Around the World with 250 Cakes + Virgin Coconut Oil at The Kirana Shop

This column appeared in the October 10 edition of Mail Today (Delhi/NCR).
Copyright: Mail Today
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/best-cakes-restaurants-food-cheesecakes/1/313943.html

FORTUNE COOKIE / By Sourish Bhattacharyya

AROUND THE WORLD WITH 250 CAKES

I MET Roger Pizey accidentally last week, much after the publishing house that had set up our interview, gave up trying to locate him. I ran into a chef in whites moving around with the air of an absent-minded professor in the Professor Calculus mould and I knew it had to be the man because I had seen his face on the back flap of his monumental book, World’s Best Cakes (Jacqui Small/Penguin Books India). When I said to him that we had been trying to locate him all over the hotel, he said, looking nonplussed, “But I was in the baking room!”

Where else would you expect Marco Pierre White’s favourite pastry chef to be? It is said that the legendary restaurateur had tasted Pizey’s tarte tatin at the iconic London restaurant, Le Gavroche, and at once made the chef a job offer he couldn’t refuse. And the two have stuck together for over 25 years; Marco has even written a laudatory foreword to one of the most delectable cookbooks that I have read in my lifetime.

Roger Pizey, legendary restaurateur
Marco Pierre White's pastry chef,
has written the most delicious
cookbook titled World's Best Cakes

World’s Best Cakes is a gastronomical world tour, spilling over with recipes (250 of them, from Apple Strudel to our own Malpua and Sugee, read sooji, Cake, to Tarta de Santiago) and guides to the best bakers and patissiers in the leading cities of the world. This is a cookbook that tells you not only how to make cupcakes, but also guides you to the home of the original temptress, Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street, New York City. It takes you to the “only place in Rome to buy tiramisu, according to the Romans” (Pompi on Via Albalonga 7); it points to the birthplace of the double-side macaron (“pure pleasure”), the Parisian tea room Laduree on Rue Royale, whose history goes back to 1862; it leads you to Vienna’s Café Central on the corner of Herrengasse/Strauchgasse, the historic meeting place of intellectuals and revolutionaries, which saw Josip Broz Tito, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky walk in and out of its portals in just one month — January 1913.

History and confectionery seem to walk with hands clasped together. The cheesecake, which I associate with the humongous portions of the Cheesecake Factory, a very American institution, is actually a creation of the ancient Greeks. It was served to Olympic athletes as a source of energy. The Pineapple Upside Down Cake wouldn’t have been possible had American bakers not discover the convenience of tinned pineapples, which started coming in from Hawaii in the early 20th century. The Scandinavian Cardamom Coffee Cake may seem like a mistake, but it owes its existence to the spice, which the Vikings took with them back home around the ninth century A.D. — the connection was established with the discovery of a Buddha statuette from the Swat Valley in a Viking grave excavated in 1954 in the island of Helgo in Sweden. Cardamom, not cinnamon, in fact, is the favoured spice for baking in Sweden and Norway.

Cakes also have been immortalised in literature and pop culture. Madeleines, the French sponge cakes shaped like scallop shells, owe their worldwide fame to Marcel Proust’s ecstatic description of them in his encyclopaedic seven-volume novel, A la Recherche du Temps (In Search of Lost Time). And of course, “cream coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels…” were some of Maria’s favourites in The Sound of Music. Apple strudels, which are layered filo pastries that can also have walnuts, pumpkin, cabbage and quark as fillings, have been traditionally eaten in Austria, the setting of the classic starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. World’s Best Cakes makes you a better baker and a better-informed person too.

At Ragini Mehra's organic produce
store, The Kirana Shop, you'll find
virgin coconut oil produced at the
Philippines spa resort, The Farm 

NOUVELLE CUISINE FOR NAVRATRA VEGANS

THE FARM at San Benito, an hour and a half by car from Manila in the Philippines, has become one of the world’s best-known spa getaways and is owned by resort developer Naresh Khattar. I’d first heard about it from the hotelier Rai Bahadur M.S. Oberoi’s grand-daughter, Ragini Mehra, whom I met in her latest avatar as promoter of organic food products at The Kirana Shop. At this quaint little place in one corner of Meharchand Market, on the other end from Ayesha Grewal’s The Altitude Store, the shop that brought organic food to Delhi, Mehra stocks The Farm’s ‘absolutely no heat’ virgin coconut oil, which dieticians recommend you have raw every morning to protect yourself against a host of diseases (believe me, it doesn’t taste bad!).

Mehra, better-known among the city’s ladies who lunch as the co-owner of the Silhouette salon at The Oberoi, also keeps a lavishly illustrated cookbook titled Raw! That too is from The Farm, which Mehra visited some time back and fell in love with its 175 acres of coconut plantations and “divine raw food”. Raw! has vegan recipes from Alive, the resort’s acclaimed restaurant, whose chefs showcased their style of cooking at a dinner at The Oberoi this past Sunday.

The cookbook, for instance, uses an assortment of mushrooms to give an interesting twist to the ceviche, a South American seafood salad that owes its worldwide popularity to super chef Nobu Matsuhisa. Its recipe for Som Tam, Thailand’s famous raw papaya salad, substitutes the flavour-enhancing fish sauce with a light soy sauce. And it reinvents the Chicken Marengo (chicken sautéed in oil with garlic and tomato and garnished with fried eggs and crayfish), the classical dish said to have been invented for Napoleon after his victory in the Battle of Marengo in June 1800. Alive’s version of it is the very nouvelle Crispy Potato Napoleon with eggplant, caramelised onions and pumpkin-ginger sauce. You’ll have to visit The Farm to figure out whether the food tastes as good as Luca Tettoni’s photographs look, but it’s one cookbook you may want to dig in this season of festive veganism.

ITALIAN NOTES IN BUTTER CHICKEN

I HAVE SEEN tomatillos, a staple of Mexican cuisine, grow in the farm of the promoter of Hyatt Regency New Delhi and Four Seasons Mumbai, Shiv Jatia. I have heard Bill Marchetti, the Aussie chef who’s developing the Spaghetti Kitchen restaurants for Blue Foods, talking ecstatically about cultivating the massive beefsteak tomatoes in Punjab. But it took a conversation last week to make me sit up and smell the ketchup.

I was talking to Zorawar Kalra, whose Masala Library by Jiggs Kalra at the Bandra Kurla Centre, Mumbai, has opened to rave reviews, and he said he was using San Marzano tomatoes for his butter chicken. These tomatoes, originally from Naples, are thinner and more pointed; they have a thicker flesh and fewer seeds, and their taste is stronger, sweeter and less acidic than what you buy in the bazaar. A favourite of pulp makers, San Marzano tomatoes may just lift the taste of butter chicken. This all-time favourite dish, about whose ideal recipe there seems to be no unanimity in this world, can be made or marred by the tartness of the tomatoes that go into it. With their acid-sugar balance and ability to smoke well because of their thick flesh, San Marzano tomatoes seem to have been created by nature for butter chicken. San Marzano, I bet, will be the new go-to ingredient.

GOURMET DELHI

DELHI’S credentials as the foodie capital got a boost this past weekend with the opening of The Gourmet Jar, India’s first store dedicated to jams, marmalades and preserves, at Shahpur Jat, the urban village in the shadow of the Siri ruins that’s been seeing a quiet revival. A creation of the Veggie Wiz blogger and ‘confiturer’, Apeksha Jain, the specialty store doesn’t have your standard-issue jams and marmalades. Instead, its spread includes such exotica as mango jalapeno or Cape gooseberry cinnamon preserve; apple, green tea and rose jam; banana rum or fig Cointreau jam; marmalades with orange and apricot brandy or bitter orange and whisky; and mulled wine jam for the Christmas season. Jain also has a sugar-free jam with dates and prunes. These are made with fresh organically grown fruit and not sweet fruit pulp, and the good news is that Jain doesn’t use corn syrup, the bane of all things sweet and industrial.

Michelin-Starred Chefs Share Life Stories at Master Classes on Eve of CSSG Charity Gala

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Roger Pizey, the legendary Marco Pierre
White's pastry chef, started life as a
herdsman tending to 500 cows  

Delhi Gourmet Club founder-member Atul
Sikand strikes a post with Mark Best, who
first worked as an electrician in gold mines

DELHI has been exulting in the company of Michelin-starred chefs from Europe and their hated counterparts from Australia. They have been brought together by the inimitable Anand Kapoor, who heads the non-profit Creative Services Support Group (CSSG), which has been spotting young people from underprivileged backgrounds and giving them their first career breaks.

Four of these chefs, who’ll be preparing a 12-course charity dinner for American Express card holders tonight at The Leela Palace, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, spent an entire day conducting master classes for 22 members of the Delhi Gourmet Club on October 2. It gave us the opportunity to find out more about their amazing stories. What I thought was most striking about the four chefs was their choice of career. In the case of all four of them, it was certainly not what they had wanted to do since the time they were growing up. What, then, were they doing before the kitchen lured them into charting out a career and achieving fame?

Frances Atkins, the first British woman chef
to get a Michelin star, went to management
school and got a degree to please a father

His Marque restaurant in Sydney’s hipster suburb, Surry Hills, has got just about every accolade in the business (including three hats from the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide), but Mark Best started his working life as an electrician in the gold mines of Western Australia, “living in a tiny town with nothing around it for 800 miles”. After working underground for four years with “a thousand smelly miners”, at age 25, Best decided to become a chef and started an apprenticeship with a restaurant named Macleay Street Bistro at Potts Point, a gentrified suburb of Sydney, whose list of famous residents reads like a who’s who of Australia.

Best’s Australian counterpart, Ian Curley, who’s as famous for his charities and his rugged humour as for Melbourne’s European, where he oversees four venues and three kitchens, was “getting into trouble” with the police by the time he was 16 in home city Coventry in the West Midlands, England. Restaurant kitchens in Australia, as he lightly put it, offered him a chance to get out of Coventry, get a job and meet “lovely girls”.

Having grown up in the hard knocks school of life (“it took me 30 years to become an overnight sensation,” he said), Curley has no patience for young chefs “who watch Masterchef and think they are pop stars”, but he has all the time for the homeless and young criminals, for many of whom he has successfully found employment in kitchens across Melbourne. I was also impressed by his very down-to-earth view of charity. “You give some, you get some back,” he said, pointing out how his charities get him TV time (you’ll see him in a couple of weeks as a celebrity judge on Masterchef Australia Season 5), which is turn gets him customers and keeps his till busy.

From the other side of the world, Frances Atkins, who was the first British woman chef to get a Michelin star in 2003 (since then, just five other women have joined her exclusive club), started cooking when she was a child because her mother, a pianist, had very little time for the kitchen. When she grew up and announced her desire to become a professional chef, her father insisted that she should first get a real education.

She enrolled in management school and got a degree just to satisfy her father, but immediately thereafter plunged headlong into a career in cooking. Today, she runs six restaurants, but it is as head chef and co-owner of Yorke Arms, a restaurant with rooms in the picturesque village of Ramsgill-in-Nidderdale, Yorkshire, that she has attained her celebrity status and won accolades for her style of game cooking.

And then there was Roger Pizey, who looks somewhat like an absent-minded professor and has a natural warmth that draws you towards him. The celebrated pastry chef of the legendary Marco Pierre White, who hired him after falling in love with his tarte tatin at Le Gavroche, has appeared in the famous television series, Hell’s Kitchen, and has just written his brilliantly informative second book, World’s Best Cakes, which is being distributed in India by Penguin.

Ian Curley said he found in Australia and a
restaurant kitchen the way to "move out of
Coventry, get a job and get to meet girls"

Pizey finished school when he was 16 and went to work at a farm a little outside his home city, Manchester, where he was a herdsman tending to 500 cows. He was inspired to change tracks by his nearest neighbour in those sparsely populated parts of England, who was devoted to the late Keith Floyd’s first television series for the BBC, Floyd on Fish, and a pretty decent cook himself. The pleasure the neighbour took in cooking rubbed off on Pizey, who enrolled in a City & Guilds re-training programme for young people and got a kitchen knife and chef’s whites at the end of 12 weeks.

He applied for a job at England’s ten best restaurants, but got an answer only from Le Gavroche, the prestigious establishment run by the Roux brothers. The letter said the restaurant had a two-year waiting list for job applicants, but a position had come up in an Albert Roux restaurant. It was there that Pizey finally found a direction for his career, even though his L67.50 a week apprenticeship made it necessary for him to walk back home, because he could not afford a bus ticket.

Pizey can now afford to look back at those days with a sense of nostalgia. The most placid man I have met in the cooking business, Pizey is into fly fishing and, yes, building rockets — he can make rockets that go up to 6,000 feet, which means he’s quite a pro at his pastime. His first love, though, remains baking. His advice to his students: “If you’re in a good mood, you make a good dessert; if you’re in a bad mood, don’t bother.”