Two cookbooks

Sometimes while leafing through that old Bombay institution, the Time and Talents Club Cookbook, I’ve wished there was a restaurant that served their food. For a few years the Time and Talents (T&T) Club did run an establishment near the Gateway of India called Victory Stall to support the widows and children of soldiers who died in the 1962 Indo-China war, but sadly I never got to eat there.
Some Parsiana readers may remember what the food was like — and some might have been among the volunteers working there — but I’m guessing that the usual constraints of what the public will accept would have kept their offerings to the sandwiches, snacks, a few basic mains and desserts that you can find in Ideal Corner or RTI today. Which is not what I imagine when I read the cookbook.
No, I’m imagining a place that serves Shirin Petigara’s Polynesian Lobster Salad, or Naju Mehta’s neat local version of bouillabaisse, or Silloo Unwalla’s Dried Bombay Duck Cutlets, made with no bother of neighbors complaining about the smell, or Amy Kohiyar’s Chicken Maivahalans with the full cup of cream that the recipe calls for, and Hira Motivala’s Miss Muffet’s Spider Pudding, which the book says is the Club’s Silver Jubilee Competition Recipe, so it has to be good!
Most restaurants can’t or won’t make food with such recipes these days. They are too full of calories or too complicated to make from scratch in professional kitchens or too obscurely local or, thanks to political pandering, entirely illegal these days (Bapsi Nariman’s Steak Fried in Breadcrumbs). Yet one knows, just by reading the lists of ingredients, the precise instructions and the aura of quiet certainty that pervades the cookbook that they would have been delicious.
And then I picked up Secrets from the Kitchen, a book of recipes from the India International Centre (IIC) in Delhi compiled by Bhicoo Manekshaw and chef Vijay Thukral, and realized that in one lucky corner of New Delhi, the spirit of the Time and Talents Cookbook lives on. Since I avoid Delhi as much as is possible I have never eaten at the IIC, but I could recognize that the recipes were related.

Bhicoo Manekshaw (left) and chef Vijay Thukral

Labda, a North Indian vegetables preparation (left) and sali ma gosht

There is, for example, the unashamed use in both books of lots of cream and butter, as in one of the first recipes in the IIC book, Chicken à la Kiev, which has almost vanished from menus these days. Or the Tournedos Rossini which occurs in both books and manages to combine three substances that are now banned (in Bombay) or near impossible to get: beef, foie gras and Madeira wine.
There’s the assumption (and instructions) in both books of basic culinary skills like making béchamel sauce or choux pastry — which is quite different from the obsessively detailed instructions and the boastful way in which such skills are displayed on blogs and online videos today. The former knows that recipes need some work, and sets about doing it with no fuss. The second is angling for a place on Masterchef for doing what real cooks do every day.
Both books name people who gave or inspired recipes, quite unlike the plagiarism that appears so often these days. Some of the people are famous [Curry a la Zubin Mehta in the T&T book, Gateau Indira (Gandhi) in the IIC book], but the books don’t fawn over them like celebrity cookbooks do. Some of the people named are the chefs behind the dishes (Manohar Singh’s sautéed vegetables in the IIC book, Chicken Boned and Stuffed a la Bastian in T&T), which acknowledges how much good food depends on the often ignored people who actually do the work.
Above all, the dishes served at IIC have not been selected according to a ‘concept’ for the restaurant, nor do they reflect the cost cutting compulsions of professional caterers. They were selected simply because they are profoundly satisfying dishes that people really want to eat, from mutton hamburgers (made with Worcestershire sauce, an excellent idea) to sali ma gosht to stuffed leg of lamb with mushroom and red wine sauce, with a few unusual ones (Coorgi wild mango curry, Kashmiri aubergines with apples, and ginger and jaggery ice-cream) thrown in to keep things interesting.
This is exactly what the T&T book does too, happily mixing local recipes, both standard and unusual, with foreign ones from expats based in the city (in the IIC book the foreign recipes come from various embassies in Delhi). These connections aren’t by chance, but are linked by the late Bhicoo Manekshaw, who was both IIC’s culinary genius and a prolific contributor to the T&T book.
Manekshaw obviously had much in common with most members of the T&T Club, but her recipes differ in one way. Rather than purely home recipes, they tend to be the classics of Western professional cooking (Beef Wellington, Chicken Terrine) which reflect the training she received at the Cordon Bleu school in London. And this got her the job of overseeing the food at IIC for 20 years — though as a test of sorts, she did have to cook a dhansak for C. D. Deshmukh, erstwhile finance minister of India and the visionary who conceived of a club there.
This kind of institutional job can be a thankless one. Indian clubs have members who make complaining into an art form, and the IIC book includes some of them ("Served insipid kheema which even a yogi will reject”). But Manekshaw was a stickler for standards and complaints seem to have been far outweighed by the gratitude of members who adored the simple, yet stylish food she developed with the chefs at the IIC. (Basil and Thyme, the café she also ran in Delhi, offered a similar experience).
Secrets from the Kitchen is a handsomely designed and produced tribute to the culinary legacy of Manekshaw and her chef colleagues, like Thukral, at IIC. As with all her books the recipes are given clearly and confidently, though if anyone really wants to learn how to cook in her style they should go to Feast of Love, her magnum opus and the closest anyone has come in India to producing a book in the strict yet supportive style of Julia Child.
Perhaps even some restaurants might try. Because, very recently, there are small signs that some chefs are realising the value of such food. Restaurants like Bombay Canteen and Sodabottleopenerwala are now featuring dishes that are not fancy, but so good, like Eggs Kejriwal, Scotch Eggs and Aloo Cutlets. They might want to consult the Time and Talents Club Cookbook for further inspiration or, Secrets from the Kitchen could stand in.