Meatless days

In the middle of The Last Jet Engine Laugh, Ruchir Joshi inserts a long ode to the Calcutta sewage system: "....What was designed to carry small amounts of transformed porridge, cabbage soup, beef stew, roast chicken and mild kedgeree.. ended up carrying a far more thickly cosmopolitan mixture than that." He describes "the waste of the great kitchens of Bengal", "the ghee-rich rejections from Marwari havelis", "the authentically pungent defecations" of Chinatown, the offerings of poets, the poor and revolutionaries.

"And then... the system began to receive increasing traces of the best cuisine in the world. From Badabazar, Bowbazar and Bhowanipur, came more and more the deconstructions of delicate patra, of dhokla and undhyu, of the simple rotli, daal, bhaat aney batata nu shaak, of bhakhri, of puri and kadhi, of thepla and proper, thick, masala-wali-chaa, and on the days after big occasions, remains of laadu, magas and shrikhand. In 1940... Calcutta had a population of around sixty thousand Gujaratis."

This passage is a perfect example of how to upset two communities at one stroke: Bengalis, notoriously touchy about their jol-khabar, were not pleased at the demotion to second place in the ‘best cuisine in the world’ stakes, nor were Gujaratis thrilled at their cuisine being praised as raw material for the finest sewage in the world. I’m staying out of this debate—the scars from the Lucknow vs Hyderabad battle and the war wounds from the Bengali-fish-curry vs Goa/ Kerala/Mangalore versions are still fresh welts on my psyche. But I’m curious.

Gujarati food travels in odd, half-hearted ways. The appetisers—dhoklas (sandwich, nylon, khaman, plain), khandvi, assorted farsaans—are popular; the extras—athanus, fresh and to-be-bottled chutneys—are sought after; and shrikhand is as well known as, say, mishti doi. What’s missing is the main course—the dals, the vegetable dishes, the shaaks and kachumbers, the handkerchief-thin rotis, the endless varieties of khichdi.

The only restaurant in Delhi that ‘does’ Gujarati food often commits the great culinary sin that Gujaratis are supposed to perpetrate: they add sugar with an over-generous hand to everything. For this trip to Ahmedabad, I pack an open mind, a healthy appetite and a willingness to explore a cuisine so strongly identified with vegetarianism that most people have forgotten that Surat was famous during the Raj for its robust Mughlai-inspired meat curries and pulaos.

Bearing past slurs on ‘sugary’ Gujarati food in mind, I’m willing to eat my words, but what Ahmedabad has on offer is dust. It comes free with the softies at the ice-cream parlours; it coats dhoklas with an earthy patina; it’s more prominent than chaat masala on the street vendor’s offerings; and it settles like baleful brown cream on the buttermilk. After a while, all the delicacies at Khau Gali in Law Road taste distinctly muddy. This may offend Amdavadis who’re justly proud of the variety of street food, but the dust imparts a flavour that’s a touch too local for my palate.

For outsiders in search of a crash course in Gujarati cuisine, the two places in Ahmedabad that offer the best introduction are Agashiye and Vishala. Agashiye is the rooftop restaurant at the House of MG, Abhay Mangaldas’ heritage hotel in the heart of old Ahmedabad. The best time to come here is at night, when the dust finally makes itself useful, casting an optimistically romantic haze around this bustling city whose edges could do with the softening.

Take a table outside on the terrace, if the weather permits; Agashiye also has an indoor family dining room, but the soft lights of diyas and candles and the clever seating adds a lot to the open-air experience. Dinner is served in courses, beginning with a lemon-honey-ginger juice (or spiced chhaas, which was rapidly becoming a favourite addiction). The first course is usually a choice of farsaans—this could be as homely as deep-fried capsicum fingers or as complex as paatra patervelia, rolled colocassia leaf cylinders with a besan, coriander and jaggery stuffing.

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