Club food is more a state of mind

Now that the Delhi Gymkhana is in the news perhaps it is time to talk a little about club food;

not just the Delhi Gym cuisine but club food in general.

 

A vast mythology has grown up around club food and Marut Sikka has even created a successful restaurant, Delhi Clubhouse, around the great dishes of clubland. I don’t go to too many clubs (never have, never will) but people who regularly eat the real thing always tell me that Marut’s delicious versions of club dishes are far better than the originals.

 

   This is not entirely surprising because I suspect that club food is more a state of mind than a specific cuisine of any great quality. To really enjoy it you have to eat it in the club and even then, the idea of the dish is usually better than the dish itself.

 

   This may be true of all clubs all over the world. The most famous club dish of them all, the Club Sandwich was not even invented in a club at all but was probably created for passengers on American trains.

 

   There are club dishes I have heard about but never eaten. There may well have been a great soufflé served at Mumbai’s Byculla Club and the dhansak at say, the Ripon Club may be the best of its kind but I am only going by hearsay. And the stories about these dishes are at least 40 years old.

 

   The most famous club dish at the moment, Eggs Kejriwal, owes more to the legend behind it than to the dish itself. You have probably heard the story. A member of the Willingdon Club called DP Kejriwal who lived in a conservative household where no eggs were allowed would go to the club and have them make him a fried egg on toast with grated processed cheese and a chilli.

 

   From all accounts the dish was fine but hardly a classic. Until the Bombay Canteen came along.

 

   The Canteen liked the idea of the dish not just because of its Bombay origins but because Arvind Kejriwal was in the news. The chef Thomas Zacharias created his own version throwing out the industrial bread and using rounds of brioche instead. He used better cheese and better quality eggs too. But I believe the dish only took off because Thomas added a green chili chutney that emerged out of his family’s cooking tradition in Kerala.

 

"I struggle to think of anything I have eaten at a club that did not fall in the range of ‘barely acceptable’ to ‘disgusting’."

   The Bombay Canteen version of the dish has now become a standard at Indian restaurants all over the world and the Willingdon Club story is widely repeated but I don’t think that anyone outside of the Willingdon would ever have heard of Eggs Kejriwal had it not been for Thomas and the Bombay Canteen.

 

   This is not an unusual trajectory for a dish. The Scotch Egg, a dish that Raj-era Brits stole from us (we call it a Nargisi Kofta) now turns up on menus at fancy restaurants, pubs and bars in many countries but even the chefs who serve it don’t always realise that the original had moved out of clubs and such elevated establishments as London’s Fortnum and Masons (which is often wrongly credited with inventing the dish) and become a nasty, cheaply-made industrial staple of shops attached to petrol pumps till Heston Blumenthal got his hands on it.

 

   Blumenthal did all the things you would expect one of the world’s greatest and most influential chefs to do: better eggs, superior sausage meat etc. But his best idea was to serve it freshly made with the egg yolk still runny. (Like a soft boiled egg.) That became the template for the fancy version but because the world still thinks of Heston in terms of science-based gastronomic innovation nobody even remembers that he re-invented the Scotch Egg.

 

   Even at fancy British clubs it is the Blumenthal version that is always served.

 

   In Britain, clubs can get away with charging high prices for food so they usually hire good chefs. In India, people go to clubs because the food and drink can be cheaper than restaurants. Most clubs struggle with the challenge of providing good food at reduced cost. They know that the current generation of chefs and cooks will give poorly paid club jobs a miss and look instead for employment in hotels, restaurants, cruise lines or in the Middle East.

 

   Consequently, many clubs have given up and outsourced their catering to contractors. Often these contractors tend to be restaurateurs and caterers who like the idea of the guaranteed incomes that club contracts provide compared to the high risk world of restaurants and catering assignments.

 

   Because they know that club contracts are a sure thing they rarely send their best chefs to cook club food. Over the last two decades it has become easier to handle club kitchens because many (most, even) club members are satisfied with Indian Chinese food and this requires zero skill to produce. Basic Indian food (kababs when the Sahabs knock back their whiskies; matar paneer-type nonsense for the memsahabs) is often offered. But the great Raj era dishes that used to be the hallmark of club dining are disappearing. What’s more I am not sure the members miss them. Why bother with a Cheese Soufflé when Chicken Manchurian is on the menu?

 

   And yet I know people who rave about the food at their clubs. It’s possible there are some secret menus served only to members and not to their guests but I struggle to think of anything I have eaten at a club that did not fall in the range of ‘barely acceptable’ to ‘disgusting’.

 

   My guess is that much of the praise that club food receives from members is due to sentiment and emotion.

 

   The obvious parallel is with boarding school food. Most hostel food can be truly revolting. At my school the chicken looked and tasted like crow and the meat must come from very thin, very bony goats. I became secretary of the Mess Committee thinking I could make a difference only to discover that the food could not be improved beyond a point. There was only so much that the kitchen could do within that budget and even in the Rajasthan of the 1970s good cooks were not willing to work in an institutional hostel kitchen at those wages.

 

   But I have met guys who remember the food with affection. Perhaps the cuisine was better at other boarding schools because so many people tell me how nostalgic they are for school food.

 

   But somehow I doubt it. Food is as much about memory and emotion as it is about quality. And, in some ways, the grand old clubs of India are no more than public schools for grownups.