Part 2 - A Cautionary Culinary Tale

This is the very sad continuation of my earlier post, as it deals with a tragic turn of events in our little culinary adventure here in India. Prepare to be shocked, saddened, and generally appalled by the most exotic terribleness of it all...

As many of you well know, we (mostly I, since Pat can pretty much take or leave, preferably leave, Indian food) were greatly looking forward to wallowing in the Indian cuisine experience for our couple of weeks here. I was so bold as to scoff at the conduct of many people, including Ngaire, who seek out hotels with "International" menu selections, in order to avoid Indian food altogether.

On our first evening in Delhi, we had a marvelous dinner at the Indian joint in our hotel, delighting in fantastic baby lamb shanks in curry sauce, along with a wonderful black lentil dal cooked overnight.

Then, the long-awaited private cooking class. Well, to begin with, it was not, despite my repeated instructions to the jerk F&B Mgr. at the hotel, a "hands on" class. Rather, it turned out to be a demonstration class, although a very interesting, close-up one, with Pat & me right next to the Indian Chef for the hotel, as he made five classic Rajasthani main dishes. All of them were made with extremely bold and intense flavors and spices, far more than we are used to in our Indian restaurants in the U.S. or in the U.K.

We were then served the five dishes at a lovely table in the restaurant, but without any accompanying starches or cooling items, such as raitas. Pat had the good sense (or the dumb luck, which often amounts to the same thing) to only take a small taste of the dishes, as he found all of them except for one far too spicy to eat. On the other hand, your intrepid writer of this message soldiered on quite
stupidly and ate a good half-portion or so of each of the five explosive dishes.

Fast forward to about 8 hours later, at about 3:00 am, when I awoke feeling as if David Beckham had just kicked me in the stomach with the most powerful kick he could manage from those very muscular, tattooed , and attractive legs of his. Hmm, I digress...

With the worst stomach pain I have ever experienced, I wondered if the best course of action would be simply to toss myself off of the rooftop bar of the hotel into the tea garden and thereby end my Indian spice-induced agony. The next day, all I ate for the whole day was one banana. Even the remotest aroma of Indian spices flipped my stomach dramatically.

In any event, I slowly recovered from the dreadful “Assault of the Rajasthani Spices” but remained reluctant to taste anything like them for several days. Therefore, totally contrary to my gluttonous nature and certainly contrary to my intentions, we were seeking out the “International” selections on every menu and avoiding all but the most mild of Indian dishes.

Is this not a dreadful and shocking turn of events??!!

I firmly hoped that when I next communicated with you that I would have better news and would be able to report that I was back in the Rajasthani saddle, indulging in curries, thalis, etc. Fortunately, later in the trip we were once again able to enjoy marvelous Indian specialties, although carefully chosen for mild spice. You must understand that what we in the U.S. or U.K, (and everywhere other than India that we have eaten Indian food), consider “medium spice” is in India something quite lower than any of the normal Indian measures of spiciness. Rather, in India (or at least in the Delhi and Rajasthan parts of India that we visited), the notion of “medium spice” is something quite wildly incendiary by our standards. God, or Lord Krishna, only knows how ghastly “high spice” must be!! Hmm, instant ulcer??!!

Oh well, Ngaire was quite content to learn (after I decided to swallow my pride and tell her) that the International Menus at the luxury hotels offer a quite reasonable choice (although quite hideously expensive).

We discovered that one of the most expensive elements of eating at the restaurants of the luxury hotels was the cost of wine. India has a relatively new wine industry, with few labels available. None of them is really cheap or really expensive (as they should not be, as they aren’t really very good), all selling for about US $14 – 17 retail. However, when the hotel restaurants sell those Indian wines for 3 -4 times retail, as all of them do, that results in a very ordinary wine selling for US $40 – 60 per bottle. Imported wines are even more expensive. Thus, nearly every dinner or lunch with wine, irrespective of quality, was in the US$100 – 200 range. We decided that it was simply part of the whole experience and did not belabor it.

We asked the chefs at a couple of hotels for their recipes, particularly for the marvelous black lentil dal and the cinnamon ice cream at Taj Jai Mahal Palace in Jaipur.

Our final indulgence in Indian food and drink was at the Biz lounge at the Delhi airport, where we sipped Indian scotch (distilled in Scotland and bottled in India) and nibbled on cumin/cinnamon cookies. Yumm, Yumm…