A Room with a view

Going by his considerable body of food writing and his friends’ memories, Merchant was one of those supremely confident cooks who could transform leftovers and half-forgotten cartons into a gourmet meal. Film director Anthony Korner (Helen: Queen Of The Nautch Girls) writes of one such instance: ‘‘There was (in the fridge) a few eggs, five sprigs of tired parsley, half a carton of yoghurt, some cooked rice, two wrinkled lemons, last night’s cold string beans and, in the freezer, half a package of pita bread…

‘‘Fourteen minutes later, Ismail blithely emerged from the kitchen bearing a tray laden with a spectacular egg curry with rice, raita, dal, potatoes, onions, string beans in lemon butter, hot pita bread and his mother’s famous green mango chutney.’’ (Ismail Merchant’s Indian Cuisine, 1986).

The confidence, which bordered on arrogance, crept through in Merchant’s own appraisal of food and cooks. ‘‘A great cook should be able to do something well with the snap of a finger rather than to toil over it,’’ he once said. For the rest of us, there are the cookbooks.

Unsurprisingly, for one so unstructured in his cooking methods, the film-maker’s first book on food came almost 30 years after he entered a New York kitchen as a homesick 22-year-old. Though Madhur Jaffrey had already made the crossover from a can’t-boil-an-egg foodie to cookbook auteur by 1986, when Merchant published his Indian Cuisine, few bothered to draw parallels between the two.

If first-timers swear by Jaffrey for her exactitude, it was Merchant’s free-and-easy push-the-envelope attitude—best epitomised in the title of his second cookbook, Passionate Meals: The New Indian Cuisine for Fearless Cooks and Adventurous Eaters (1994)—that won the film-maker new legion of fans.

Interestingly, though Merchant was ostensibly writing on Indian food in his first two books, there is often little that’s intrinsically Indian about the food; many of the dishes—especially the fish—work better with crusty bread and a green salad than roti and raita. The European side of Ismail blossomed under the Tuscan sun while shooting for A Room With A View, and in France, where M-I made eight films.

While his food and food writing were always connected to his day—cases in point: ‘Richard’s Chicken’ and ‘Felicity Kendal’s Nimbu-Masoor Dal’—Ismail Merchant’s Florence (1995) and Filming And Feasting In France (1999) actually takes the film-food fiend on to the sets of their productions via fresh markets, top-line restaurants, stately pensiones and of course, a makeshift kitchen. The Continental insistence on fresh produce complemented the master chef’s own sensibility, honed in Mumbai’s Crawford Market, producing a fiesta of classic and concocted dishes all with that quirky touch.

There won’t be any more of those books. But the next time you want your lager on ice with a squeeze of nimbu, remember, the spirit lives on.