin. Sumana had bust a toe that morning and was in obvious distress when we reached there but the staff were wonderful, helping her along and finding a suitable place for us to sit. At the end of the meal Tom Kitchin, the chef, came out and signed our menus. That was a lovely personal touch that immediately lifted an already great experience several notches higher. It’s something that we’re seeing now in India too, where managers no longer act like Carson the butler (of Downton Abbey) turning up his nose at black tie instead of white for dinner!
Bikramjit: I think one reason we work (or eat) well together is that we have very defined strengths. Joy is good with flavours. I have an idea of quantities, be it ordering at restaurants or cooking for parties at home. Sumana likes things Just So when it comes to cuisines she is familiar with. Of course, we do enjoy doing things that are not conformist and, sometimes, that works out wonderfully for everyone.
Sumana: As precious as these fine-dining memories—and there are several others, in Istanbul, London and elsewhere—are our walkabouts in farmers’ markets. All of us love discovering indigenous produce, talking in whatever language possible with shopkeepers and farmers, admiring gross-looking seafood and strange fruits, and sampling peculiar stuff wherever possible! At the Neighbourgoods Market in Cape Town—a must-do for every visitor—we had different vendors every few feet, selling everything from home-brewed beer to seafood paella, fresh cheeses to honeycombs (and some beautiful and wildly expensive, and heavy, wooden chopping boards).
Joy: I had been to Cape Town a few weeks before the other two came and I remember going to Neighbourgoods one Saturday and immediately thinking, ‘This is where we have to come together.’ I think our love for fresh markets wherever we travel is only outweighed by our extreme laziness so that we don’t actually end up cooking much while on holiday. I look at all the varieties of mushrooms, the rows of greens, the hunks of beef and shelves of seafood and wonder what it would be like to cook with such good produce. But it rarely happens. So we end up eating excellent food but we miss out on the Masterchef experience, using all the wonderful produce (and possibly great kitchen equipment) ourselves. We spent a couple of nights in this town called De Kelders, which is on the South African coast where the whales come in. It was a homestay with a fully loaded kitchen but it also had lovely people in charge who organized everything for us.
Sumana: Going back a bit in time, I remember our first trip abroad for a friend’s wedding. We were very gauche, very wide-eyed, though we were in the UK, which is familiar at so many levels. Our friends took us to a seafood restaurant in Mumbles, Wales. And I was blown away by how lightly the fish was treated, with just butter and lemon juice. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, no wonder the spice trade was so important to these guys.’ I also realized how we smother our food with masalas, possibly to disguise inferior produce or to guard against spoilage in our tropical heat. That very simple meal suddenly connected a whole host of dots for me.
Joy: The Istanbul trip was special for another reason: we were very lucky to meet up with Aylin Oney, who, apart from being a warm, funny and super-helpful friend, is a local food historian. So we got to see bits of Istanbul we would probably not have otherwise seen. We ate like locals at Ciya in Kadikoy, we shopped in the tiny stalls surrounding it, buying honey fresh off the combs and the best Turkish delight. We met Bilge, whose shop at the Spice Market was like Aladdin’s cave for food lovers.
Sumana: Yes, I think that the organized food tour in Istanbul really opened our eyes to the huge difference local knowledge can make. In Peru, my hosts were well aware of my interest in food, in not just eating it, but related history and agriculture as well. I was lucky enough to get a tour of an organic farm at the foothills of the Andes (it’s the most spectacular farm ever, with the mountains seeming to rise right up from the clearing of the farm), see various fruits and vegetables growing in the fields, go around local markets (very like our Indian haats, actually) and see quinoa heaped up for sale, just like rice is, in our bazaars. I believe prices have gone up five times at the ground level since the quasi-grain suddenly became popular worldwide. It was another indicator how food cannot be a single-point interest; everything in our lives tie up with it.
Joy: When we went to Rio, hotel rates were far too high and all we could afford was a homestay; our host, Eliana, was a wonderfully spirited Chilean in her seventies, a former professor of political science. She had a lovely house straddling five levels with a huge and well-stocked kitchen that she threw open to us. On the last day of our stay she decided she was going to cook a moqueca (fish stew) for us so we set off shopping. She took us to this local market where no one spoke anything other than Portuguese, and inside that to her favourite grocery store to buy the oils and spices we’d need. It was no more than a neighbourhood kirana store; I’ve seen them across India, and their treasures are known only to locals. We bought rice, a special palm oil, various powders (including cocoa sold loose)—the sort of stuff no tourist would get to see, and far more authentic (and cheaper) than what they sold in the department stores. On the way back home we took a short detour to the Confeitaria Colombo, a really grand nineteenth-century café that specialized in pastries. Off our beaten track, for sure. That evening she made the moqueca and as she made it she told us stories of her life, which seemed to be interwoven with the moqueca. All of that (and some good wine) made for an unforgettable dinner.
Sumana: The moqueca story was very special to me: I had first read about it in Jorge Amado’s classic novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon. And as it happens, a television adaptation of the novel is where Eliana learnt to cook the stew, though over the years she had made it her own.
Joy: My discovery was not a coincidence, it was planned. Months before our Brazil trip I’d seen an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show where he went to Sao Paulo and ate feijoada, which was originally slave food, a stew made with the offcuts and tripe, with beans and a lot of accompaniments. I was fascinated by it, by the story and the elevation of slave food into the national dish of Brazil. We had feijoada in Goa a few weeks before our Brazil trip and it disappointed me: is this what the fuss was about? I needn’t have worried; we had it on our second day in Sao Paulo, and it was everything I’d expected: full of flavour, with layers and textures to it, and bits and bobs of meat that you weren’t too sure about (was that an ear or a snout or something else?). We had it several more times on that trip, including on a rainy and chilly afternoon in Rio and it was soul food, just like it said on the bottle.
Bikramjit: Simultaneously, we’ve had the good fortune of meeting people who have helped grow our interest in food. I became friends with the late Jacob Sahaya, when we met at a dinner. His knowledge of coastal Tamil food, Kongunadu food, was something he was very proud of. A couple of years after that meal, I got to meet and work with Jacob again and met his family as well while cooking up some very intricate Nadar dishes. It was a community (and cuisine) I’d been unaware of. For someone who was a star—Jacob had a hugely popular cooking show on Sun TV—he was very close to his roots. Like me, he believed the food made by the aunts and mums was unbeatable. His restaurant, which I visited shortly before his sudden and tragic death in 2012—he was just thirty-eight—was a fantastic homage to all the home-style recipes he had collected over the years.
Joy: I remember that first dinner (and also a meal several years later at his restaurant in Chennai). There were many things we learnt from him that we apply even today.
Bikramjit: He was the first person I knew who had researched food through ancient Tamil texts. It spurred me to investigate and read about food because I realized how little I knew. Jacob introduced me to Indian food without foreign influences: no chillies, no potatoes, no cane sugar. It’s amazing what we have been able to make Indian. It makes me think every time I look at a dish.
Joy: One of the privileges of being on the fringes, as it were, of the food business—writing about food, eating out frequently—has been the proximity it gives us to the creators of good food, insights into their philosophies, an understanding of how the business works. They are primarily chefs—putting good food on exciting menus—but their stories and their world views go far beyond what they put on the plate.
Bikramjit: The person who inspired me, especially while he was in his experimental stage of cooking, is Bakshish Dean. I met him while working on my very first food review in Delhi—a review of his restaurant Fire at the Park—and we clicked almost immediately. I was in awe of his knowledge of food; we had both read Harold McGee and Bakshish has used this knowledge in a practical sense. That first menu was fresh and extraordinary; he looked at the food, the ambience, the service, the crockery and cutlery as part of a whole experience. And his food really stood out. I still feel Bakshish is one of the best culinary minds in the country. I remember those long conversations I had with him sitting in his tiny office in the kitchen, tasting bits of different dishes and just talking about food non-stop. It was like sitting in on a lecture, and it helped me think out of the box. I still remember a meal that he had invited me to where he made this pulao with green methi seeds and rice from a recipe he had borrowed from his Muslim neighbours in Shimla. My decision to go and hunt authentic recipes from across India, which I turned into a TV show, was largely inspired by what Bakshish fed me right there in Delhi. He made me realize the importance of sticking to the original flavours of anything one is cooking.
Joy: What has always fascinated me is not the chefs but the domestic cooks, the bawarchis. How they mastered alien meat, fruits and vegetables, alien flavours and processes to produce gourmet dishes—it’s fairly mindboggling when you come to think of it. We had a cook called Sunil from Purulia, one of the poorest districts of West Bengal. He came to our house as a raw teenager but within a few years he was making souffles, soups, roasts and stews; most amazing was how he cooked beef perfectly even though he didn’t eat it (and could barely touch it). Even a kebab would have been alien to him as also the process of grilling. I wish I had asked him how he had picked up all this: did he merely replicate instructions perfectly, did he understand what was going on, or was it pure instinct? I never did ask, of course; we just took it for granted.
Sumana: Talking about cooks/chefs we’re impressed by, I have to bring in my grandmum. She was the classic Indian matriarch, never measuring anything but by andaz, producing the most finely cut vegetables on the Bengali bonti and cooking only a few signature dishes herself, usually sweets. The family cook produced the daily meals on her directions; she’d be telling him about the tempering and the timings from one room, and he’d be sweating it out over the coal fire in the kitchen. Yet every single dish and every single meal that we ate while she helmed the household bore her stamp. Typically, she never used recipes, nor did she leave behind any and, as typically, I was never interested in following what she did as a child; food was something that just appeared at the dining table, though the talk of food was always all around. The thrill when I managed to approximate a particularly favourite dal years after she had passed away was indescribable.
Joy: My interest in food came from my mother. As a child I would be in the kitchen while she baked (always in the afternoon, when she had the kitchen to herself); I would pass the ingredients and operate the mixie, and as reward I would claim the scraps of dough (my favourite was the dough used in apple pie). This was the 1970s, when you didn’t get most of the ingredients that are so freely available today, and my mother was an expert in substituting and making use of local produce in Western food long before it became fashionable in the top restaurants. Her curiosity about food—willing to try anything just once, to travel for a taste or a recipe—has rubbed off on me. I wish I had her ability to approach perfect strangers at the fish stall or the fruit market and ask them how they were going to cook what they had bought.
Bikramjit: When I was allowed to go out with the family to eat (I was a very, very badly behaved child), I always managed to sweet talk my way into various kitchens, my favourite being the kitchen of our neighbourhood Chinese restaurant, Chung Wah. It was a fascinating, dark, smoky kitchen with flashes of fire from the woks. The chefs wore vests (ganjis) and almost played with the food. This was possibly the beginnings of my desire to become a chef. And yes, I wanted to be a Chinese chef. The first person who encouraged me to begin the process of cooking was my aunt Shona, who I remember came to spend time with the family in 1977. I vividly remember Chhotopishi, as I called her, using an element heater to cook up pork chops with apple sauce. From scratch. She even took me to the market and that’s when, I think for the first time in my life, I saw a dish coming together from start to finish.
Joy: When Bikramjit comes to stay with us, there is an obligatory visit to the local fish market where he will buy vast quantities of seafood and then proceed to cook. By the end of the evening he uses up every single cooking utensil (and some that aren’t), but in the end turn out some incredible dishes. I remember he once bought a whole seer fish. We brought it home and all he did was add some soy sauce, ginger, coriander and lime, and steam it. It was simple and it was perfect. We have actually planned our big parties around his visits—he is happiest when left alone in the kitchen to create havoc and turn out a never-ending stream of freshly cooked finger food. This has often been preceded by a visit to the market to buy a carload of stuff from crockery to implements to raw material to the best cheeses/sausages/meats, and you can sense Sumana’s tension levels rising when he walks through the door with the baskets, bags and boxes but by the end of the evening there are a lot of very happy, if overstuffed, guests who walk, or roll, out of our door. He loves an audience. The flipside is that if he has to cook a simple meal for the three of us and is not in the mood, it could go horribly wrong.
Bikramjit: I think Sumana’s cooking has evolved the most in the past twenty years. From knowing very little about food or cooking and, frankly, having very little interest in it, she is today the most knowledgeable, in the deepest sense, among the three of us and can turn out gourmet meals as well as very good everyday rice-and-dal lunches. And the latter is actually the mark of a good cook; gourmet meals, with good ingredients and fancy recipes, are often easier to replicate than simple food made to taste very good. Joy and I have been exposed to food and cooking from an early age so in some ways it is more innate but Sumana has learnt it almost from scratch later on.
Joy: I think we’ve all evolved in different ways. I think more about food than before, and I analyse differently, perhaps a bit too much, as well as plan and execute differently. I’ve been exposed to more of, and have learnt to appreciate, Bengali food; ditto with Sumana and ‘Western’ food. Bikramjit, who always straddled both worlds, has learnt to be more discerning (especially in our company). The landscape around us is far more democratic than before; everyone has more defined tastes, even twenty-something colleagues will know clearly what they like and dislike and are not shy of articulating it. But after all that travel, all those top restaurants and Masterchef dishes and fancy ingredients, there’s one truism that stays with us: The best meals are those shared around a big table with family or friends. Nothing makes a meal more complete and more satisfying than the company of those close to you, the conversation stretching the mealtime for hours. A bit like this chat!
Sumana: Time to end, with this quote from Virginia Woolf that sums it up: ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’