Heartwarming books that celebrate food nostalgia

My first response to reading The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai was envy. Why can’t I write like this? Simple, heartwarming and unputdownable even to me sitting in Coimbatore, thousands of miles from Kyoto where the book is set.

Two non-fiction books I fell in love with this year are also this alphabet soup of food, culture, trade and history. Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen and Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus, both by Yasmin Khan, are moving beyond words and explore ideas of diversity and identity through food. In these, food comes together with culture, history and tradition in a joyous celebration even in the midst of strife.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives, a work of fiction, is set in a small diner in Kyoto run by a retired policeman, Nagare, and his daughter, Koishi, in a quiet lane. They track down and recreate dishes people remember just by taste or memory with no idea of the ingredients or technique. A beef-and-vegetable-stew eaten only once decades ago, a mackerel sushi tasted at a long-gone ryokan, a tonkatsu-craving of a dying man, among others. The father-daughter duo investigate and recreate the exact taste for their delighted clients. Most of the time, their clues are nothing more than vague memories.

If Nagare and Koishi were closer home, I would ask them to recreate a morukuzhambu I ate in a tiny room in Madurai in 1987. All I remember that is our rickshaw driver stopped there on a hot day in May. A temple festival was underway, and I sat on a red-oxide floor eating the tastiest lunch of my life off a banana leaf. I could never find the little eatery again. But, Nagare and Koishi would nail it, I know.

It is her memories of hawker food she ate so much of when she was growing up in Singapore, that keep Chef Chindi Varadarajulu going. The Creative Chef and founder of the Pumpkin Tales and Zhouyu restaurants in Chennai says, “I sampled a melting pot of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic cuisines in Singapore. There are hawkers there who are third generation and who still cook the same way as their mothers and grandmothers did.”

The fried carrot cake is a memory she is determined to keep alive. “It is actually made of radish (or white carrot). It is cooked with soy, garlic, chillies and eggs. It is simple, but it is tricky too, and is one of my favourite breakfast dishes. I am trying to recreate that in my kitchen,” shares Varadarajulu. But she is sad that many ingredients and vegetables that she saw in her childhood, seem to have disappeared from the markets.

The books by Yasmin Khan are also about food memories, but in a different way. These are true life accounts. Khan visits refugee camps and talks to the inmates about the food of their countries. The displaced people hang on to memories of their homeland through food. Ahlan wa sahlan are the words with which Yasmin is welcomed at a Palestinian camp. The phrase loosely translates to ‘may you arrive as part of the family and tread an easy path.’ She meets Sumood wa Hurriya, who teaches yoga to women in the refugee camps. Sumood is also a part of a Palestinian local organic food movement.

She shares with Yasmin her recipe for roasted aubergines, spiced chickpeas and tomatoes. I was delighted I had all the ingredients, so I cooked it too. I also made a side of cucumber raita with roasted and ground cumin, so widely used in Palestinian food. There is something heartening in there about our shared food heritage and the message of love that runs through life-giving dishes.

Sudha G Tilak is a food writer and the author of Temple Tales. In the chapter Heavenly Feasts, she lists sacred food offerings that have stood the test of time. “Look how long the Kanchipuram idli has survived. The idli offering at the Varadaraja Perumal Temple is made with original ingredients of the land like rice, urad dal, gingelly oil and peppercorns and cumin and it is steamed in mantharai (bahunia) leaves, just as it was all those hundreds of years ago, probably the 16th century,” she says.

Food nostalgia, like other happy memories, can offer comfort. “Not just the taste of the dish, the memory of the person who cooked it and served it to you is also linked to the memory. Sadly, I am a hopeless food detective, but I have been around so many women who just by tasting something know what ingredients have gone into the dish. And they know immediately if one of those ingredients has been substituted with another! These are real super sleuths of the food world,” notes Tilak.

Meanwhile, I can’t wait to read what the food mysteries the food detectives will solve in Hisashi Kashiwai’s The Restaurant of Lost Recipes, his next book.

Pankaja Srinivasan is a journalist based in Coimbatore.