I was talking to someone on the train this morning about food. She has been giving me invaluable advice - which, as with all invaluable advice, is never followed for God knows what reasons - about shopping for assorted foods, cooking/seasoning/marinating meat, using the pressure cooker, and more. Today the conversation segued into street food, that stuff variously described as 'manna from heaven' or 'deadly germ-laden crap', depending on who was doing the describing. I missed a lot, she insisted, by not working my gustatory way through the delights of edibles available on the streets on this glorious city. And, to make it even worse, I didn't know what I was missing.
Did I not? In the uncountable years that I have lived and eaten my way through various parts of the country and the world, I have followed the family's golden rule fairly diligently. No rasta food, please, my mother mandated many years ago. And, being a thinking, well-behaved, obedient child even as long ago as when I was a child, I followed the order without too much argument. So I would watch my friends clamour around the chanawala outside our school precinct, licking salty-spicy fingers as they munched on warm, crispy chana jor garam laced with extra lemon juice and onions. In Maryland, USA, my junior high school classmates would run to the ice cream truck and exchange teenage gossip and lipstick-tips over a mint-chocolate-chip bar. In college back home in Bombay (as it was then), ragda pattice and bhelpuri jostled for pole position with masala dosa and sev-batata-puri sold just outside the gate. But all that was forbidden and, frankly, not wanted. I screwed up my fastidious little nose at the cloudy water used to wash the plates, the lack of napkins and the overall state of hygiene of the master chef who produced these delicacies.
Perhaps the only two times I did indulge my yearning for food not eaten in a restaurant was once, in Geneva, when I succumbed to the piping hot lure of fresh-baked chestnuts at a street stall near the school tram-stop and another time, in New York, when the siren call of a fresh hot pretzel slathered with yellow mustard was too loud to resist. And, yes, there was the once when my mother and I ate crusty hot baguettes filled with cheese and sausage from a cart in the middle of the main square in a little town in France...
Earlier this week I was watching chef Anthony Bourdain wander through China, eating all sorts of very strange food. He did it all in restaurants, some not more than the proverbial hole in a wall, and enjoyed almost every bite - the ducks' feet, the pigs' stomach, the live bugs, the eye of newt and tongue of frog...well, maybe I stretch the point rather there, but you know what I mean. Madhur Jaffrey cooked her way across the world, eating fresh caught tiger prawns on the seafront in Kerala; Keith Floyd took bites out of lethally spicy mutton in Goa and Kunal Vijaykar ate noodles with goodness knows what extra bits in Chinatown in Kolkata. Perhaps not the literal interpretation of street food, but close enough for...err...jazz.
Why am I picky, now that I don't need to follow parental diktats? Simple: I once watched a vendor at a tiny stall in Nariman Point, the business hub of Mumbai, make a sandwich. In between scratches of unmentionable parts of his anatomy, a couple of hearty blows of his clogged nose and a great deal of unsavoury spitting dangerously close to his store of chutney and butter, he put together a multi-layered creation of bread, vegetables, spreads, cheese and spices that, after grilling, smelled divine, looked delectable and evoked visions of every bacterium in the universe just waiting to dive into my waiting-to-be-filled stomach. Would I dare??
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