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Journalism of Courage
LONG before Thomas Friedman, Ismail Merchant discovered that the world was as flat as a frying pan. And that while film may be the lingua franca of the artistic world, food was a close second.
That’s probably why tributes for Ismail the chef have been as numerous as those for Merchant the film-maker. His Va-Va-Voom Potatoes—a signature dish that Shashi Kapoor was particularly fond of—will be recalled with as much fondness as his special touches for the Nawab’s picnic scene in Heat And Dust; memories of his biryani will also be redolent with all the poignancy of Nur’s drunken scene in In Custody.
‘‘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).
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DINNER GUESTS
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The amazing thing about watching him cook was his speed. Whether it was an Indian or a Western meal, he could whip up an entire meal for six within half an hour. It was like watching an artist at work. |
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.
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MERCHANT’S MANTRAS
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PEG MEASURE A single drink, or a glass of wine before dinner. Anything more tires the senses |
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.
