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Hamburgers can get better but memories never can

I went to dinner in Delhi‘s Connaught Place a fortnight ago.

There was a time when it was the city‘s restaurant hub. Then, as Delhi exploded in all directions, the Connaught Place restaurants began to seem tired and out of touch.

 

Over the last decade however, Connaught Place has recovered its mojo and the restaurants are booming once again.

 

   It is pretty much the same story with most Indian metros. Calcutta’s Park Street regarded itself as the centre of the universe in the 1960s. It then collapsed, along with the rest of the city, when the CPM took office and decided that its mission was to destroy Calcutta. Now, the CPM itself has collapsed and Park Street is booming once again.

 

   In Mumbai, the Churchgate Street restaurants never suffered the same kind of fate but even so, they now seem to be back to the 1960s/1970s heyday.

 

   Almost none of this is due to nostalgia. At every single one of the city-centre restaurants that I have been to, most of the guests are young and unlikely to have any memories of the glory days of these places. Perhaps some of the guests – like me, for instance– remember coming to these restaurants as children. But that’s about it.

 

   Some people talk warmly about the Indian food at these places but with a few exceptions (the Dal Meat at Embassy or the Channa Bhatura at Kwality, both in Delhi), it was, in retrospect, unmemorable Punjabi restaurant food that stayed in your stomach for days afterwards. That is to say, it was food that no Punjabi ever ate at home. The dishes were mostly made up. Some were inspired by the Muslim cuisines of Delhi and Lucknow and some were variations on traditional dishes from pre-Partition Punjab. But all of them were given a heavy-handed, fat-filled makeover.

 

   And the restaurants made their reputations less on the Indian food and more because of what was called ‘Continental’ cuisine in those days. This was partly because many of the places had flourished during the Second World War when American and British soldiers were stationed in India.

 

   In Calcutta, the Park Street restaurants relied on inspiration from the ‘elite’ clubs of Calcutta, most of which served food that would disgrace a minor British public school.

 

   When I look back on the ‘Continental’ dishes of that era I wonder if the people who cooked them had any idea of what the original versions of these dishes were like. Certainly, I doubt if they knew how any of them had been created.

 

   Let’s take Chicken Tetrazzini, a great Calcutta dish which owes its popularity to the legendary Sky Room restaurant which, if I remember correctly, closed in the early 1990s. If you have any experience of 20th Century Calcutta, you may remember Chicken Tetrazzini. It is a very heavy combination of chicken, pasta, cream, and cheese. If that sounds terrifyingly fattening and rich, you are on the right track.

 

  The dish was created for the opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini (1871–1940), a legendary fatty who, it has often been suggested, epitomised the phrase, “it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

 

   Tetrazzini felt no embarrassment about her size and was proud of her fabled appetite. She would cheerfully consume large bowls of spaghetti before going on stage and singing her heart out. This dish was created for her in America when she was performing there. There is some dispute about which Chef actually created it but it hardly matters now because the dish has disappeared from most menus. Only in Calcutta is it still regarded with warmth.

 

   Remember Chicken Kiev? I once wrote a whole article on its origins (no it has nothing to do with Kiev or with Ukraine) so I won’t bore you with the origin story but it is essentially, chicken filled with butter, covered in breadcrumbs and then fried. Guests were expected to stick their forks into the chicken and watch as the butter spurted out, possibly staining their shirts.

 

"Because there was very little foreign travel in those days, we had nothing to compare them to and did not realise that the Indian versions frequently deviated substantially from the originals."

   Then there was Waldorf Salad, distinguished by its use of fruit mixed with vegetables (i.e. apples with celery and lettuce) and served in a basic mayonnaise dressing. It was invented by a waiter called Oscar Tschirky at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York and travelled the world before taking up residence on Churchgate Street.

 

   Most fish dishes were either incorrectly made or adapted for the convenience of the kitchen. Fish and chips is a famous British dish (possibly of Portuguese origin) which is made by frying fish in a batter made from flour. It is actually two dishes in one. The batter must be light, but still so hard that you have to crack it open with your knife. It serves to shield the fish which is poached inside the batter shell so that it melts in your mouth when you eat it.

 

   We never got that version. Instead we got fillets of whatever fish was available (in Bombay it usually meant pomfret) that was coated in breadcrumbs (not a batter) and pan fried. There was nothing wrong with it. But it bore as much relation to the real thing as say the Bengal Club bore to the Athenaeum.

 

   Prawn Cocktail sounded more sophisticated, but it was actually such a simple dish that a dishwasher could’ve made it on the days when the chef was off. You boiled the prawns and served them in a sauce made by mixing mayo with ketchup and a little spice. Calcutta legend has it that the Sky Room Prawn Cocktail was so famous that they used to parcel it and send it by air to Delhi where it would reach the Prime Minister’s House for Indira Gandhi’s delectation. (Yeah, sure. Because there was no ketchup available in Delhi, presumably.)

 

   Lobster Thermidor, a classic of that era, is also remarkably easy for any professional kitchen to turn out. You take the meat out of the lobster and cut it into chunks. Then you make a sauce from onions, wine and cream. You arrange the lobster chunks in the shell, pour the sauce over it, cover with cheese and grill it.

 

   An alternative was Lobster Newburg, originally created at the famous New York restaurant Delmonico’s. This consisted of taking lobster meat and cooking it with egg yolks, cream, butter and a little spice (cayenne pepper in the original). It was so heavy that it could’ve been made for Miss Tetrazzini.

 

   Opera singers were generally well represented on ‘continental’ menus. Peach Melba was created by the great Chef, Auguste Escoffier, for the Australian singer Nellie Melba.

 

   Once again, it caught on at Indian restaurants because any fool could make it. You opened a can of peaches, cooked them in vanilla syrup (or not) combined them with commercial vanilla ice cream and topped the whole thing with a caramel-raspberry sauce.

 

   I don’t know if any of the guests realised how easy these dishes were to make and because there was very little foreign travel in those days, we had nothing to compare them to and did not realise that the Indian versions frequently deviated substantially from the originals.

 

   And yet, I have to admit to a sneaking admiration for the restaurateurs who created these versions of classic dishes. French and Italian food may not have worked in the Indian context so they did their best to adapt the recipes and the dishes themselves.

 

   For instance, in Ajmer, where I went to school, the top restaurant was a place called Honeydew. It served what was described as a mutton hamburger on the menu and referred to by the waiters as a ‘mutton humburg’. The meat patty was unusually spicy and one day I discovered why. I ordered a Shami kebab: it was exactly the same as the patty that went into the hamburger.

 

   Not that I’m complaining. I still have a certain affection for the made-up touches like the fried buns that were used for hamburgers in those days. At United Coffee House, one of my favourite restaurants from that era, in Connaught Place, they serve a fancy, entirely modern hamburger these days. But each time I go, I ask for the inauthentic 1970s version.

 

   Because hamburgers can get better. But memories never can.

 

 

Posted On: 24 Jan 2025 09:47 AM
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