A Room with a view

Going by his considerable body of food writing and his friends8217; 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: 8216;8216;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 night8217;s cold string beans and, in the freezer, half a package of pita bread8230;

8216;8216;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 mother8217;s famous green mango chutney.8217;8217; Ismail Merchant8217;s Indian Cuisine, 1986.

The confidence, which bordered on arrogance, crept through in Merchant8217;s own appraisal of food and cooks. 8216;8216;A great cook should be able to do something well with the snap of a finger rather than to toil over it,8217;8217; he once said. For the rest of us, there are the cookbooks.

Unsurprisingly, for one so unstructured in his cooking methods, the film-maker8217;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 can8217;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 Merchant8217;s free-and-easy push-the-envelope attitude8212;best epitomised in the title of his second cookbook, Passionate Meals: The New Indian Cuisine for Fearless Cooks and Adventurous Eaters 19948212;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 that8217;s intrinsically Indian about the food; many of the dishes8212;especially the fish8212;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 day8212;cases in point: 8216;Richard8217;s Chicken8217; and 8216;Felicity Kendal8217;s Nimbu-Masoor Dal8217;8212;Ismail Merchant8217;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 chef8217;s own sensibility, honed in Mumbai8217;s Crawford Market, producing a fiesta of classic and concocted dishes all with that quirky touch.

There won8217;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.