Jeffrey Alford and his partner Naomi Duguid are the authors of a fabulous new book called
Mangoes and Curry Leaves
, about the cuisine and culture of the Indian subcontinent. Alford will be in town next week, appearing at Las Cosas Kitchen Shoppe and Cooking School at 7 pm, Tuesday, Jan. 24. (Costs $75 and includes a meal; call 988-3394 for details.)
Alford recently spoke with Total Pig from his home in Toronto. Here are some highlights:
TP: You don't write what I would call regular old cookbooks. How would you describe what makes your work different from other books that have recipes in them?
JA:
We don't see food as being isolated from culture. For this book, we really wanted to take people to the subcontinent. We'd like to see more people go there and experience it, not just cook the food.
So would you say Mangoes and Curry Leaves has some of the elements of a guide book?
Yeah, there are those elements. I mean, we don't tell you which hotels to book or anything like that. But we say, 'look for a hotel within the $5 to $15 range.' Some travelers would have no idea that $5 is what you would pay for a hotel. And we recommend that if you do stay in a big international hotel, you don't eat there-you might as well be eating in California! You have to go a little ways away from the hotel.
Some people have health concerns, too. They're really afraid to eat abroad and we had to address that.
You and Naomi met 20 years ago while bicycling in the Himalayas. In your research for this book did you get to revisit some of the places you saw on that trip?
No, not together. We had so much to cover [for this book] that we had to divvy up the trips.
What are the most striking changes, as far as food goes, that have happened in the region over the past 20 years?
Transportation! The market where I used to live (in southern India) is in an area that's very tropical; it's right on the equator. When I lived there before, all of the fish there was salted and dried, even though it was near the ocean. Now it's fresh because of improved transportation...they have enough trucks bringing in enough ice to keep the fish fresh.
You know, every day in the south of India they eat what is called a "measured meal," based on the measure of rice for each person's meal. The amount of rice in their "measured meal" has gone down, as it does when people have more money to buy food besides rice.
There are other things, too. We were often in very rural areas and I didn't see a single well that hadn't been improved-protecting water quality is so important. And small business loans. Twenty years ago there was no such thing. Today they're able to open a little store or something like that. But really the thing that's affecting them so much is the computer stuff.
Outsourcing?
Exactly. I live in Canada and there's this thing, 'Buy Canadian.' I always say if everybody buys Canadian, who's going to buy something from Nepal? We don't see things in isolation. We think food is a way of entering culture and learning about something we don't know about.
There must be an incredible diversity of cuisines
covering the vast territory between Sri Lanka and Nepal. What unites them?
Almost nothing! It's just so big and so vast and there are so many tribal populations. We wanted to work against this cliché of "Indian" cooking. When we go into an Indian restaurant here the food generally comes from a small part of northern India. The cooking of Sri Lanka is in some ways closer to the food in Thailand than in India.
But there are some similarities. They are mostly rice-based cuisines. They depend less on meat than other cuisines do. One thing we realized was that there's not a lot of weird stuff. There were very few things that we thought, 'Oh, I don't know if I'm gonna eat this.'
How hard was it to adapt these recipes for the North American kitchen?
I grew up until I was 30 in Laramie, Wyo., and I've been cooking this kind of food since I was a teenager. I didn't have a hard time cooking like this in the 1970s and I don't think anyone will now. But there will be always be exceptions. Like the winged bean, a very delicate thing like a green bean. You can't get those here. And fresh curry leaves. But it's just a matter of time.
Are there some dishes in the book that you think Santa Fe audiences will be particularly responsive to?
I think the first chapter on salsas.
Sauces?
No, salsas. Actually I can't remember what we call them in the book. Sometimes they're called chutneys, but I think that conjures up the wrong image. They're fresh sauces, like salsas.
And there's a chapter on dals. People in New Mexico are used to eating and knowing about beans, and dals are just that same kind of thing: slow-cooked beans. And they're eaten with flatbreads! It's very like tortillas and beans.
LAS COSAS KITCHEN SHOPPE AND COOKING SCHOOL
DeVargas Center
181 Paseo de Peralta
988-3394
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