“The anthropologist arrives in the city on foot, the sociologist by car and via the main highway, the communications specialist by plane,” Nestor Garcia Canclini has wryly observed. What does that make you, you wonder?

Stop. Stop.

You measure distance by travel time, not so long at all. You measure it yet again by the time-difference, which is hardly insurmountable: just about 4 hours from home. Measure it again by the immediate familiarity of roads and buildings, street signs, shops, and brands, and you arrive at a theory of cultural homogenization, which asserts the sameness of everywhere—all things standardized to global consumer standards and needs. Packaged. Pretty. Predictable. An eminently negotiable “contact zone,” to borrow Mary Louise Pratt’s old term, in which it does not seem at all that “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other …  in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”

But they do clash asymmetrically, you want to insist, almost in vain, given all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They do.

South Africa feels a whole lot like the United States in some respects, or like Europe in others—and you don’t really need Hofstede’s dimension data to tell you that. The movement is, as Tomlinson has written, from connectivity to proximity to ubiquity: interconnectedness creates the impression of proximity and uniformity. What it means is that you can hit the ground running, borne along by airplanes and taxis and such conveyances that whisk you from site to site so that you can comfortably function really without regard to local context. Propelled by trans-national flows of capital, global business decontextualizes everything. It’s like skimming the surface of deep water with no thought to the depths below your airborne feet.

Then again, airports and hotels are not places to expect cultural difference beyond the marketing of Amarula or beadwork dolls or t-shirts which say “South Africa” [you were there. Really, you were. You couldn't have got a t-shirt that says "South Africa" any place else.] On the contrary, they are sites which have been deliberately homogenized, cultural differences reduced to immigration procedure—except at key moments of rupture: risk carrying poppy seeds through Dubai, and place and culture may well reassert their presence, indeed their ultimate authority, with a vengeance, popping your global bubble. What’s beyond these sites of constructed homogeneity matters immensely.

To find what’s beyond, however, is not easy. The world is a lot more impenetrable than “small world”/”flat world“ theories let us believe, and since both business and tourism have pounded roll-on luggage-friendly paths into contact zones once overdetermined by colonialism and slavery. Leave aside for now stories of Soweto and and Fordsburg and Lenasia. Leave aside what it has felt like to be dropped, unawares, into the homes and daily routines of people in Midrand or Thokoza or the unpronounceable Vereeniging. Forget what it’s like to find yourself between the lawn mower and the children running and dinner preparations and the train blocking the route to your next interview (for which you’re already late).

Instead, consider just the prospect of walking through a grocery store.

Grocery stores capture you as sites in which globalized consumer culture per force articulates with the local: the environment (going roughly by what produce is available, imports notwithstanding), gastronomy (what clues are contained about how people eat and cook), and of course branding (washing powder is Omo as it always has been, and Nido—well, anyone who has lived in Africa knows that’s milk powder). Walking through a grocery store or visiting a spaza shop is like reproducing those most mundane of routine practices in search of life narratives that illuminate values, myths, desires, habits, identities. Globalization comes alive at the grocer’s as the interaction between different scales of human experience, vocabularies, and needs.

Or it should anyway.

At first, however, the walk is disconcerting, for it winds also through a de-territory: standardized, homogenized, consumer-friendly, numbingly repetitive landscapes that make it hard to differentiate a SuperSpar, Checkers, and a Pick-n-Pack in Joburg, from a Randalls or a HEB in Houston: start at fruits and vegetables, go through the bakery, and then navigate to cereals, dry packaged foods, bath products, home-care, toys, kitchen things, dairy, wines. Walk through tunnels of Nido upon Nido upon Nido, Omo beside Omo beside Omo, Peri Very Peri-Peri, to the row of check-out stands, with conveyor belts and scanners that go beep-beep-beep.

When you do find your way to local ingredients, there’s another sort of ubiquity with which to contend: beyond the fruits and vegetables (very few of them organic), packaged and processed foods predominate.  Actual peri-peri (bird’s eye) chilies are near-impossible to find except occasionally in the gourmet corners of Woolworth Food. It’s no coincidence that the chain Nando’s peri peri sauces are everywhere: interpreted, bottled, and good to go. The distance from where you are is so much the greater. Of course.

Interestingly enough, this assertion of global de-territory isn’t disturbing at all—though it really should be. Being forced to deal, damnit, with suspicion toward poppy seeds (khus khus) in Dubai or daily infrastructural instabilities in Pondicherry, is a rupture tortuous enough to make many a repat queasy about being forced to be in a place.

The retail grocery spares us the contact zone by eschewing locality. In place of place, an numbing amnesia takes hold. You must press through the fog for little hints of the sort of globalized consciousness that Pick-N-Pay represents.

Not local culture, against a homogenized consumer landscape, trans-national cultural difference is accentuated: Mexican “Guadala Gunpowder” hotsauce promises to bring the (Bandito-heat-gunfire) south of Mexico into South Africa.

When you see TEXAN corned meat, you know for a fact that you aren’t any longer in Texas (or Kansas, for that matter). Where you are, however, remains frustratingly indeterminate though of course you know precisely where you are all along. You’re in South Ey-frica, Joburg, Rosebank, but also in that familiar global cosmopolitan de-territory that has so loosened the ties between culture and place that your movement between places is seamless. It’s so easy to forget where you are.

But look closer, there are other signs.

An abundance of cabbage and swiss chard, which everyone calls spinach, and some call morogo [mo-ro-kho], though you doubt the two can be the same (morogo refers to a wild variety of local spinach). Piles of “pumpkin” (butternut squash) everywhere.

Eggplant is “brinjal”—great for grilling, calling out to “buy and braai” (barbecue).

Roiboos (roy-bos; Afrikaans for red bush) tea, the world’s latest health tea drink, as ordinary as any other Lipton commodi-tea in this part of the world.

A love-affair with apricot jam intense enough to can the stuff mile-high.

Rusks and Blatjangs (saucy, jammy, fruity chutneys) and Trekker Coffees to invoke Voortrekker journeys from the Cape colonies into the heart of what is now South Africa.

Samp—a word of Native American origin—or stampmielies in Afrikaans, to accompany beans.

So, so many ingredients for porridge of one sort or other. King Korn for mabele (as it is known in Northern Sotho: stiff porridge made of sorghum meal).

Piled-up 10kg bags of No 1 Super Mealie Meal (ground white maize) to prepare a pap for every braai—whether a putu pap or a krummelpap or a stywe pap or a growwe pap (some of which may be distinguishable from each other based only on water content, for pap is essentially a porridge).

[Wait -- so much mealie meal, seriously? You hold on to the thought, to follow later.]

And wines. Don’t forget the wines. Stacked up to the ceiling, rivaling only the canned apricot jam and the stacked sacks of mealie pap.

And the oddest of little clues about other sorts of global trends: in the dairy case, a container of Inkomazi sanctioned as “shuddha” (Sanskrit for clean) and “halal,” both with appropriate seals. [“Inkomo” is cow, imaasi is soured milk; together they are Inkomazi, cow’s soured milk or a local brand name for “maas,” which is essentially high fat fermented milk. Yoghurt, but really only sort of.] Nothing Parve here, but “Shuddha” and “Halal” matter.

You keep returning to pap and samp–which are everywhere in restaurants and your respondents’ answers to food association questions as favorite, staple foods, the necessary complement to every braai.

But somewhere you remember N!ai and Nisa, and mealie meal as handouts to erstwhile hunter-gatherer communities long-settled into poverty and disenfranchisement on reservations. You recall N!ai reflecting: “We were not poor. Before, there was plenty of food, but that is not true anymore … Even if hunger grabbed you, you could eat….We didn’t know money….Now we eat mealie meal, and mealie meal and I hate each other.”

There are other accounts, such as the one recorded by Audrey Richards in 1939:

Bemba, after leaving their country to work in urban areas in the south, say they find it difficult to adjust themselves to the maize flour “mealie meal” they are given there. One old man probably too fixed in his gastric habits to become adapted to town life said, “Yes, first I ate through one bag of [maize] flour and then a second. Then at last I said, ‘Well, there it is! There is no food to be found among the Europeans.’

How did it happen that a grain whose origins are not in Africa at all but in the Americas, which were unheard of prior to the 1700s, by the time of your visit they are as much part of local cultures as “Oma” is now Afrikaans? ["'Oma'--that's Dutch, isn't it?" I remark to a grandmother whose grand daughter is kissing her good bye. "No," she replies definitively, "It's Afrikaans."] Such is the entrenchment of maize meal into African foodways and agrobusiness: the capitalist expansions that accompanied colonialism and transformed physcial and social landscapes are consigned to amnesia.

Through the secret door marked “mealie meal” which not even the locals will know is there, you’re about to walk straight into a contact zone.

Portuguese traders provide the earliest introduction: it’s zaburro in Mozambique (from the Portuguese milho zaburro), masa mamputo in Angola (“grain of the white man”), and mealie in Afrikaans (from the Portuguese milho)–the term most widely used in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Missionaries brought it next.

Even so, until the first third of the twentieth century, McCann tells us, diets in southern Africa consisted mainly of sorghum and millet. As late as the end of the 19th century, white South African farmers still held maize a Kaffir crop, with limited commercial value.

Yet, as maize fit in first between seasonal cycles, soil niches, older staple crops, and other New World émigrés such as cassava, beans, or pumpkins, it was poised to revolutionize industrial food production in South Africa. A few things made this possible:

1. Maize’s quick maturity and less-labor-intensive cultivation, compared to the traditional sorghum–which made it attractive as a crop;
2. The 1867 discovery of diamonds and the 1885 opening of a railroad at Kimberly–which brought in hungry workers and a cash economy alongside a transportation system linking local production with national and international markets;
3. The arrival of the “Hickory King”: a white dent poor-soil-tolerating out-yielding maize variety–which would become the progenitor of commercial maize varieties in the region and which held the possibilities of industrial production;
4. The exodus of men from agricultural production to the mines–which buttressed the need for a low-labor crop, on the one hand, and created the political need for cheap food supply, on the other.

The result: Basotho farming quickly turned maize from garden vegetable into an export-ready commodity–”mealie flour.” The commercial flour fed men in the mines “mealie papa” (cornmush) while their families back home consumed their household crop in the same form. Government subsidies in a mining economy would eventually enable the mechanization of maize cultivation on white farms, instituting cheap “mealies” the culinary cornerstone of apartheid era food production.

Thus it was, writes McCann that:

[t]he evolution of a distinctive agricultural landscape—the region of the Transvaal, the eastern Orange Free State, and colonial Basutoland (Lesotho after 1968) known as the “maize triangle,”—was a product of the historical conjuncture of maize, labor migration, and nascent industrial capitalism on the South African highveld. This setting of highlands, palatable grasses, friable soils, and well-defined rainfall frontiers became a stage on which maize played a seminal role in struggles over labor, landscape, and livelihood. Maize thus stood at the heart of an industrial transformation of the national food supply. 

You return once more to the Rosebank Pick-N-Pay as a site of global historical amnesia, thinking of the drives from Nelspruit to Kruger and God’s Window speeding you past farm upon farm of Australian pine, eucalyptus, avocado, banana, and orange, stretched out beyond what your camera can capture, maybe even further than God’s own eye could see. And you wonder when it will again be possible and what it will take to remember agrarian transformations of socio-political landscapes on a mundane walk though a Joburg grocery store.

Sources:

James McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa’s encounter with a new world crop 1500-2000 (Harvard University Press, 2007) 

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 1992)

Audrey Richards, Land, Labour, and Diet in Northern Rhodesia (LIT Verlag, 1997 [1939])

John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1999)

A Recipe for Mealie Pap

 375 ml water (1,5 k)
 5 ml sout (1 t)
 300 g mieliemeel (500 ml) (2 k)
 (6 porsies)
 Metode:
 Kook die water en die sout in 'n kastrol, gooi die mieliemeel stadig 
 by sodat dit ophoop en die water rondom kook.
 Moenie roer nie.
 Sit die kastrol se deksel op en kook 10 tot 15 minute lank stadig.
 Klop goed met groot vurk.
 Sit deksel op en laat verder oar baie lae hitte gaar word. 
 Dit neem ongeveer 1 uur.

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But they are not here, yet. You will squint in the glare and close your eyes.

The equinox is celebrated in Tamil Nadu and Kerala as the start of a new year: Varsha pirappu (the start of a new year) in Tamil Nadu and Vishu (“equal”) for those of us who come from borderlands or into Kerala. For these transitions, however, there will be no fireworks, no descending ball, no count-down chorus. Instead, there will be a quiet ritual called kani or “first sight” which you must organize for yourself, for it to have any real meaning. Vishukani: the first sight of the new year.

If you’d been of your mother’s or grandmothers’ generation, you might have slept late the eve of the equinox, preparing the Vishukani: fill an urali (wide, shallow vessel used in ceremonial cookery) with all things golden and glowing, brimming over with promise and possibility: golden cucumber [kanivellari]; golden laburnum [konnappoo or kanikkonna]; ripe yellow bananas; a halved jackfruit, its bulbs each a-glow; mangoes tending from green to gold [maa-pala-vazhai]; coins which once might have been gold; cloth edged with gold; a mirror which reflects all things golden; and your daily gold: rice, coconuts, betel leaves. You would have assembled all this in a vessel made of a bell metal called panchalokam, a gold-hued five metal alloy symbolically standing in for the five elements of the universe: earth, fire, water, air, ether. You would then have lit a brass lamp [nilavilakku], and gone to sleep with the flame burning golden.

You’d have risen early the next morning, opening your eyes to Vishukani, the burning lamp, the golden laburnum which blooms only when the sun is at its most exalted and stands verily for the sun itself: the eye through which Vishnu gazes at all creation. You would have then gone to rouse your sleeping children from the slumber of the past year, and lead them, eyes still closed, to the Vishukani now a sign of hope and aspiration and the prayer that the abundance first beheld should endure.

Other rituals would then have followed, and a remarkable feast.

Being not of your mother’s or grandmothers’ generation, however, your rituals are less spectacular and more awkwardly construed: this post, some flowers beside a lit lamp and a garlanded deity, sleepy children lead happily to coins that are now theirs, and the traditional green mango pachadi or chutney which holds it all together.

The mangoes are still green, remember. You will have picked three, firm and tart. You will peel, dice, and cook them with jaggery [raw palm sugar], salt, turmeric, and red chillies, and you will season them with freshly picked neem flowers as is customary on this day.

Tamilians speak of six distinct tastes or aarusuvai (aaru=six, suvai=tastes): sweetness (innipu/ இனிப்பு), sourness (pulippu / புளிப்பு), bitterness (kasappu/ கசப்பு), saltiness (uvarppu/ உவர்ப்பு), astringence (thuvarppu/ துவர்ப்பு), and spiciness or heat (kaarppu/ கார்ப்பு). Although one or other (or more) of these tastes could be emphasized in each dish, it is the six which make a whole, complete experience.

Green mango pachadi seasoned with neem flowers represents such a whole: sweet jaggery, sour mango, bitter neem flowers, saltiness from salt, astringent turmeric, and hot/spicy (dry red) chillies. No element is excised in some pretense of unattainable perfection. The perfection exists only in the whole acceptance of life itself.

You will open your eyes to this reality and hope that you and your children can, in spite of all your cultivated cosmopolitanism and their ascribed Texan origins, still glimpse the vision of a truly golden and abundant life, rich and full in all its varied tastes.

Puthandu Vazthukal, y’all.

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I mean, we might have known it was coming even back in the 2000s, before economic crisis woes struck. Montrose was slowly but surely being gentrified. “Mid-town” appeared. The process of downtown urban renewal was on. Lofts were making it possible for downtown business districts to double as living spaces. And districts like Upper Kirby were bridging the divide that separated most of us from the untouchably rich River Oaks.

With these changes, the food scene was changing, too. Rapidly. Chefs were becoming celebrities, and we were beginning to identify their restaurants with them. Think: Monica Pope (of t’afia), Mark Cox (of Mark’s American Cuisine), Hugo Ortega (of Hugo’s), Anita Jaisinghani (of Indika). In 2006, Houston was already a “haven for hip cuisine,” according to USA Today, thanks to its increasingly numerous expert and creative Chefs. While it had never been so important to associate Ashiana with Chef Kiran Verma, when she took over Bombay Palace on Westheimer, the place bore her name: Kiran’s (and stated that the cuisine remained traditional while the Chef was modern–but that’s a separate story). Other names appeared in course: Marco Wiles (of Poscol), and Bryan Caswell (of Reef).

This was in 2009, roughly. I’d left Houston a year before, and when I’d return for D & G’s annual November break, there was this distinct sense, enhanced every year, that Houston was growing into a coveted foodie Mecca. In 2011, Culture Map reported that Houston had not one but two Lower Westheimer restaurant rows. Of course, for those with longitudinal views of the city and its development, this was nothing new. Restaurant rows had always lined Westheimer. It’s just that they were now taking on the character of their exclusive, name-brand Chefs. What Mark Cox had begun by converting an old, 1920s church into one of Houston’s “most romantic” eateries (a status I cannot deny; Mark’s really is a pretty special Houston spot), others continued, converting old houses and taking over older establishments and reinventing them with commitments to the local. As Monica Pope’s trademarked tag-line goes, the promise was increasingly to “eat where your food lives.”

In the meantime, other restaurants either survived or gave in to the new landscapes. Mai Thai on Kirby just South of 59 wasn’t there the last we looked, and there was talk of a high-rise. Ming’s Cafe on Montrose just south of Westheimer (at which I was treated to my 37th birthday dinner) closed to another Bryan Caswell undertaking, Little Bigs. But no-fuss joints like Niko Niko’s remained right across the road, Churrasco’s at Shepherd Square seems a permanent fixture, the sun will never set on the Empire Cafe’s domain between two sets of restaurant rows, and Chuy’s has much too much of a following ever to be displaced by anything, cults of celebrity or any other–even when Pondicheri, Tootsies, and urban lofts move in right next door.

[The image above is borrowed from the Houston Press, which has a fantastic series of maps showing the changes on Westheimer's restaurant row between 1997 and 2012. Click on the image (or here) to get to the slide show.]

You’re wondering where all this is going, beyond general Houston restaurant mapping? Bear with me, I’m getting there!

I am of course interested in what happens to Indian cuisine in this sort of gentrified Houston landscape, beyond the worship of Anita Jaisinghani’s Indika and Pondicheri. I’ve talked before about how Indian eating in Houston went from ethnic enclave to the mainstream world of gourmet, bistro, and fast-quick alike–and indeed, Jaisinghani’s 2011 Upper Kirby “Pondicheri” undertaking was a lovely example of just that sort of shift.

In 2012, however, two other things seemed to have happened, taking Indian-inspired culinary forms into new sorts of conversations. Let’s call them Doshi Nosh? I’ll explain.

We found The Doshi House on a whim–following a Facebook comment left by a friend who was away from Houston but curious also about its emergent eating scenes. I had no idea what really to expect, or where we were going. Only that the place sounded interesting, a new take on Indian-in-Houston, and I wanted to find it.

I dragged along my smart BAM Mexican student-friend (whose devotion to Arundhati Roy’s poetry politics I cannot fathom) for what turned out to be a 40th birthday lunch treat.

And treat it was, beyond expectation. Doshi House is a virtual outpost in Houston’s historically black, neglected Third Ward, situated at one end of Project Rowhouses. This is a community that resists gentrification in the sense that it demands integration and respect rather than the sort of outright take-over to which neighborhoods like Lower Westheimer and Montrose can so much more easily adapt.

In this sort of space does Doshi House introduce a blend of old and new. It continues the conversation on what food can do to open up spaces of community. It makes use of well-worn ingredients–an existing structure, couches, books, fittings, a used piano–to fashion an invitation to sit, read, converse, commune, and congeal; it’s not brand-spanking new synthetic stucco in spaces which are deeply self-conscious of their sagging wooden habitations.

Within this framework, Doshi House opens out some possibilities. It’s the only coffee house in the vicinity. It’s the only Indian-inspired eatery in the Third Ward, and one of few establishments to attempt a conversation across historically race-divided lines–anything else Indian is either in suburban ethnic enclaves on 59 and Hillcroft or Sugarland, or on gentrified urban rows. It speaks to the bohemian, student-scholar, artist, environment-conscious, and second-(or third-) generation Indian Americans, all of whom thrive in such mixed ethnic spaces. And although it’s run by its own chef whose name is projected onto the establishment, it’s not so much celebrity that matters here, but identity. And a young chef named Deepak Doshi who was experimenting with new recipes when we got there, and who apparently loves to cook.

We found Nosh Bistro on another whim, learning of its opening through another foodie friend who remarked at once on its über style. She wasn’t wrong.

Set alongside the old but face-lifted Taco Cabana (site of many a cheap grad student lunch) and the long-standing Café Japon (site of birthday dinner #36), in the once-upon-a-time bank space across, Nosh is a visual treat. Plush and purple, rich and red, shot through with shine and silver, sitting in the dappled sunshine of Houston’s lovely live oaks, Nosh is a stunner. Food-wise, Neera Patidar’s undertaking with partner Kwan Lee, Nosh takes on that new genre “Asian” but with Indian tones of the sort that Chris Shepherd’s Underbelly on Westheimer doesn’t even try to incorporate.

So, I’m honestly glad for these sorts of new directions in Indian food, but gosh, Nosh was just a tad too posh for me.

We went with children: mistake #1. When the waiter approached us to take drink requests, we asked for water: mistake #2. We should have specified: sparkling water, flat water, smart water, bottled water.  Just water is like drinking out of a tap, and that’s just not über chic at a place like Nosh. We went in between errands–heck, we were about to undertake an international move in weeks–instead of a nice, long, leisurely lunch with girlfriends or business colleagues: mistake #3. And we went hungry: mistake #4. Portions were gorgeously presented, but miniscule. The bill was over twice what we paid at Doshi House, and less than half as satisfying.

[In fairness to Nosh, we did come upon them barely a week after they had begun opening for lunch. Their eagerness and nervousness showed. Badly. Perhaps they've since settled into a different sort of comfort zone?]

Now places like Underbelly and Mark’s are not necessarily child-friendly at all, even at lunchtimes–and that’s unfortunate, because we happen to have very foodie children who are summarily written out food narratives except those involving mac-and-cheese, soul-less pizzas, or other thoughtless assemblages. “Children” are presumed to be those picky-eater noisy mannerless sorts, to which no restaurant worth its salt, save Pondicheri (or Chuy’s whose jumble just mixes up kids and adults) really creates anything special.

But that’s not the only trouble with Nosh, which seems so absorbed in its own über self-referential Asian style, it’s not really attempting a conversation except on terms it sets. And while Deepak Doshi was bustling around with experiments and modifications to accommodate, Nosh worked flatly within its established parameters: glamour, style, “Asian.” All of which make Nosh a rich-crowd party that wants to invite non-River Oaks guests in, but hasn’t yet figured out how to do so. I hope it does yet, because it certainly has eye candy enough to draw people in–and then surprise them, rather than affirm the inevitable race/class/ethnic barriers.

What these two new Indian additions to the gentrified Houston restaurant scene mark are points in an emergent narrative about Houston food that experiments like Underbelly–which I don’t mean to pick on, they do have the best tortilla soup I have ever tasted, but heck, they do claim to tell the story of Houston food and yet do it so partially–just don’t capture. While Nosh tries to take the already-established into new heights of glamour, Doshi House brings us back down to earth in a gentle, unpretentious and yet creative way that extends neglected conversations about race, space, and renewal. They’re both telling responses to the unfolding story of Houston’s culinary and urban gentrification, to put it in a nutshell.

Although I was slightly less than enthusiastic about Pondicheri on our first visit, compared to posh Nosh it’s creative, lively, inclusive, and interesting in a grounded sort of way–open to kids and families and other sorts of gatherings alike. It also has a new pastry counter, and something called the “Pondi bar”–chivda snacks made into a sort-of rice-krispie bar–that make it just that much more charming. At the very least, its breakfasts and brunches are well worth a trip across town.

What’s to happen on the Houston foodie scene next, I wonder? Will I get a chance to see it unfold? I hope so–either myself or via your mailed-in narratives of what’s new and trending in H-town.

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In all of these places, we found food that said more or less about the character of these places–or that capped the experience, rounded it in some essential way. I’ve documented some of this on Paticheri’s Facebook page but not everyone’s on Facebook (yes!) and the idea of a series seemed to logically emerge. Why not?

Not reviews precisely, nor robust accounts of cuisine-in-place (as with my post on Pondicheri) but some combination of personal photo album, an open-ended series of vignettes, field notes, jumbled journal jottings, rough photo documentaries, brainstorming seeds waiting to be planted.

In other words: just a taste.

Like Monday night’s visit to Mia Cucina in Powai–[पवई in Marathi really, pronounced Pavai] once upon a time, a far-flung suburb of Mumbai with few eateries to speak of, let alone ones that exuded cosmopolitan confidence, or dared to speak in fluent Italian with vintage elegance and design flair.

Even from the curb, the place pulls us in.

We are to have gone to Cafe Mangii on the other side of FabIndia, these days the standard measure for all things ethnic-chic, but we skip that for the invitation of a wide clear window front lined with glass bottles of all shapes.

With little cake-topper dancing couples set within. Squirrels turning in the cages of personality, secure within the glass bottles of insulated experience.

There are other treasures. A bottle rack suspended over the bar that mimics the storefront window and makes everything float.

A collage of shapes cover a far wall. Artwork on the exposed brick walls where there is no Italian stucco.

Lined-up and stacked-up tins of olives and tomatoes, the sense of an old shop of authentic imports.

The bottles draw me back, time and again. They reflect so much. Outside, a record throws thick Italian melodies into the glass box room. Inside my head, synthetic sounds croon nostalgia about bottles that were wombs in Huxley’s Brave New World:

Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted!
Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?
Skies are blue inside of you,
The weather’s always fine;
For there ain’t no Bottle in all the world
Like that dear little Bottle of mine.

Away from the bottles, little signs of subversion and play. A brick wall that runs into a chalkboard-like wall with a window that opens into Pisa. A static clock above stops time.

A handwritten menu with doodles. It takes a second inspection to recognize that the handwriting is a font–but of course.

Everywhere, signs of times when the modular, the industrially produced, the digital create cravings for rougher materials: lined paper foolscape sheets set in an old file-folder, brick, stucco, chalkboard. And yet, it’s all a simulation. It all can only ever be a simulation. The bottled nostalgia of a digital age.

The food, however, is no simulation, right from the bread basket with its herbed white butter to accompany focaccia softer than clouds.

The waitstaff dim the lights as the food arrives, so the photographs here do no justice to their elegance, presentation, and above all perfectly balanced tastes.

There is bruschetta and Bombay Duck (except that that’s not duck but fish–lizardfish or in Marathi, bombil)

And dishes of spaghetti and risotto and salad, pizzas on wooden peels. We eat collectively, each with a sampler’s platter, and lick our respective plates clean. Each dish is finished to perfection, having broken free of the Italian=cheese equation trap into which so many so easily fall (most especially run-of-mill American eateries). What makes the evening is good ingredients, as my friend says, each one respected and given fair play on a collective stage. And that’s no small accomplishment.

But of course, there had to be room for dessert.

Flourless chocolate decadence for me. “Are you a 70% cocoa person?” my friend asks, and I think yes, I am just that, in many more ways than one. [Would only that I knew to turn that personal commitment into something more collectively meaningful.] The light is harsh, but the flourless chocolate is kiss-your-fingers perfect.

There’s much more to say about the culinary revolutions taking place in Mumbai–but another time. For the moment: if I had to bottle the experience of a city expressing global cosmopolitan confidence, ironically in its particular expression of nostalgia, it would be at Mia Cucina.

"When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
 and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
 cages of our personality
 and get into the forests again,
 we shall shiver with cold and fright
 but things will happen to us
 so that we don't know ourselves."
 --D.H. Lawrence

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The original and authentic “beans bunny” or bunny chow was first dished up at G. C. Kapitan Vegetarian restaurant at the corner of Grey and Victoria in Durban [opened 1912, closed 1992]. The restaurant is established by an Indian of Fijian origin,  Ganda Chagan Kapitan, son of Kesur Jivan Kapitan who arrived in Durban in 1887. The family established the Kapitan Balcony Hotel, famed for its sweetmeats, and later the Kapitan Vegetarian restaurant, famed for “Beans Bunny.” Both are now closed: the Balcony hotel because then owner Ratilal Ranchod joined the Divine Life Society to do community work, and G.C. Kapitan’s because the building lease finally expired and none of Kesur Jivan’s descendants wished to continue in the restaurant business.

The photograph above is by author Mrinal Hajratwala, who writes: “This image was photographed [c.1960] when my second cousin, Dalpat Kapitan and  his family were at the airport, en route to a family vacation in India. … Kapitan and his family owned a restaurant in Durban, South Africa, and his father and my Great great uncle, G.C. Kapitan is credited with inventing the fava-bean version of the ‘bunny chow.’”

“Bunny Chow” is a no-fuss dish: a square loaf of bread hollowed out, filled with bean  curry (chicken and meat curry fillings came later), lidded with a slice of the hollowed-out bread. Wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers, it takes no additional packaging, and no utensils–even to this day.

[The image above is from South Africa Eats by Phillippa Cheifitz.]

Stories of Bunny’s name and origin abound, all of them apocryphal. The most circulated accounts tell the following (with the last insights being far less credible than the first few):

• Bunny was an easy way of serving migrant Indian laborers working on the sugarcane plantations of Kwazulu-Natal. They were not allowed to sit inside restaurants, thanks to segregation laws–and curry-roti wasn’t an easy sort of carry-out. So, Kapitan came up with an easy way of serving them in hollowed out bread through a back window. The Bunny Chow counts among our first and most enduring forms of take-away.
• Bunny was just an easy way for the laborers (or, some say, Indian caddies at the Royal Durban Golf Course) to carry their food to the fields. Indian chapatis and rotis were hardly take-away friendly until the advent of styrofoam, plastic, and foil much, much later.
• Bunny was the cheapest food available to laborers at the time, especially because it had only sugar beans, no meat. It was cheap as well as convenient.
• Bunny’s name derives from the fact that the restaurateurs belonged to an Indian “bania” merchant community; so “bania chow” becomes “bunny chow.”
• Some say its name derives from the identity of the man cooking it: “Bhunia.” Right, that may well have been synonymous with “Bania.”
• Still others say that the Bunny’s name relates to its use of bread, or bunny + aatchar (pickle) which becomes bunnny chow. Hunh?
• The last, and to my mind zaniest explanation is that eating with one’s fingers resembles eating like a bunny, and since the Bunny takes no utensils, its consumption gets likened to rabbit-like eating behaviors. Ahem, seriously?

Whatever explanation one believes, two things seem true: first, that Bunny Chow embodies the story of segregation in South Africa, and that Bunny is hardly a classy sort of food–which means that it is better associated with a lower class of eating. And eateries.

This reminds me that I’m not only in the wrong place, but also in the wrong class and time. A few decades prior, Bunny Chow might have been a logical choice for a person of my skin-color–which would also determine my social class. Now, exploring Soweto in between consummately professional interview sessions, I realize in just what ways class can channel food choices. Common foods have to be ushered into respectable spaces for us to be able to eat them at all.

Strip malls and enclosed malls are everywhere respected commercial gathering points in South Africa, a distinct step up from the far more informal, far less regulated spaza shop micro-market sales environments. The malls often fenced-off and guarded: business interests and consumer spaces inside, hawkers and vendors outside. Inside, of course, is a commercially cultivated air of consumerist sophistication; it is the space of the brand. Brands spawn chains. Chic South African eateries like News Cafe, Spur, Nando’s, Mugg & Bean, Chicken Licken, Galito’s, and the usual fast(er) food chains set their individual scenes by variously combining an increasingly familiar set of stock practices and tactics: colorful menus and visuals; family-friendly or contemporary-stylish seating; food which is more-and-less industrially created, prepackaged, pre-made, high-sugar-high-fat, easy to produce, easy to reproduce; child-friendly cheap-plastic-toy-filled faux-global  low-wage-labor commission-driven gimicky sales environments; and standardized take-them-anywhere put-them-on-anything sauces and preparations—combinations of such elements set the inevitable scene.

All in places like Moponya Mall, established by the Sowetan self-made business tycoon, Richard Maponya, or in Jabulani Mall, built by another self-made millionaire from Mpumalanga, Roux Shabangu, to which they lend a further credibility, and express the possibilities of mobility, justice, and social progress.

Yet, what strip malls lined with chain restaurants generate are what I’m starting to think of as stripped and chained forms of food: homogeneous, predictable, transferable, cookie-cutter reproducible, environmentally unsustainable, borderline unethical attitudes towards food and those who consume it, and outright under-compensation of those who dish it up, assembly-line style. If “good food” suddenly becomes accessible and affordable, it’s tragically such movements that make it possible.

Don’t get me wrong; I fill my belly at such establishments when I have to, and without complaining. But I’m increasingly convinced that we live in rapidly expanding food deserts, surviving  in a mirage of plenty.

Bunny chow, however, is not to be found stripped and chained–a fact I gratefully acknowledge. One has to search to find it, neither in strip malls nor in fine restaurants (its rare gourmet incarnations notwithstanding), but in a class of ethnicized eateries all on their own. I can’t help but wonder if this wasn’t why G.C. Kapitan’s finally closed shop, even after 80 years in the Bunny business: Bunny was always going to be a common food, heavy with curry. Even the dignitaries who dignify G.C. Kapitan’s in Durban come searching for its ethnic commonness.

When we do find Bunny in Lenasia, it’s in only two places. First, we see it is sold across from a bus stand market, on a stretch with a Lenasia Mall that other locals are reluctant to linger on—so we don’t stop there, except to take a quick round of the market.

We head instead to the other more upscale Lenasia Trade Route Mall, in which is a small corner eatery called “Taste Budds.” Not a chain that draws the crowds seeking safety, still tucked away in its own ethnic corner in the company of spices and with Bollywood dances flashing on nearby electronic goods store screens–but secure enough in the incandescent premises of the mall that a certain respectability rubs off.

I can’t say the Taste Budds Bunny is the best thing I’ve ever eaten. But then again, we know already the character of Bunny depends wholly on the curry within.

Besides, having found the object of our quest, there is nothing left to do but turn out of Lenasia Mall and onto Nirvana Drive.

With grateful thanks to Lukas and Mimi, who rode with us 
though it all, and without whom I'd never have found Bunny.

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You’ll find yourself wishing that the journey there had been more arduous, so that you can fall to your knees, a hopeless convert

gasping, breathless, whispering words of holy praise at what grace and glory made this world. [Somewhere in the distance is Maputo, Mozambique].

The wide vistas almost too rich and full to take in just like that, with the van driver calling us to come quick-come quick from below, you’ll come down thinking of big — but stumbling upon little

fragile forms of beautiful life, perfectly colored, here for as long as they’re here, and when they’re gone, gone.

You can carry with you only saudade, the love that remains as you find your way to Harrie’s in Graskop, just beneath, returned to all the kitsch and strangeness of the world as you know it

and when you look up, there’ll be lamps, not sky, even in broad daylight. But there are other solaces here. Homemade ginger beer, slightly yeasty, that cools your body

and pancakes, sweet and savory, that divert attention from your too-full heart to your too-empty tummy, filling what needs to be filled, and leaving the rest to find its own means, in its own time.

There’ll be jars of preserves and sweet treats to sample

And with chocolate shots from the shop next door (No, says the lady who sells them, not chocolate, Belgian chocolate).

sunlight in the open passages, and a cat forever by the hearth, contented, asleep.

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It begins without ceremony in Soweto, between twin chimneys and the trees. These cooling towers of the Soweto [South West Township of Johannesburg] Power station once loomed large over shacks in a sprawling shantytown produced by mining, urbanization, segregation and apartheid. They receive their present, cheery facelift on the eve of Soweto’s 100^th anniversary in 2004—marking the township’s transformation into a rising suburb, tourist attraction, and exemplar of progress from despair.

It begins on Vilakazi street in Orlando West, where the signs of struggle have so-fast been memorialized that June 16—the day when young Hector Pieterson is killed by police opening fire on student protesters in 1976, sparking the Soweto uprising—becomes just another party day for Soweto’s youth.

Hector is not the first casualty of the Soweto uprising. But he is the movement’s most iconic memory, thanks to a photograph of his limp body being carried by Ma’makhubu Mbuyisa, accompanied by his distraught sister Antoinette, that was circulated widely by the print media.

“Mbuyisa is or was my son. But he is not a hero. In my culture, picking up Hector is not an act of heroism. It was his job as a brother. If he left him on the ground, and somebody saw him jumping over Hector, he would never be able to live here.”–Ma’makhubu Mbuyisa’s mother

Outside now are neatly laid out rows of bead babies, dolls, and sundry African masks and crafts, arranged neatly underneath the 2010 FIFA World Cup’s perhaps now equally iconic Coke adverts—celebrating peace, coke, and vuvuzelas.

Sakhumzi’s dishes up classic South African fare in a no-fuss bufftet, a block away from “Mandela House” and Desmond Tutu’s home, both now museums. Soweto boasts another pride nobody else has: two Nobel Peace laureates’ homes on the same street, within blocks of each other.

WANDIE’s Place, in Dube, has busloads stopping in for lunch. Its foyer, if one can call it that, has every square inch of wall space plastered with business cards, notes, currency from all over the world—people leaving their marks on places they have touched, and the place, the Big Man Wandie absorbing it all.

You’ll walk through such scenes in a daze, trying hard to reconcile the spotless affluence of these Sowetan streets with the numbers that otherwise describe Soweto–about HIV/AIDS, about unemployment, about violence and crime—and with the despair you hear in the many and long conversations you have with modest people living modest lives.

On the weekend coming, you take the day and buy a ticket to the Apartheid Museum in Gold Reef City. The museum stands across from a theme park and casino that memorialize another dimension of South Africa’s hoary past: mining. Your ticket tells you to enter through the gate marked “Nie-Blankes.”

From here, you are invited to enter alongside the other heirs of South African history. You see later that each person walking in is represented in a “memory box” that tells how their personal history is intertwined with apartheid. You wonder if that means that it’s your history, too?

You see the history of racial segregation, violence, and brute ideological domination arranged in spaces that are deliberately barred, jail-like, allowing only glimpses of other spaces beyond. It’s as though you are trapped in periods of history, by “Bantu education” that makes you think you should be free but is itself a system of racial domination, and it is only time and emotion that propel you forward.

You walk through long narrow corridors, lined with text, images, and video footage. The story of apartheid is told via an account of legal measures, cultural rationalizations, educational policy decisions, each speaking insidiously of fairness and justice and  reason.  The cumulative experience is a jumble: disconcerting, saddening, incomprehensible. Entirely overwhelming.

“Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time … It is the realization that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”—Steven Bantu Biko, 1971 & 1978

The only redemption lies in the fact that this story, you know already, has a happy ending.

There is a special exhibit on Mandela this time. You’re hesitant. You know he is special, has suffered much and achieved much. But you’ve always paused at cults of adoration, so you do the same here, too.

You read Mandela’s words, written in the colors of sticks laid out. You pick the words you like the most and insert the appropriately colored stick in a rack alongside those inserted by other museum-goers–and then you are invited to walk his path to freedom.

You come into an open garden. The sky is big, the air is perfectly warm-cool, the clouds are almost within reach. You’re not sure where you’ll be lead, but you’re willing to go anywhere.

And then, you find treasures.

Purple surprises growing in seas of tall grass. A sign tells you that this is what you thought, a space of contemplation–to remember what happened, to allow the pain our collective inhumanities to course through, to configure yourself in relation to it, and, having absorbed it, to “walk away free.”

Even the grasses are reaching the clouds, so you know such freedom is possible.

You find your way backwards in time, to Gandhi Square in Johannesburg’s Central Business District. Your driver, Abner, is worried you are here, and sticks close by. You wish he wouldn’t, but you know his kindness so you accept it. [The mural shown is part of an "Unurth Street Art" exhibit by Faith 47, David Krut]

You are no daughter of Gandhi, but you come to find him anyway, a young lawyer risen to political consciousness, about to depart for India from Johannesburg. And you learn that the misspelling of his name is not just an American thing…

You insist, at lunch time, on pap (mielie meal porridge). You resist, fittingly you think, being stripped and chained by all the big-name cookie-cutter restaurants. [Though you are tempted to see what KFC's pap might be like]. The first place has run out, and you’re not settling for rice, so you go to the place next door. The lady at the register scowls.

It’s nondescript. But promises soul food.

And it has what you want: steamed bread, chakalaka (even if it’s the tomato-onion salsa kind nobody likes), cabbage. And pap. You’re tempted to call out: “Boom Chaka-Laka” but you desist.

The meal arrives, all of it by now familiar. You eat with happy relish, happier still when Abner tells you that he’s satisfied, too, now that he’s found a good, inexpensive place to lunch in the CBD (Central Business District), of which he seems more wary than you are.

The afternoon calls you to keep going. You find your way to a bookshop, and the green leaves form a luminous canopy overhead.

You come back to the hotel, tired, but only in your feet, not in your heart. Besides, you have tea, your window box with the view of the world’s largest urban manmade forest that is Joburg, and more South African stories — this time of the Cake that the Buddha ate. The day has circled around, and made you whole.

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The beautiful little roselle is neither flower nor fruit, but the calyx of a wild hibiscus: the Hibiscus sabdariffa. Its origins trace back to North Africa and Australia, from where it traveled in the hands of slaves, slave-traders, traders, and other travellers first to the Caribbean and Central America–and Florida, where it was known as the “Florida cranberry”–and later to California and Hawaii.

In Mexico, and perhaps elsewhere in Central and South America, it’s a red sorrel sourced from Jamaica, the stuff of which “agua de Flor de Jamaica” or simply “agua de Jamaica” is made. In Arabic it’s the karkady (كركديه)–of which the hibiscus tea served in North Africa is brewed. In East Africa, it’s (one assumes in parts outside of Sudan) as “Sudanese tea.” In West Africa, it’s known variously as bissap, wonjo (Gambia), zobo (Nigeria, where the white sorrel variety is known, too) To the Spanish, it is quimbombe chino. The Dutch (who came across the roselle in Suriname) called it zuring—sorrel again, but invoking zuur, or its sourness. To the French it was once the oseille rouge, though now the North African name predominates: it’s karkady in French and karkadé to the Swiss as well.

Farther Eastward, a host of other names proliferate: the roselle is belchanda to the Nepalese, tengamora to the Assamese (mwitha to the Assamese Bodo tribal communities), chukor (চুকর) in to Bengalis, gongura to Andhras, pundi to Kannadigas, ambadi to Maharashtrians, mathipuli to Keralites; it is chin baung in Burma, kra jiab daeng (กระเจี๊ยบแดง) in Thailand, som phor dee (ສົ້ມ ພໍດີ) in Laos. To the Malays it’s asam belanda (sourced from Assam, does one presume?); to the Chinese, luo shen hua (洛神花). [There might be some confusion in these names between the red and the white sorrel, Hibiscus cannabinus, whose leaves are, for example,  more commonly known as "gongura" in Andhra Pradesh. Taste-wise, the difference may be marginal. Both species are fibre-yielding and cultivated in place of jute, giving them the name "Deccan hemp."]

Were its names not variety enough, the wholly edible roselle plant is pressed still further for its medicinal values. Roselles are vitamin C-rich, and teas made from dried calyces are widely believed to have anti-hypertensive properties. (My boys eat the calyces straight from the plants, and seem to relish their tart juciness–releiving both their stresses and mine). John Feeney tells us that the roselle’s

leaves, seeds and calyces are used in Guinea as a diuretic and as a sedative. In Burma, the seeds are used as an aphrodisiac, in Taiwan as a laxative. In the Philippines the bitter root is roasted, skinned and eaten to stimulate the appetite. In Angola, the heated leaves, which produce a thick juice like Aloe vera, are used as a poultice to speed the healing of wounds. In several countries it is a folk remedy for certain cancers. Sudanese herbalists believe that karkady lowers blood pressure—and western scientists have confirmed the claim, identifying a glucoside, hibiscin, as the agent. Cairo doctors invariably prescribe drinking two glasses of karkady a day, along with other medication, for their hypertensive patients.

…

In the early 1960′s, when the world awoke to the dangers of some synthetic food dyes, karkady became a popular natural coloring agent for many drinks and foods, and even for pink and red meats. These days much of the karkady used for coloring is supplied by Senegal, where the dried calyces are pressed into 80-kilogram (175-lb) balls for shipment to pharmaceutical and food manufacturers in Europe.

Here, in Pondicherry, the little roselle is the secret ingredient of what our children know and drink to cool down their dusty selves all through the summer sear as “power syrup”–”power” being the spiritual significance assigned by The Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram to so many hibiscus varieties, though she was much more finely specific in her associations than the common “power syrup” designation would indicate. Flower syrups are common in Pondicherry and Auroville, and many take the Mother’s significance as their own names–so it is possible to walk into the Auroville Visitor Center or any other of its restaurants and order a tall, cool drink of lavender-hued “Radha’s Consciousness” (made from blue pea flowers I’ve known all my life as shanku pushpam) topped up with soda. And in that, for the price of just over a dollar, taste something of Radha’s love for the divine cowherd Krishna, in Brindavanam of myth and lore.

I make no such promises to elevated consciousness in this post, though I willingly submit to the power, this-or-other-worldly, of the hardy, lovely little roselle.

The other lovely thing about the roselle: it’s not to be found at your regular grocers. Fiesta in Houston always had packet-fulls of the larger flor de Jamaica, dried, but here one has to go foraging for the fresh stuff. And we didn’t have to go far before we found enough for several batches of jam, jelly, and syrup.

We  chutneyed the leaves (into what the Andhras call gongura pachadi or chutney) and added the greens (locally known by the generic term “puliccha keerai,” or sour greens, owing again to their tartness) to dals–but those are stories for other days.

Lots of lovely Pondicherry ladies make roselle syrups in small home-based businesses–guarding their recipes and methods closely. Not being one to respect proprietary anything when the common good is involved–and for me the wild, adaptable roselle is metonym for the common good–I offer an illustrated version of the jelly recipe below. For a jam, you’ll want to follow all the same steps, except you’ll keep the calyces in rather than straining them out. They do add a lovely texture to the jam. For a syrup, you’ll just not worry about the wrinkle test, and just stop cooking when the liquid barely turns syrupy. Bottle, store refrigerated, and top up with cool water, ice or soda for a quick and easy “power” drink.

Other ideas: re-warm the jam and swirl through ice-cream. Or spread it on top of a warm cheesecake  for a truly stunning contrast of color, texture, and taste.

[Click on the graphic to view higher-res, printable images]

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Words and photographs are Bridget’s alone. The recipe visualization is my very small contribution.

I turn it over to Bridget--and her grandmother, Martha G. Diggs:

I asked my grandmother, “Why don’t you come and visit me in Houston?” She replied, “The furthest that I have ever been was from Lexington (a very small Tennessee town) to Jackson (a slightly bigger Tennessee town) by train to get hot peanuts. I would have gone any distance to get those hot peanuts.”

The memories of movement, hot peanuts, and a train ride bring my grandmother such joy. She associates those hot peanuts with meeting my grandfather, her mother’s dark red dress, and going to the “big city” to shop for what she called “the necessities.”  This conversation began as she organized her ingredients to make her simple (but overly sweet) Mississippi mud cake.  Memories of childhood, Sunday lunches, and lazy summers in my grandmother’s kitchen are all brought back as I watch her mix the ingredients of the rich, chocolate cake. The years have passed but the conversation still flows between sips of coffee.

Mississippi mud cake began to appear in 1970s United States, so named as its dark, gooey chocolate textures called to mind the dark banks of the Mississippi River–which in turn is a sign of freedom and movement and roots for some, slavery and servitude for others.  The Mississippi’s dark, muddy banks represent both fertility and the threat of flooding and destruction.

Land has been important element defining my grandmother’s life. My grandmother pours her batter in the glass cake pan saying, “We moved back from Illinois when your dad was around 9 years old and your grandfather started planting tomatoes. He planted tomatoes every year and was about ready to harvest his last tomatoes before he died. I canned those tomatoes and made salsa and tomato soup.” My grandparents both tended to the land and their plants since the time they married.  “If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat,” my grandfather would say, “If there was a disaster and people couldn’t go to Kroger, they wouldn’t know how to survive or what to do.” I tend to agree. He worked hard until his body would no longer allow him to work. The weeks before he died he dreamed of working the land again.

My grandmother spent the past thirty years working as an “environmental specialist” at the Methodist Hospital. She says that “environmental specialist” is just a big word for maid. She had to stop working last year after a bout of pneumonia, but still talks about returning.

My grandmother’s life was all about freedom and movement. She got on that train to get those hot nuts, moved from Lexington to Pinson to work the land with my grandfather, moved from Pinson to Illinois in search of work, and has spent the last 30 years working in a hospital.

We sit down to eat her completed, still hot, Mississippi mud cake that runs all over the plate. The coffee and chocolate complement each other as the conversation flows.

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We had it easy, I’ll admit. Flights that took us just where we needed to be. Placard-bearing agents who met us at airports and hotels. Tickets and itineraries waiting. Cars waiting to take us to trains waiting. No arduous climbs anywhere.

But perhaps that was just why the stunning proportions of the Andes caught us unawares: there was no gradual climb. Just a lift and a drop right into their midst, high enough and fast enough that we needed several cups of coca tea to acclimatize to altitude.

Plus a pisco sour [Inca Cola, for the under-18-ers] or two thrown in for good measure. And for local flavor.

Then we could roam the charming town with cobbled streets and terrible histories of Christian conquest, lemon meringue tartlettes and alfajores in hand, and allow seductive enunciations of Quechua to lead us to what mattered. To Sacsayhuamán. To Qorikancha. To Pachamama Herself.

And when we remembered our hunger, to wander amidst the hecklers inviting us into “Typical Peruvian” restaurants as in India we would have been invited into sari shops in old cities–to find snack shops, bakeries, passion fruit pies, infusions, and empanadas.

A luxurious little den called “Korma Sutra,” that served tandoori cuy–that’s guinea pig for you–but, no, we didn’t dare. The samosas with spinach, on the other hand, were delicious, and the salsa accompaniment to complimentary chips other-worldly. [This was in Cuzco.]

Even the trains that moved us fed us on petit pastries in delicate baskets, and with cheese and tablecloths. The journey was a performance, down to its last culinary detail; even sales of goods happened with a song-and-dance flourish  [why-oh-why can't American conveyances mimic such simple elegance?]

And when we had been down into the jungle valleys of Inca Terra and up again into the lost city called Machu Picchu, when we had seen what we had seen and known what we could know, when we were filled with wonderment and inspired to awe by the Inca’s exquisite poetry of stone on the mountaintops, we could not but grope for words at Govinda’s–speaking in our own familiar meatless idiom to a landscape that inspired nothing short of reverence, devotion, and the dedication of one’s body and soul, not to the Krishna of the Hare Krishnas whose eatery this was, so much as to Pachamama Herself.

As I say, the mountains in all their stillness nearly stole us away.

And then we found soup made heavenly with quinoa. Cultivated and ceremonially revered by the Inca as “mother grain,” suppressed as “Indian food” by the conquistadores for its local significance, rediscovered by the world in the age of superfoods, there for us now that we know what the Inca once knew.

A good broth, chicken if you like, vegetable if you don’t. All the goodness of squash (zucchini), potatoes, peas, carrots, peppers–and cupfuls of quinoa. Milk, if you like it stirred in. Queso Blanco, if you can find it (fresh paneer if you can’t). Beet greens thrown in at the last moment, just barely to wilt and tinge the soup with color. Food for the body and the soul.

Of course, we made this soup in Pondicherry, wishing for holographic technologies to reproduce the stunning landscape of the Andes to really reproduce the experience–but in their absence closing eyes as the steam rose with flavor, and being transported back to the base of Machu Picchu. A nip in the air, the sound of rushing agua callientes in the background, the crunch of quinoa on the tongue, and the great mountains towering.

That way, we’d still have 5 days to look forward to in the Galápagos.

[Warning: jarring rant ahead; read at your own peril.]

See how simple and elegant airline food can be? This was Aerogal, but Taca was just as good. Why-oh-why do American airliners insist on tossing massive tasteless sandwiches and General Tso’s chicken at you, when they really have no inkling how to prepare either sandwiches or Chinese food? Not to talk of serving anything with grace and style. Argh!

[Rant over now.]

All good wishes for 2013, Pâticheri peeps! May your journeys this year take you, too, to such stunning heights and earthy tastes as you never imagined existed–even if you have to travel American airliners to get there!!

Quinoa Soup for the Soul

1 onion, chopped
1-2 cloves crushed garlic
2 large potatoes, cut into chunks
2 carrots, sliced lengthwise and then cross-wise in chunks
1 red bell pepper (or half of a green and half a red), sliced into strips
handful of green peas
1 small zucchini, cut as the carrots above
4-5 cups good chicken or vegetable stock (or water–see note below)
2 cups of quinoa
A few slices of queso blanco or fresh paneer, cut into squares
A few stalks of beet greens or swiss chard, chopped roughly

NOTE: If using water instead of stock, add some chopped celery and parsley to your mix of vegetables, and be prepared to season with with some combination of dried basil, thyme, and oregano. A little extra salt might be called for, too.

1. Prepare your vegetables: any combination of carrots, zucchini, green peas, bell peppers, and potatoes you please will really do. More will make a chunkier stew; less will make a lighter soup. Keep your chopping chunky: this is a soup that wants you to relate to each of its ingredients.
2. In 2 tablespoons of olive oil, fry a chopped onion until transluscent. Add a clove or two of crushed garlic and fry till about to brown.
3. Toss in your potatoes, carrots, and peas, and pour in 3-4 cups of chicken or vegetable stock. Add the sliced chicken breast at this stage, too, if using.
4. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer till potatoes and chicken are almost cooked, about 15 minutes.
5. Throw in the zucchini and bell peppers; simmer again till the squash is softening.
6. Add another cup or two of stock (or water) and 2 cups of quinoa..
7. Simmer again, stirring occasionally, until the quinoa is cooked and looks like its sprouting on its own.
8. Taste for salt (stock can be very salty) and add more if needed. [If you used water, it's time to
9. throw in your additional dried herbs until you get the combination you want--I'd do about a 1/2 teaspoon each or less].
10. Add your cheese: queso blanco if you have access to it, or else fresh paneer–cut into small square chunks. If you’re vegan, simply omit.
11. Just before serving, throw in your chopped chard or beet greens and warm just until wilted.

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