Loved this. I used to work with a lot of British Gujaratis, and they gave me a recipe for "Indian pasta" which is so tasty. I'm white but I love spicy food. The world is big enough for every take on cuisine, all of the dishes in the article sound delicious. Who cares if they're not authentic? Italians? Where do you think I learnt to add Marmite to bolognaise sauce from? At least it's not France, which I found the most committed to never changing anything.
I keep thinking about this post, and it influenced my lunch - I just surprised myself by cooking a a coconut curry pasta al forno with cauliflower and chickpeas.
Italians, wherever they are in the world, are very precious about “Italian food”… even in the U.S. where Italian-Americans refer to bolognese as “gravy”.
Absolutely. Colonel Kenney-Herbert includes several macaroni dishes in his Culinary Jottings (first edition 1878, I have the easily available Prospect Books reprint of the 1885 edition).
Colonel K-H discusses the subject with his usual thoroughness and one remark about how the pasta will have passed through many hands makes it clear, I think, that it was imported. Edward Palmer's Veeraswamy cookbook has a recipe for Spaghetti and Rice that seems like Egyptian kushari. Other Raj era cookbooks also have pasta recipes, usually, like Colonel K-H's, under macaroni.
There were also the Italian culinary professionals who worked in the big cities - Bosotto in Bombay and Peliti in Calcutta and Shimla (I wrote a piece once wondering if the curious use of Shimla mirch for bell peppers in India could be linked to Peliti, who had an estate in Shimla where he could have grown them. He came from a village near Turin which was next to Carmagnola, which has a famous fair centred around peppers).
I'm pretty sure restaurants like Gaylords or Lido Room in Bombay had pasta on their menus. Gaylords was established in the 1950s and would have reached more people than Trattoria.
Its quite true that Tratts was influential, not least because it was a hotel coffee shop, so is open 24 hours, leading to a huge amount of late night dining. But there were others that were also important in Bombay in that period. Don Giovanni's, in particular, run by a stereotypically pasta passionate Italian named Giovanni, who exited Little Italy in exasperation with their menu choices, and set up on his own.
Outside Bombay there were other places. American-Italian would have come through Peace Corps volunteers, who wrote cookbooks adapted to local tastes, and influenced restaurants like The Only Place in Bangalore, which I think had spaghetti and meatballs on its menu.
Its quite right to cite the Osho ashram as one place of influence, and there was one cook in particularly, an extremely eccentric and entertaining (in small doses) character called Sarjano. He wrote a book Food Is Love, which describes how to make Italian food in India (there was at least one other such cookbook).
So yes, many many influences other than Trattoria. And no way Tratts or any place with a real Italian connection would have contemplated making pasta in a pressure cooker, which one guy I know tried to convince me was the best, truly Indian way to make pasta. "none of this al dente kaccha kaccha stuff," he said disdainfully.
And its true that chef Ritu Dalmia, whose wonderful Mezzaluna restaurant, was followed by other really authentic Italian ones, tells me that its still not uncommon to have people claiming the pasta is too raw. And lets not even get into their views on risotto...
This is so great, Vikram! I only had a small window (of time and word count) so I picked what i found most entertaining - Tratts. But really great to know more all this Bombay Italian. I love this anecdote about Don Giovanni's!
He was also famous/notorious for a sign at the entrance saying very clearly how children should behave, or shouldn't come at all. Many people sympathised...
I love everything about this post. As a food anthropologist who watched people cook mokoroni (as they called them) in West Africa until they turn into mush, I love the appropriation of the food of others to make it one's own.
In Lisbon when I currently live, the best Italian restaurant is owned and run by a Nepali chef trained in Italy. All the cooks are Nepali, but they cook 'classic Italian'. I wonder however what the staff meals are.
There is some real wisdom to "this is cooking, not cuisine". It is frustrating to see rich people turn their nose up at food thst the common man eats. I exist in a level of middle class that there is a ton of home cooking and fast food occasionally, but there is also rare opportunity to go to the fine dining type places and while that is an amazing experience, so is the hole in the wall burger place where the patties are crisped up just right on the griddle and the (American, mind you) cheese is melted just right, or the family-from-Mexico owned Mexican restaurant that has authentic Mexican food but has adapted elements of Tex Mex into some of their dishes because at the end of the day, they think it is good that way and doesn't matter if it's exactly the way things are done back home. Same with the Italian American food that Europeans turn their noses up at, that attitude attempts to invalidate the experiences of first generation Italian immigrants who couldn't even hope to afford the ingredients they were suddenly able to afford once they moved to America, indicating had the economy been better back in Italy at the time they would have made similar dishes. There is zero room in my book for food snobbery, it is either good or it's not and "authenticity" can be a separate argument, is not a vector for determining whether food is good or not.
"an Indo-Chinese macaroni dish to students at Delhi University; here, pasta and noodles are tossed together with oil, spices, ketchup and soy sauce?"
- this feels very close to mee goreng (stir-fried egg noodles from the Indian-Muslim community in Malaysia), built on that same sweet–savoury mix of ketchup and soy, cooked into something fast and satisfying.
Indo-Chinese noodles would have quite a different trajectory from Italian pasta in India. For a fascinating glimpse of this history, check Monica Liu's recently published memoir Shillong to Chinatown, a Culinary Journey. Also, the introduction of Maggi noodles by Nestle created a whole cuisine of its own, plus imitators like Nepal's Wai Wai, which is huge and hugely influential in its own right.
This made me think about growing up in Mexico, where similarly to Indian and Pakistani preferences, we love really punchy, salty, fatty, spicy food, and don't mind tweaking other cusines to meet the demanding Mexican palate. I was just reminded of Sunday lunches at my grandmother's, where the whole family would get together to make (mexican) sushi. I recall we would always add a big squeeze of both fresh lime and orange juice into the soy sauce for dipping, to add both acidity and sweetness. I have nevered dared to do this while making or eating 'traditional' sushi with white people - but I stand corrected!
I absolutely love this piece! As an American living in Italy, I am constantly baffled by the fierce policing of Italian food, which stifles creativity and innovation! There has never been one singular "Italian cuisine," since cuisine always evolves. My own project, "Not Eating Italian in Italy" serves to highlight the burgeoning international restaurant scene in Milan, where young chefs are helping broaden the Italian palate! Thank you so much for sharing this essay, what a fun read!
I often use leftover daal & saag aloo to make what we (maybe ignorantly) call Hakka Noodle. I know this is different from what is being examined here. Now I am inspired to work with even more interesting aromatics & combos initially, when making pasta dishes. We use exclusively rice noodles anyway. They are the perfect foil for most things. I loved this piece.
Strangest meal I ever ate was in a 'Chinese' restaurant in Marrakech. Delicious but definitely from no region of China. Also, a Ghanian ex regularly served rice with pasta.
have been ordering Barbaresca for over 10+ years now and never noticed the tempeh!
My earliest memory of eating Italian is the EXOTICA pizza from Pizza Hut... when it opened in Jaipur's Ganpati Plaza, and this version of Pizza Hut also had a pretty insane salad bar! It quickly shut down for unknown reasons, but when it reopened a few years later, the arrabiata sauce pasta stole the show. At home, my mother made versions of pizza with a mishmash of vegetables that included small-diced potatoes — gosh, it tasted so wonderful!
Loved this. I used to work with a lot of British Gujaratis, and they gave me a recipe for "Indian pasta" which is so tasty. I'm white but I love spicy food. The world is big enough for every take on cuisine, all of the dishes in the article sound delicious. Who cares if they're not authentic? Italians? Where do you think I learnt to add Marmite to bolognaise sauce from? At least it's not France, which I found the most committed to never changing anything.
Humans do love to localise other cultures’ foods, clothing, and music and have been doing it forever. I hope we can stop pathologising it.
I keep thinking about this post, and it influenced my lunch - I just surprised myself by cooking a a coconut curry pasta al forno with cauliflower and chickpeas.
Sounds delicious!
Delicious!
Brilliant article- I would say quickly though that Italians are this snobby about their food with other white people too- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc
Italians, wherever they are in the world, are very precious about “Italian food”… even in the U.S. where Italian-Americans refer to bolognese as “gravy”.
Italian food in India has a long history dating back to the colonial era and pre-dates Gujaratis making green chilli pizzas in the 1970s.
Absolutely. Colonel Kenney-Herbert includes several macaroni dishes in his Culinary Jottings (first edition 1878, I have the easily available Prospect Books reprint of the 1885 edition).
Colonel K-H discusses the subject with his usual thoroughness and one remark about how the pasta will have passed through many hands makes it clear, I think, that it was imported. Edward Palmer's Veeraswamy cookbook has a recipe for Spaghetti and Rice that seems like Egyptian kushari. Other Raj era cookbooks also have pasta recipes, usually, like Colonel K-H's, under macaroni.
There were also the Italian culinary professionals who worked in the big cities - Bosotto in Bombay and Peliti in Calcutta and Shimla (I wrote a piece once wondering if the curious use of Shimla mirch for bell peppers in India could be linked to Peliti, who had an estate in Shimla where he could have grown them. He came from a village near Turin which was next to Carmagnola, which has a famous fair centred around peppers).
I'm pretty sure restaurants like Gaylords or Lido Room in Bombay had pasta on their menus. Gaylords was established in the 1950s and would have reached more people than Trattoria.
Its quite true that Tratts was influential, not least because it was a hotel coffee shop, so is open 24 hours, leading to a huge amount of late night dining. But there were others that were also important in Bombay in that period. Don Giovanni's, in particular, run by a stereotypically pasta passionate Italian named Giovanni, who exited Little Italy in exasperation with their menu choices, and set up on his own.
Outside Bombay there were other places. American-Italian would have come through Peace Corps volunteers, who wrote cookbooks adapted to local tastes, and influenced restaurants like The Only Place in Bangalore, which I think had spaghetti and meatballs on its menu.
Its quite right to cite the Osho ashram as one place of influence, and there was one cook in particularly, an extremely eccentric and entertaining (in small doses) character called Sarjano. He wrote a book Food Is Love, which describes how to make Italian food in India (there was at least one other such cookbook).
So yes, many many influences other than Trattoria. And no way Tratts or any place with a real Italian connection would have contemplated making pasta in a pressure cooker, which one guy I know tried to convince me was the best, truly Indian way to make pasta. "none of this al dente kaccha kaccha stuff," he said disdainfully.
And its true that chef Ritu Dalmia, whose wonderful Mezzaluna restaurant, was followed by other really authentic Italian ones, tells me that its still not uncommon to have people claiming the pasta is too raw. And lets not even get into their views on risotto...
This is so great, Vikram! I only had a small window (of time and word count) so I picked what i found most entertaining - Tratts. But really great to know more all this Bombay Italian. I love this anecdote about Don Giovanni's!
Antoine wrote a lovely tribute to him: https://antoinelewis.com/2019/07/15/a-tribute-to-the-don/
He was also famous/notorious for a sign at the entrance saying very clearly how children should behave, or shouldn't come at all. Many people sympathised...
I love everything about this post. As a food anthropologist who watched people cook mokoroni (as they called them) in West Africa until they turn into mush, I love the appropriation of the food of others to make it one's own.
In Lisbon when I currently live, the best Italian restaurant is owned and run by a Nepali chef trained in Italy. All the cooks are Nepali, but they cook 'classic Italian'. I wonder however what the staff meals are.
Thank you for this great post.
There is some real wisdom to "this is cooking, not cuisine". It is frustrating to see rich people turn their nose up at food thst the common man eats. I exist in a level of middle class that there is a ton of home cooking and fast food occasionally, but there is also rare opportunity to go to the fine dining type places and while that is an amazing experience, so is the hole in the wall burger place where the patties are crisped up just right on the griddle and the (American, mind you) cheese is melted just right, or the family-from-Mexico owned Mexican restaurant that has authentic Mexican food but has adapted elements of Tex Mex into some of their dishes because at the end of the day, they think it is good that way and doesn't matter if it's exactly the way things are done back home. Same with the Italian American food that Europeans turn their noses up at, that attitude attempts to invalidate the experiences of first generation Italian immigrants who couldn't even hope to afford the ingredients they were suddenly able to afford once they moved to America, indicating had the economy been better back in Italy at the time they would have made similar dishes. There is zero room in my book for food snobbery, it is either good or it's not and "authenticity" can be a separate argument, is not a vector for determining whether food is good or not.
Tadka penne for dinner now
"an Indo-Chinese macaroni dish to students at Delhi University; here, pasta and noodles are tossed together with oil, spices, ketchup and soy sauce?"
- this feels very close to mee goreng (stir-fried egg noodles from the Indian-Muslim community in Malaysia), built on that same sweet–savoury mix of ketchup and soy, cooked into something fast and satisfying.
Indo-Chinese noodles would have quite a different trajectory from Italian pasta in India. For a fascinating glimpse of this history, check Monica Liu's recently published memoir Shillong to Chinatown, a Culinary Journey. Also, the introduction of Maggi noodles by Nestle created a whole cuisine of its own, plus imitators like Nepal's Wai Wai, which is huge and hugely influential in its own right.
I'm literally looking up these dishes so I can recreate them at home.
I swear by Maryam's keema spaghetti! https://tastecooking.com/keema-spaghetti-is-4500-miles-away-from-bolognese/
And South-Asian home cooks with youtube channels have a lot of recipes to cook from (they're all fairly relaxed, no rigid method)
Thank you!
This made me think about growing up in Mexico, where similarly to Indian and Pakistani preferences, we love really punchy, salty, fatty, spicy food, and don't mind tweaking other cusines to meet the demanding Mexican palate. I was just reminded of Sunday lunches at my grandmother's, where the whole family would get together to make (mexican) sushi. I recall we would always add a big squeeze of both fresh lime and orange juice into the soy sauce for dipping, to add both acidity and sweetness. I have nevered dared to do this while making or eating 'traditional' sushi with white people - but I stand corrected!
I absolutely love this piece! As an American living in Italy, I am constantly baffled by the fierce policing of Italian food, which stifles creativity and innovation! There has never been one singular "Italian cuisine," since cuisine always evolves. My own project, "Not Eating Italian in Italy" serves to highlight the burgeoning international restaurant scene in Milan, where young chefs are helping broaden the Italian palate! Thank you so much for sharing this essay, what a fun read!
I often use leftover daal & saag aloo to make what we (maybe ignorantly) call Hakka Noodle. I know this is different from what is being examined here. Now I am inspired to work with even more interesting aromatics & combos initially, when making pasta dishes. We use exclusively rice noodles anyway. They are the perfect foil for most things. I loved this piece.
Strangest meal I ever ate was in a 'Chinese' restaurant in Marrakech. Delicious but definitely from no region of China. Also, a Ghanian ex regularly served rice with pasta.
Does anyone know a place in New Jersey or NYC that makes Indian Italian food?
have been ordering Barbaresca for over 10+ years now and never noticed the tempeh!
My earliest memory of eating Italian is the EXOTICA pizza from Pizza Hut... when it opened in Jaipur's Ganpati Plaza, and this version of Pizza Hut also had a pretty insane salad bar! It quickly shut down for unknown reasons, but when it reopened a few years later, the arrabiata sauce pasta stole the show. At home, my mother made versions of pizza with a mishmash of vegetables that included small-diced potatoes — gosh, it tasted so wonderful!
Also, it might be interesting to read into Italian cooking's UNESCO status https://substack.com/inbox/post/187581265
My memory of pizza hut salad bar is that everyone took huge amounts of macaroni and only a few salad leaves!