Mangalorean Flavour Missing in Abhi-Ash Wedding
Courtesy: Vikram Doctor / Times News Network
April 21, 2007
In the blanket coverage of the Ash-Abhi marriage, there’s been little written on the food.
I suppose the assumption is that, with the groom’s side taking over matters so totally, it’ll just be generic North India. It certainly doesn’t look like the bride’s side will get much of a say in anything.
This is sad since she comes from the excellent food city of Mangalore. I was there last weekend and am still regretting I didn’t stay longer.
There’s so much variety: the omnivorous cooking of Bunt landowners, Aishwarya’s clan, jostles for table space with the vegetarian food of Udipi’s Brahmins, the pork and fish of Mangalorean Catholics, the rich food of Moplah Muslims, and other influences from Kerala down South, Goa up North, Tamil Nadu to the East and all the wide world to to the West, which used to arrive in Mangalore on the monsoon winds.
Not all of this is easily available. I think Mangalore has still to figure out how to showcase its culinary potential. But I did taste one outstanding dish which would be perfect any wedding feast. Coondapur style Ghee Roast Chicken is one of those dishes too wickedly rich to eat regularly, but too delicious to drop altogether.
A wedding would be the ideal place for it - and you can spend the honeymoon working the calories off! It wasn’t, as I was expecting a whole roast chicken (though I’m told it can be served that way too), but succulent chunks, lightly spiced and with the most indescribably crisp and delicious crust. It's oddly little known outside Mangalore, though a couple of places in Bangalore serve it.
A friend tells me the secret is the Coondapur masala mixture (heavy on cinnamon, I think) and, no surprise, the ghee that makes anything taste good. It’s not roast in an oven, but half fried, half pot-roasted on the stove.
One other element is filled in by Chef Ananda Solomon of the Taj group, famous for restaurants like Thai Pavilion, but originally from Mangalore. “Ideally it should be made with the skin on,” he says. The ghee fat combines with the chicken skin fat to give that texture and taste - and calories beyond counting. “
"It can't be eaten everyday,” says the chef, with understatement, “but once in a while it's great.” It also makes Ghee Roast Chicken one of the rare exceptions to India’s chicken skin-off rule. This prejudice against chicken skin is one of the mysteries of Indian cooking, like the distaste for real lamb (from sheep) as opposed to goat meat.
The standard reasons given for these prejudices are usually on the lines of “we don’t like the smell”, but then why do cooks around the world, including many Indians abroad, not mind?
This chicken skin chauvinism greatly annoys food lovers who point out that much of the flavour of chicken lies in the fat beneath the skin. Bhicoo Manekshaw is particularly censorious about skinless chicken: “why bother to eat this tasteless stuff?” she demands in her book Feast of Love, and determinedly compensates with a recipe for an omelette with fried chicken skin and mushrooms.
It sounds delicious, even if I rather doubt her tactic of frying skin strips till they are crisp and the 'fat melts away' really lessens calories.
Ranjit Rai also has a wonderful sounding recipe in his authoritative Tandoor book, for Golden Chargha Chicken, where the skin is basted with honey for a crisp, sweet-savoury result. Another friend points out that desi chicken is usually cooked with skin on since its tough flesh needs all the help it can get from skin-fat.
But these are exceptions; in general Indian chicken comes skinned. And one possible answer is suggested by Harold McGee’s book on food science.
Skin and bones, he says, were used to give a thicker, more stomach filling consistency to stews because over long cooking the connecting tissue melts “to provide large quantities of gelatine and a substantial body.”
This is fine for Western dining where the stew is the meal’s main element, with bread as support, but maybe not in India, where rice tends to be the main element, with a small amount of spicy, liquidy curry providing taste and lubrication.
This could be why we have little taste for dishes with meaty, gelatinous textures - though a cynical friend suggests that perhaps we just don’t like the real taste of meat, “which is why we have to disguise it with so many spices!”
What happens to all the chicken skin? In the West discarded chicken skin goes into products like chicken nuggets where their fat helps give them their characteristic texture - and makes them even unhealthier than they are.
I suspect that chicken skin here is going into the plethora of chicken products that have recently become available - chicken sausages, chicken salami, even, believe it or not, chicken bacon.
I think I’d prefer eating skin more knowingly, especially if available in as delicious a form as Chicken Ghee Roast. I doubt that Bollywood, more used to showing than eating skin, would go for it, but the rest of us can hope that Chicken Ghee Roast becomes increasingly available outside Mangalore.
Wedding Varta: