A dash of gusto...

A collection of Hindustan Times' 'Rude Food' columns, reviewed by the consulting editor of The Times of India.

Rude Food
The Collected Food Writings of Vir Sanghvi
Vir Sanghvi
Penguin
2004
Food
Pages: 368
Price: Rs 375
ISBN: 0143031392
Paperback

HT Image

One cap among the many plumed ones that Vir Sanghvi sports does not receive the attention it deserves. The success he notches up year after year as an editor, political commentator and television anchor accounts for the esteem and popularity he enjoys within the country and beyond. But only a small number of readers who take a passionate interest in the subject are aware that for a quarter of a century he has also been writing on food with remarkable verve and felicity. The publication of Rude Food, a collection of his columns written for the Hindustan Times, will give them, and indeed a wider readership, an opportunity to acknowledge in full measure the talents he was required to summon to practice this difficult genre of journalism.

Food writers fall in four broad categories. Some concentrate on cookery books. Others function solely as restaurant critics. Still some others analyse food from a scholarly perspective. The most stimulating ones, however, are those who, cutting across all these categories, communicate their impressions about what they eat with a literary flair that makes reading about food as much of a joy as consuming it.

The column would be signed ‘Grand Fromage’. Literally, it means ‘large cheese’ in French but the idea was to treat it as an in-joke for the office. The Grand Fromage was of course the Big Cheese — the paper’s editor. (Heh, heh, heh. No, I didn’t find it very funny either.)

Such flair is hard to cultivate. For, as the influential critic Paul Levy remarks, the vocabulary available to a food writer is meagre. The words you can use to describe taste are sweet, sour, savoury, bitter, salty, sharp, acid; to describe the olfactory, you have smoky, flowery and acrid; and to describe texture you can count on smooth, rough, soft and harsh. This is why ‘literary’ food writers often take recourse to analogy and metaphor.

I do not know whether Vir Sangvi is bothered about producing gastronomic literature since his style, as we shall see in a minute, is decidedly conversational. All the same he belongs to the fourth category of food writers I have mentioned earlier. He does not shun recipes altogether. Occasionally he dons the mantle of a restaurant critic if only, as he says in his autobiographical preface, to “take all the snobbery out of going to expensive restaurants.” And though he lays no claim to be a scholar, historical references and allusions to trends, fads and fashions abound in this collection.

Right at the start he tells us that his intention was to launch a food column that “cut through all the crap, swept away all the bull-shit, treated the snob non-sense with the contempt it deserved and did not take sides — of hotel chains, chefs, wine importers, head waiters and God alone knows who else.” So it is that he articulates his likes and dislikes with undisguised and often rude candour. In that respect he is closer to the Gallic tradition. The French tend to be taciturn if the meal is superb. But, as Anthony Burgess observes, they break into senatorial or Zolaesque invective if it is not.

Vir writes without any embellishment about the great meals he has had in China, Thailand, London, New York and elsewhere and about his fondness for salads and sandwiches. Wielding wit and charm he holds forth on caviar, truffles, foie gras, smoked salmon, vanilla, oysters, chocolates, mushrooms, potato chips, fast foods, dietary regimes, exotic fruits like the Durian (‘Smells like shit but tastes like heaven.’) and even on his suspected ‘lactose intolerant’ condition (allergy to milk). He also movingly evokes the eateries he frequented when he was growing up in Bombay and when he was a student at Oxford.

But he bares his fangs to debunk the feigned obsequiousness of waiters in Five Star restaurants, the exorbitant money these restaurants charge for dal and chaval, the ghastly fare served in flights and at official banquets in New Delhi. In much the same vein he berates the consumers of spirits, pokes fun at the self-styled experts on wine and is pitiless when he denounces the Indianization of Chinese food. This latter trend started in Bombay when Nelson Wang concocted a dish which was to become a huge favourite with Indians – the Chicken Manchurian. It is to be found nowhere but in India.

None of this is to suggest that Vir is hooked on foreign foods alone. In several pages he extols the virtues of desi khana, including kakori kebabs, Nizam rolls, tandoori chicken, idli-dosa, bhel-puri and the many irresistible vegetarian delicacies of his native Gujarat. Perhaps he should devote more of his energies to discover the marvels of Indian food. They vary not only from state to state, but also from region to region within a state and indeed from one community and caste to another. Greater heed to our own culinary traditions would enable Vir to deflect the criticism that much of his writing can appeal to the upper crust alone and that the praises he occasionally sings for desi khana is a telling example of inverted snobbery.

But let me not quibble any further. This collection reveals an India that is rapidly coming of age in the gastronomic area as well. Vir argues in substance that an Indian can be attached to his or her family and regional food and, at the same time, experience in a sensible and discerning manner the culinary delights of the entire world. And this regardless of the onslaught of the culture cops, advertisers, PR executives and overbearing ignoramuses.

No other book by an Indian author published in recent times celebrates the art of eating with such sustained gusto and scepticism. In addition to his role as an eminently fair referee of our political contests, Vir Sanghvi has emerged as one of our foremost arbiters of what should, or should not, flatter our palate.

(The writer is consulting editor, The Times of India.)