Legend has it that the idea for one of Mumbai’s best-loved street foods took root when former hockey player and salt refinery owner, Amarjeet Singh Tibb, chomped up a pita bread wrapped around a mass of meat made up of slivers of lamb kebabs, shaved off from a slowly rotating rotisserie. Pickles and crunchy vegetables gave the succulent cumin-flavoured meat company and sauces dripped out of the roll. It was 1967. Tibb was in Beirut on his way back from London. A foodie, he was moved by the street vendor’s offering and decided to give it his own tweak. Back in Bombay (as Mumbai was known then), he found a willing co-adventurer in his wife Surinder Kaur. The West Asian flatbread was replaced by a flaky roti and Surinder’s mutton – or chicken – curry became the stuffing. The rolls were put to test on picnics with friends. And in 1969 was born the Frankie — named after the cricket legend Sir Frank Worrell.
Decades before the shawarma came to find a place in the country’s street food landscape — after liberalisation — it had inspired two Partition refugees who had made their home in India’s finance capital to create a street food dedicated to a cricketer born in Barbados. The Frankie story is part of a long — almost endless — list of fascinating accounts of give-and-take amongst cultures. But history also tells us about a counter-current — of people who want to confine food within borders. On Monday, Tamil Nadu Health Minister Ma Subramanian added his name to this unsavoury catalogue: He requested people to avoid eating shawarma.
A lot of Subramanian’s concerns draw from reasons that have to do with hygiene. A teenager had reportedly lost her life and more than 50 people fell ill after eating shawarma at a Kerala restaurant. “Shops selling the dish don’t have proper storage facilities and they keep them outside exposing them to dust and due to the interest of youngsters, many shops have started selling the dish without any proper facilities,” he said. These are valid food safety concerns. But the minister chose to pin the main cause for these omissions on shawarma’s “Western (sic)” origins.
It is, of course, true that we tend to associate countries or regions with culinary items — Japan with sushi, Italy with pizza, Mexico with tacos, Bengal with shukto, Spain with paella. Food is also a key ingredient of regional pride. But culinary borders were porous for centuries before the word “globalisation” entered the lexicon of academics and policymakers.
Like the narratives of most culinary experiments, the story of Amarjit and Surinder’s take on shawarma has variations. But nearly every one of them confirms that unsaid adage of gastronomy: Food is the eternal nomad, comfortable in a variety of lands and social milieus. Today, the Frankie is as inherently a part of Mumbai’s gastroscape as the chai – virtually indistinguishable from the beverage in its country of origin — is to the daily routines of lakhs of Indians.
Legend also has it that in the the 1860s, the experiments of a young native of the Turkish town of Bursa, Iskender Effendi, gave birth to a far-reaching innovation in kebab making. While assisting his butcher uncle, Iskender decided to deviate from the established practice of grilling meat on a horizontal spit and, instead, grilling lamb on an upright spit, ensuring that the juices of the meat would not fall on the flames. He then came up with the idea of cooking sheets of meat, layered one top of another on this new charcoal powered grilling device. Patrons at his family restaurant were served a heaped medley of meats of different cuts, along with generous servings of yogurt and sizzling sheep butter. Food historians trace the origins of the doner kebab to Iskender’s experiments — doner is rotation in Turkish, and cevirme means turning in the same language, the origin of the Arabic word shawarma.
The rotisserie has acquired mechanical finesse in the more than a century and a half since it was crafted. From Turkey, it travelled to lands and market places where the aromas that arises from this grilling device mingle with smells of chaat and aloo tikka and cooks keep an eye on the turning rotisserie while sharing space with noodle vendors clanging furiously on their woks and biryani sellers peddling a vegetarian version of the original meat and rice dish. In this extravaganza of flavours and tastes, who cares for origins — foreign or Indian.
Write to the author at kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com
