Its still upma

Fusion foods home is never home. It begins,always,in that other land where memories are sharp and ingredients scarce. Like that supremely skewed stew of Britain the curry. Even William Makepeace Thackeray wrote an ode to the packaged wonder that made the dish possible,along with Epping butter: She pops the meat into the savoury stew/ With curry-powder table-spoonfuls three/ And milk a pint the richest that may be. But it is in New York that Indian food,like Japanese and Italian and Thai cuisine,has had wild incarnations. Naans arrive in pumpernickel-caper flavour,garam masala truffle becomes dessert and a Mumbai-born chef wins the latest season of Top Chef Masters with an upma.Floyd Cardoz of the nouvelle

Indian restaurant Tabla in NYC and two other finalists had to make a three-course meal. And the first had to be inspired by a childhood memory. Cardoz,not surprisingly,remembered the upma that he snacked after school and,surprisingly,decided to toy with a dish that could be perturbingly muted in its flavours. But Cardozs upma is not the everyday easy breakfast of south Indian homes; he made a semolina polenta flavoured with coconut milk and kokum and topped with sauteed wild mushrooms.

Upma has had many makeovers as it travelled across India. And Cardozs uber-preparation is also upma. In this age of food fetishisation and celebrity chefs and signature dishes,where your next meal just cannot be the same as your last,where more experiments seem to be taking place in the kitchen than in the CERN laboratory,that semolina revisionism is the story of every dish. Its also the grandiloquent story of the migrants table.