The first thing that would strike you upon opening Sarah Woods’ Desi Kitchen: From Jalandhar to the Black Country: A Culinary Roadmap to the Indian Diaspora in Modern Britain is the effortless storytelling. Cooking is indeed an art for her. And born as she was in a working-class Punjabi family of first-generation Indian immigrants in Black Country where they ‘couldn’t actually get rid of the visitors – it was a bit like living in Piccadilly Circus!’, her true inheritance is in the joy she gets in creating communities through food, whether it be through crowded and ticketed supper clubs, or spreading lockdown cheer by passing food and drinks through her home window to the people in the neighbourhood. As she told us in her interview with Asian Voice, ‘What makes me happy is the reaction I get when I see people eating my food. There are few professions in the world where you can elicit such strong emotions, and being a chef is one of them where you can provide such pleasure to other people.’
Rich diversity of immigration
And bringing together so many people with so much joy for nearly all her life has made her mindful of differences, and how those can be overcome ‘by a language of food’. In the introduction to her book, she writes: ‘I feel we need to focus on the here and now, the very exciting evolution of the British food scene based on the rich diversity that immigration has brought. As well as sharing recipes derived from my own Punjabi heritage, I look forward to lifting the veil on other communities, from the island of Sri Lanka all the way up to Kashmir, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Indian food is not one homogenous food type, but hyper-regional and nuanced. The second-generation desi layer removes the geographical borders, and this same cross-over forms part of our identity. The world has always had fusion inspired by travel, exploration and more recently an accelerated movement of people. Classical and traditional recipes will always have a place, but sometimes you have a craving or a ‘chaska’ that only desi flavours can satiate.’
Classic recipes
In her illustrated book (where her cat Tilly makes an appearance), she includes classic recipes from Punjabi, Kashmiri, Pakistani, Nepali, Gujarati, Parsi, Sri Lankan, African Indian, Goan, Bangladeshi, and Bengali communities (kudos to her for this distinction!) from areas in Britain which they are most associated with. The food from each region is introduced by a person from the respective community belonging to first-, second- and third-generation diaspora, people who are also a part of the social media communities she has made for desi foodies. She devised most of the recipes herself while being guided by these people. And while she was a finalist in BBC One’s Britain’s Best Home Cook, her journey around the UK into the households of different communities was a different kind of immersive experience, something she told us was a learning curve for her too. Most of these recipes would be a part of the community’s oral tradition, without written recipes. And her research would entail looking at the different worlds as a newcomer to get the story behind each of the recipes- why people would cook in a certain way, and why particular dishes were important to people. ‘It’s just the hard work and the legwork- speaking to people, doing your research, and reading’, she smiled.
And all these make for as big mouthfuls as they suggest because to be fair, people from the Indian subcontinent can’t be exuberant when it comes to food. Fairly poor families would have whole meat and fish without judgement to make the most of a good day, while an average Hindu family would have different food dishes for widows, the head of the household and the like, and all communities would have some form of ritual fasting. Though of course, there is some hope for people to healthy and sustainable eating. For instance, she brings in Ayurvedic properties of balance in her recipe of the Bengali ‘chorchori’ (traditionally associated with Bengali widows), and she has included a list of spices that she uses regularly along with their benefits in her section on Gujarati food for which she collaborated with NHS doctor Pyal Patel and Cheshire-based nutritionist Katy Petter.
The Desi story
But the desi story that she tells through her book is an overarching one of remembering the Indian subcontinent, with love. As she told us, there is something for everybody. ‘It’s for the reader to pick and choose what they want.’ Some of the dishes are not meant to be eaten every day, they are celebratory dishes, or they are meant to be eaten in mourning, for instance, the Parsi dish ‘dhansak’, which was originally a dish eaten on the fifth day after a person’s passing when meat was reintroduced into the diet. She recalled the advice of dietician Fareeha Jay, with whom she collaborated while laying out food from the Kashmiri community- moderation is the key. One should not hold back during celebrations, especially after rigorous fasting. ‘The most important thing to remember is to enjoy what you eat and not feel guilty about it,’ according to Jay.
True to how its sound and scope, the book is very ambitious, all the more with her acknowledgement that there is no such thing as ‘Indian cooking’ or ‘authentic Indian home food. ‘It is when you bring in the desi element that you are crossing over to different countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal. But then you are also bringing in the regional influences of the places in Britain in which these communities have settled. So it has got a dual regionality in some respects. That’s why I was mindful to celebrate some of the traditional and classic cookery that define regions and communities, and then bring in the desi remix with blended cultures and borrowed elements. And that’s an expression of my identity- I am not one thing, I am not another. My identity is hyphenated, as is my food.’
Tadka
And Sarah does manage to convey that with her meticulousness, even to novices. For someone who told us she did not want to make it easy and who takes pride in writing at the outset, “I NEVER use shop-bought pastes and jars”, her warmth and inclusiveness come through with the cooking advice for beginners that she shared with us: “I would say that for someone new to Indian cooking, the most important thing to master would be a tadka. A tadka is the objectional flavour that is used across India. There are two types of tadka. The first tadka is where you are tempering your whole spices, cooking them in the oil so that there are layers of flavour, and then adding the aromatics. The other tadka is the sizzling tadka right at the end which you pour on the dal. I would recommend masoor dal because daal is one of the simplest things to cook, and one of the most popular. Everybody loves daal, I have not met anybody who doesn’t. For somebody who wants to master Indian cooking, I would suggest daal and tadka as your starting point,” she said.
