South Indian Thali Cookery Course |
I’ve seen them before in Asian supermarkets – even been given them as a strange present – but never knew what they were or what to do with them. Bitter gourd is a freak of evolution, an alien-looking cucumber covered with dark green rubbery spikes of flesh, and chow chow is a delicate broad bean-green tennis ball-shaped vegetable. You peel it and slice it like an apple and when cooked it tastes like a cross between kohlrabi and courgette. I was at the Southern Indian Thai cookery course run by Rachel Demuth and Jan Berridge in Rachel’s gorgeous Georgian house in Bath. Downstairs, where she holds her vegetarian cookery classes, is a spacious stainless steel kitchen, the walls cool white and pale mint, whilst upstairs the sitting room where we ate our thali at the end of the day, has a fantastic view over Bath and is festooned with Rajasthani wall hangings and genuine camel bells gathered from her last trip to India. Rachel, who has been running the legendary (in the West country anyhow) vegetarian restaurant, Demuths, since 1987, begins the course by running through the odd vegetables we will be cooking with and the spices that make up an Indian curry. “If you have a jar of curry powder, you are never going to get an authentic flavour,” she says, although admits to using this English version of an Indian spice mix for vedgeree – the vegetarian equivalent of kedgeree. The most surprising one to me was curry leaves, which she suggests buying fresh from an Asian supermarket and freezing. They are pungent and not meant for eating – the Indian equivalent of a bay leaf. We begin the practical element of the class by grinding our own spice mix, garam masala, which is not at all like the stuff you buy in the shop and smells extraordinarily sweet, and sambhar powder, a feisty mix from Tamil Nadu. Apparently the Tamils don’t eat much apart from lentils and there are even toasted lentils in the spice mix, as well as asafoetida. This is the resinous gum of an Afganistani plant that strict Hindu’s cook instead of onions and garlic (since they unleash passionate feelings) and its other name is ‘devil’s dung’. You can see why when you smell it. It also an anti-flatulence agent, which must help with all those lentils. The spice mixes are explosive and I can immediately see why it’s so much better to grind them fresh instead of buying ready-made. They will keep for a month in an air-tight jar - just as well because once the novelty has worn off, I doubt I’ll manage to toast and grind my own curry powder every day. So that the whole class doesn’t keel over with hunger as we salivate over the spices, we make our own ‘small eats’, and wolf them down hot off the chapatti pan: iddlis, delicate steamed buns made of lentils and rice with a fresh coconut chutney and a soupy lentil stew, followed by banana puris – thick pancakes of mashed banana and chick pea flour with fresh mango chutney. We have also managed to stuff ourselves on barfi, Indian sweets made with sugar and full fat milk, which are ruinously bad for any diet and horribly addictive. I cannot understand why both Jan and Rachel have managed to remain stick thin. Jan makes a mango and rosewater milk pudding – in fact, it’s the basis for kulfi, Indian ice cream, but we will eat it chilled rather than frozen. We all try a little: we tell ourselves it’s to test whether Jan as managed to put in the right amount of rosewater. It’s like a sweet, dense mango-laden custard. The class then divides into three and each group makes a curry. Thalis are actually the plate, Rachel tells us. They’re made of stainless steel with individual compartments for rice, several different curries and chutney. “You eat in a circle, starting at one end and work your way round to the pudding,” says Rachel, adding, “You can see the Indians looking at us tourists as we pick are way all round instead of eating in order.” The class collectively voted that the Keralan chow chow and methi coconut curry is the best. “Once you’ve got the spice mix right, you can vary the vegetables,” suggests Rachel, which is lucky because neither chow chow nor menthi, which looks like overgrown clover, appear to be in this week’s organic veg box. The food is authentic: Rachel has been to India eight times and was taught by Indian women how to cook, and I’m relieved to find that drinking cava with your curry is also okay now since the Indian middle class have started creating fantastic wines. “The impetus behind the cookery course was really to have a fun day out where people learn something and I get to meet new people,” says Rachel. As I leave clutching a sheaf of inspirational recipes and loosening my dress, I think she certainly seems to have got it right. www.vegetariancookeryschool.com; |