Australian culinary historian, writer and educator Charmaine O'Brien has travelled the length and breadth of India, understanding the spices, flavours and techniques in the last two decades and documenting them in her books including The Penguin Food Guide to India. Winner of multiple awards including the Best National Food Writing and Gourmand International Cookbook Awards 2016, she shifts her focus to the rapidly changing food scene of the new India with her book Eating the Present, Tasting The Future: Exploring India Through Her Changing Food. In a tete-a-tete, she takes us through her new findings.
This is your fourth book on India's culinary graph. Tell us about your tryst with Indian food and what made you pen down not one but four books on India.
When I first came to India, I thought the totality of Indian food was what was available in an Indian restaurant in Australia as these all had pretty much the same menus. My experience of it was overly rich and excessively hot with chilli and they all tasted pretty much the same. However, I was surprised to discover otherwise when I came to India. Hence, I decided to write the book that eventually became The Penguin Food Guide to India.
For how long have you been in India and how extensively have you travelled the country?
I have been coming to India for more than 25 years. I have lived in Delhi for a couple of stints. When I did the research for the Penguin Food Guide to India, I spent 12 months travelling all over the country. I have been to every state of India, with the exception of Tripura, Manipur and Mizoram. However, I did manage to speak to people who came from these regions so I got an understanding of the food of these regions for the book.
Have you explored the food of Calcutta/Bengal? What is it that you liked about the region?
Yes, I have spent considerable time in Calcutta. The food that left an impression on me definitely includes the seafood — huge prawns with sweet meat cooked in coconut milk, ilish marinated in a paste of white poppy seeds, curd and chilli, a mix of crab and prawns pureed and steamed in banana leaves, prawn cutlets, fabulous crab balls at a Chinese restaurant and also white pumpkin cooked with ajwain. I also love mishti doi and bhapa doi and of course, I tried a lot of sandesh. There is also a dish that I cannot recall the name of but it is made with leftover vegetable peel amongst other things. It is funny as I was thinking of it to be apparently a trend in ‘upcycling’ food but it's incredible India has a tradition of upcycling before that term was invented!
While your last three books have been a guide to Indian food traditions, this book talks about the current scene and the future. Tell us more.
After finishing writing The Penguin Food Guide to India, I turned my attention from observing and learning about India’s food traditions to what was changing in India with respect to food as what I was noticing around me looked a lot like an ‘industrial revolution’, albeit one driven by technology rather than steam engines. I also write on Australian food history and it's being inextricably linked with 19th-century British history. Then there are also the links between Australia and India as British colonies. So, it was quite astounding to see India changing with such momentum — this was too interesting a story not to try and tell it in my way, which is through food.
The book is partly a memoir so it draws on my 25 years of researching and writing about India’s food so that is there as the foundation. There were many predictions that the pandemic would destroy the restaurant industry in India (and in other countries) but it seems to me that eating out here is absolutely booming. I have been particularly interested in watching the emergence of what I call the ‘global food style’ in India. There are so many eateries here now that you feel like you could be anywhere in the world. You can buy pretty much any Western food you might want these days. Also, all the global ‘wellness’ trends in food are here and a lot of convenience food that did not exist before — packaged and processed meal components, pre-cut veggies, pre-made dosa batter, ready-to-eat meat products, packaged flavoured yoghurt/curd. The list could go on and on. I think of this as great for women who still produce most domestic meals in India as it eases their labour and potentially frees them up to do other things. It could have some significant environmental consequences as well. India is moving from a resource-conservative country to one that is becoming resource consumptive, i.e., buying more packaged and processed food and potentially wasting more food in itself. So it’s a two-edged sword.
You also do catering and your speciality is modern Indian food. Tell us more about your culinary repertoire in this category.
I would not say these days that I make ‘modern Indian food’, I would instead say I make ‘Indian-inspired food’. My cooking is a blend of Indian ingredients, techniques and recipes and my European cookery skills (I have professional cookery training in the classic European style). I have not done any catering as such in India although I do cook for some friends here sometimes and they are particularly appreciative of the salads and bakes I make as these are novel for them. The professional catering I do is in Australia. The menu includes dishes like Seafood Biryani, Sali Boti, Lagun Nu Custard, Berry Pulao (I found the recipe for the famous Brittania berry pulao in a dusty old 1980s magazine in a guest house I was staying in in the hills), Shrikhand, Pork Vindaloo. There is another dish I make from the Northeast that is made up of clotted cream (which I make on the stovetop), dressed with crisp puffed rice and syrup made from date palm syrup or jaggery – I cannot remember the name of this but it is sensational.
What are you working on next?
I am going to write a book about celebrity chefs in colonial Australia. The first ‘chef’ in the book was an Indian fellow who was born in Surat around 1802 who then went to England (probably as a lascar on a ship) and was caught stealing there, a crime for which he was transported to Australia, which was a British penal colony at that time, and after a series of adventures escaping from various penal establishments there and living with aboriginal people, he eventually becomes the cook for one of Australia’s most famous explorers. After this book, I will turn my attention back to India for another book I have long wanted to do but that is my secret for now.