It started a few weeks ago, when my mother asked, over the phone, "So what do you want from Bombay?" Mr Mezza Voce was going there for a long weekend, and my parents do sometimes look on him as a glorified postman who's joined the family. It probably struck them as a good opportunity to send me something.
As usual, I had a hard time coming up with ideas. Almost everything I could think of was too big (my piano) or too perishable and messy (our cook's pepper chicken) or liable to inspire the gift of a rather larger quantity than I might have wanted (my parents once came to Hyderabad with no less than eight packets of banana chips, just because I said I wanted one small packet of the cheese flavoured variety from Mahima Mangalore Stores). The last time I had asked for something, they had sent a parcel with a cousin and really, while two marzipan Easter eggs were delightful, two packets of Goa sausages were a bit excessive when---
At that point, an idea hit in mid-thought. Goa sausages, eh? Goa sausages, otherwise known as chorizo, aren't really a favourite item with me. I have some trouble stomaching the quantity of palm vinegar and spice that goes into them. There is no doubt the smoked, cured pork in them must have been useful and very welcome to a primarily fish-eating community at times when fish was in short supply and in days when nobody had a fridge to store food. But they are just too, too much. They are greasy, smell a bit, look somewhat like dry dog poo, and ultimately, the casing is always, always recognizable as something highly unappetizing--pig intestine. This is a pleasant thought for nobody, not even the most hardened meat-eater.
They are, however, very edible and even good to eat when taken out of their casing and eaten with lots of rice, in a chorizo pulao. The rice absorbs enough of the vinegar to develop a faint sour tang, while the cured meat absorbs water and becomes a bit juicy. The smell turns into a fragrance, the overpowering taste becomes a highlight, and the grease is spread out in the rice, making each grain just a little bit more defined, more individual than before. The overall effect is rather like that of lime pickle with curd rice, or alternatively, if you like anthropomorphic food, a bit like Rodrigo Fonseca, the life of the party at the Catholic Gym Christmas dance way back in 1959, telling spicy stories to make the girls giggle and rearrange their stiffly-starched skirts and managing to liven everything up so that the band plays faster music, the aunties start smiling, and the whiskey pegs become just a little larger. Can't you just hear the grains of rice all gasping excitedly "That chorizo? What personality! Is he single?"
And the general effect is the same when eaten with the sort of bread that can add enough texture and enough bulky bread-taste to keep that spiciness in check. Too many risque stories, after all, can get a bit tedious and indigestable, depending on whether you can take them at all or not. Am I stretching the metaphor? Anyway, there is no better way to eat chorizo than by throwing it into a hot pan for a while and then taking a small, somewhat round loaf of bread that has a very crisp, hard crust and a soft, welcoming inside, tearing it open to expose that inside to the air, putting your chorizo in, and then closing it up again before you take a large bite. Good, isn't it?
Which brings us to what I'd thought of when I remembered the Goa sausages. I didn't care that much about the sausages, but I did care about that bread, that particular sort of thin-hard-crust-outside-soft-soft-sponge-inside bread that you get at its best only in Bombay -- the pav.
The pav is known to most because of its use in pav bhaji, in which vegetables and masala are beaten to a pulp and then made to line the inside of a pav, a form of culinary enjoyment that has more or less managed to make its way across India's urban centers. If you're a bit more of a connoisseur, you might know the vada pav, in which a comfy hot potato vada sits inside a pav with some garlic-flavoured powder and green chilli chutney to dress it up a bit.
If you live in Bombay and are a bread eater, however, you'll know the pav as the sort of bread that you get at its finest from Irani bakeries. The key is in the contrast. The hard crust, hard enough to be significantly different from the inside and yet, in the case of a normal pav, soft enough to be pulled off and rolled up by itself (in the case of a brun pav, the crust is hard enough to break your teeth on if eaten cold). And the soft, plump, airy inside, just waiting for your teeth. This isn't a chewy bread or a sticky bread, it's just soft and terribly, terribly welcoming. You get these in a slab, of six or eight together, maybe even ten, and you call them ladi pav. It's like a bunch of buns all stuck together, only no mere bun was ever that good.
And the long preamble was just to tell you that, in fact, when my mother asked me what I wanted from Bombay, what I did think of was ladi pav. It's not as though you don't get some form of pav here in Bangalore, but, well, um, er, let's put it mildly -- it's not pav. No self-respecting pav has the same crust a simple bun would have, the soft crust that flakes off. The pav you get at Nilgiri's is, alas, like that. Just like most of the pav that makes its way into plates of pav bhaji across the country. It completely misses the point, thinking that pav is just a bun-like bread, when, in reality, the proof of the pav is in the crust. I gather there are some trade secrets about keeping the air in the oven moist to ensure a hard crust, but though I like baking, the point of this is not a recipe, its just an expression of love, soft, welcoming, airy love, with a bit of a rugged hard edge to it...
Er, sorry. Bit maudlin, I know, and somewhat like a Barbara Cartland romance novel.
At any rate, there is a special affinity I have for the pav, and this is not because Goans are called pavs (allegedly because they were the only bread-eaters to begin with, possibly because the word pav is the word for bread in Portuguese, oh, never mind, this is too complicated to go into). We'll run through this -- my family is Goan, but it's also a family of migrants that moved base from Goa to Bombay three generations and more than a hundred years back. We eat fish curry. But actually, we eat a lot of other things as well. We're proper migrants, picking up the culinary habits of those around us, diluting our own food habits as we please.
This was bad enough in my grandparents' house and became worse in my parent's house, not least because the cook we've had for 25 years is an Adivasi with a flair for food. She came to us barely knowing how to make tea -- now, if you go to visit my parents, there's a good chance you'll be eating chhole and sabudana vada one day, pepper chicken the next, steak the third, some bastardized Chinese-style noodles called "chow" the fourth, Gujarati khadi and East Indian style bombil fry the fifth, Mangalorean mutton curry the sixth, and tandoori chicken on Sunday. Our food has long since ceased to be a fixed point of cultural identity; this has everything to do with both my parents' appreciation of a good thing when they eat it, which led them to never demand fish curry unnecessarily, and our beloved cook's fondness for experimentation and constantly adding to her repertoire. We're not purists, we're philistines, and proud of it.
As it happens, her fish curries are really nothing out of the ordinary, probably because she doesn't eat fish -- on the other hand, everything else she cooks tends to be her own personal riff on the traditional style of cooking whatever dish it is, which leads to even more confusion, albeit along with intense pleasure. (Note: Some readers of this blog have been making plans to lure her away. I know who you are and where you live and more importantly, if I tell this prized cook not to make what you like the next time you visit she will.... actually, she'll make what you like no matter what I say. She likes her admirers. Fine, whatever!)
And hence the affinity for pav -- whatever the cuisine, we can and do eat pav along with it, which means that it is an item of "home food" for me in a way that nothing else is. We had the same pav-walla from A-1 bakery come to the door to sell us pav for more than 20 years; now he's dead, but his son has taken over as pav-walla. As for A-1 bakery from which we always get our pav, it goes on, hopefully forever, and the son of the owner has trotted off to the further suburb of Malad to bake and sell pav there. Change; constant; you see what I mean? Much as we like chapathis and phulkas, they'll never quite unseat the pav.
But, yes, to return to the pav I wanted from Bombay. Mr Mezza Voce promised to get me some. He was at work in Bangalore again when I got home, secure in the knowledge that there was some pav waiting for me. I dropped everything and charged into the kitchen to look for it. And it was there -- only thing is, it wasn't quite there. I got uneasy when I saw the sealed transparent plastic packet -- pav out of a packet is rarely very good. At any rate, I opened it up and was suddenly, rapidly, deflated.
It had a flaky, soft, bun-like crust.
I had not been that disappointed in a long, long while, which should explain why I called up Mr Mezza Voce and rather maliciously said flippant but rude things about how he'd become a Bangalorean and didn't know a proper pav when he saw it any more. I take the opportunity to apologize here both to him and to Bangalore; I will write an ode to Iyengar bakeries soon and to Mr Mezza Voce's ability to find good food wherever he goes. They -- and you -- must understand that it was a little like being told that your mother is at home waiting for you and rushing in to find the lady who lived two doors down, who, while a nice motherly person who truly likes you, is not your mother after all. And let's say you haven't seen your mother in ages but you've been wanting to; doesn't that turn into a nastier shock?
At any rate, enough of these family-centric analogies that exclude those who don't like their families. It turned out that Mr Mezza Voce's mother has been buying that sort of pav for years, so for him, that is a pav of equal status. And, remarkably, because I never thought it possible, I am actually a culinary Nazi who wants some things "just so". A lesson in perspective and in context and in the necessity of very clear communication in a marriage. Ambiguity is bound to make its way in somewhere, but we can at least try.
I did eat the pav. To be truthful, after that first flush of irritation at it, I felt a little sorry and decided to be kind and less Nazi-like and more welcoming. I ate it with home-made hummus and some superb and very North Indian garlic pickle, which made for an interesting sandwich, even if a sandwich as unhomely as that bread itself -- there I go again. I'll shut up now. Sorry, that was a pav, just not the pav I'm used to. There are other realities, and my stomach must collide with them and learn to live with other versions of what it is accustomed to.
I suppose that is a moral, so we'll stop now.
As usual, I had a hard time coming up with ideas. Almost everything I could think of was too big (my piano) or too perishable and messy (our cook's pepper chicken) or liable to inspire the gift of a rather larger quantity than I might have wanted (my parents once came to Hyderabad with no less than eight packets of banana chips, just because I said I wanted one small packet of the cheese flavoured variety from Mahima Mangalore Stores). The last time I had asked for something, they had sent a parcel with a cousin and really, while two marzipan Easter eggs were delightful, two packets of Goa sausages were a bit excessive when---
At that point, an idea hit in mid-thought. Goa sausages, eh? Goa sausages, otherwise known as chorizo, aren't really a favourite item with me. I have some trouble stomaching the quantity of palm vinegar and spice that goes into them. There is no doubt the smoked, cured pork in them must have been useful and very welcome to a primarily fish-eating community at times when fish was in short supply and in days when nobody had a fridge to store food. But they are just too, too much. They are greasy, smell a bit, look somewhat like dry dog poo, and ultimately, the casing is always, always recognizable as something highly unappetizing--pig intestine. This is a pleasant thought for nobody, not even the most hardened meat-eater.
They are, however, very edible and even good to eat when taken out of their casing and eaten with lots of rice, in a chorizo pulao. The rice absorbs enough of the vinegar to develop a faint sour tang, while the cured meat absorbs water and becomes a bit juicy. The smell turns into a fragrance, the overpowering taste becomes a highlight, and the grease is spread out in the rice, making each grain just a little bit more defined, more individual than before. The overall effect is rather like that of lime pickle with curd rice, or alternatively, if you like anthropomorphic food, a bit like Rodrigo Fonseca, the life of the party at the Catholic Gym Christmas dance way back in 1959, telling spicy stories to make the girls giggle and rearrange their stiffly-starched skirts and managing to liven everything up so that the band plays faster music, the aunties start smiling, and the whiskey pegs become just a little larger. Can't you just hear the grains of rice all gasping excitedly "That chorizo? What personality! Is he single?"
And the general effect is the same when eaten with the sort of bread that can add enough texture and enough bulky bread-taste to keep that spiciness in check. Too many risque stories, after all, can get a bit tedious and indigestable, depending on whether you can take them at all or not. Am I stretching the metaphor? Anyway, there is no better way to eat chorizo than by throwing it into a hot pan for a while and then taking a small, somewhat round loaf of bread that has a very crisp, hard crust and a soft, welcoming inside, tearing it open to expose that inside to the air, putting your chorizo in, and then closing it up again before you take a large bite. Good, isn't it?
Which brings us to what I'd thought of when I remembered the Goa sausages. I didn't care that much about the sausages, but I did care about that bread, that particular sort of thin-hard-crust-outside-soft-soft-sponge-inside bread that you get at its best only in Bombay -- the pav.
The pav is known to most because of its use in pav bhaji, in which vegetables and masala are beaten to a pulp and then made to line the inside of a pav, a form of culinary enjoyment that has more or less managed to make its way across India's urban centers. If you're a bit more of a connoisseur, you might know the vada pav, in which a comfy hot potato vada sits inside a pav with some garlic-flavoured powder and green chilli chutney to dress it up a bit.
If you live in Bombay and are a bread eater, however, you'll know the pav as the sort of bread that you get at its finest from Irani bakeries. The key is in the contrast. The hard crust, hard enough to be significantly different from the inside and yet, in the case of a normal pav, soft enough to be pulled off and rolled up by itself (in the case of a brun pav, the crust is hard enough to break your teeth on if eaten cold). And the soft, plump, airy inside, just waiting for your teeth. This isn't a chewy bread or a sticky bread, it's just soft and terribly, terribly welcoming. You get these in a slab, of six or eight together, maybe even ten, and you call them ladi pav. It's like a bunch of buns all stuck together, only no mere bun was ever that good.
And the long preamble was just to tell you that, in fact, when my mother asked me what I wanted from Bombay, what I did think of was ladi pav. It's not as though you don't get some form of pav here in Bangalore, but, well, um, er, let's put it mildly -- it's not pav. No self-respecting pav has the same crust a simple bun would have, the soft crust that flakes off. The pav you get at Nilgiri's is, alas, like that. Just like most of the pav that makes its way into plates of pav bhaji across the country. It completely misses the point, thinking that pav is just a bun-like bread, when, in reality, the proof of the pav is in the crust. I gather there are some trade secrets about keeping the air in the oven moist to ensure a hard crust, but though I like baking, the point of this is not a recipe, its just an expression of love, soft, welcoming, airy love, with a bit of a rugged hard edge to it...
Er, sorry. Bit maudlin, I know, and somewhat like a Barbara Cartland romance novel.
At any rate, there is a special affinity I have for the pav, and this is not because Goans are called pavs (allegedly because they were the only bread-eaters to begin with, possibly because the word pav is the word for bread in Portuguese, oh, never mind, this is too complicated to go into). We'll run through this -- my family is Goan, but it's also a family of migrants that moved base from Goa to Bombay three generations and more than a hundred years back. We eat fish curry. But actually, we eat a lot of other things as well. We're proper migrants, picking up the culinary habits of those around us, diluting our own food habits as we please.
This was bad enough in my grandparents' house and became worse in my parent's house, not least because the cook we've had for 25 years is an Adivasi with a flair for food. She came to us barely knowing how to make tea -- now, if you go to visit my parents, there's a good chance you'll be eating chhole and sabudana vada one day, pepper chicken the next, steak the third, some bastardized Chinese-style noodles called "chow" the fourth, Gujarati khadi and East Indian style bombil fry the fifth, Mangalorean mutton curry the sixth, and tandoori chicken on Sunday. Our food has long since ceased to be a fixed point of cultural identity; this has everything to do with both my parents' appreciation of a good thing when they eat it, which led them to never demand fish curry unnecessarily, and our beloved cook's fondness for experimentation and constantly adding to her repertoire. We're not purists, we're philistines, and proud of it.
As it happens, her fish curries are really nothing out of the ordinary, probably because she doesn't eat fish -- on the other hand, everything else she cooks tends to be her own personal riff on the traditional style of cooking whatever dish it is, which leads to even more confusion, albeit along with intense pleasure. (Note: Some readers of this blog have been making plans to lure her away. I know who you are and where you live and more importantly, if I tell this prized cook not to make what you like the next time you visit she will.... actually, she'll make what you like no matter what I say. She likes her admirers. Fine, whatever!)
And hence the affinity for pav -- whatever the cuisine, we can and do eat pav along with it, which means that it is an item of "home food" for me in a way that nothing else is. We had the same pav-walla from A-1 bakery come to the door to sell us pav for more than 20 years; now he's dead, but his son has taken over as pav-walla. As for A-1 bakery from which we always get our pav, it goes on, hopefully forever, and the son of the owner has trotted off to the further suburb of Malad to bake and sell pav there. Change; constant; you see what I mean? Much as we like chapathis and phulkas, they'll never quite unseat the pav.
But, yes, to return to the pav I wanted from Bombay. Mr Mezza Voce promised to get me some. He was at work in Bangalore again when I got home, secure in the knowledge that there was some pav waiting for me. I dropped everything and charged into the kitchen to look for it. And it was there -- only thing is, it wasn't quite there. I got uneasy when I saw the sealed transparent plastic packet -- pav out of a packet is rarely very good. At any rate, I opened it up and was suddenly, rapidly, deflated.
It had a flaky, soft, bun-like crust.
I had not been that disappointed in a long, long while, which should explain why I called up Mr Mezza Voce and rather maliciously said flippant but rude things about how he'd become a Bangalorean and didn't know a proper pav when he saw it any more. I take the opportunity to apologize here both to him and to Bangalore; I will write an ode to Iyengar bakeries soon and to Mr Mezza Voce's ability to find good food wherever he goes. They -- and you -- must understand that it was a little like being told that your mother is at home waiting for you and rushing in to find the lady who lived two doors down, who, while a nice motherly person who truly likes you, is not your mother after all. And let's say you haven't seen your mother in ages but you've been wanting to; doesn't that turn into a nastier shock?
At any rate, enough of these family-centric analogies that exclude those who don't like their families. It turned out that Mr Mezza Voce's mother has been buying that sort of pav for years, so for him, that is a pav of equal status. And, remarkably, because I never thought it possible, I am actually a culinary Nazi who wants some things "just so". A lesson in perspective and in context and in the necessity of very clear communication in a marriage. Ambiguity is bound to make its way in somewhere, but we can at least try.
I did eat the pav. To be truthful, after that first flush of irritation at it, I felt a little sorry and decided to be kind and less Nazi-like and more welcoming. I ate it with home-made hummus and some superb and very North Indian garlic pickle, which made for an interesting sandwich, even if a sandwich as unhomely as that bread itself -- there I go again. I'll shut up now. Sorry, that was a pav, just not the pav I'm used to. There are other realities, and my stomach must collide with them and learn to live with other versions of what it is accustomed to.
I suppose that is a moral, so we'll stop now.
13 comments:
wonderful!
i'm splitting my sides at Fonseca. i've never had ladi pav. in hyd, as you probably remember, a soft britannia is enough to work one's nostalgia. sigh.
Did you know he didn't know one pav from another when you married him?
At the end of the post, I was salivating and cursed Mr.Scribbler more than you probably did!
Wow, you write SO well :)
d, thank you. And I'm amazed--I wish I'd known you in Bombay (though that isn't just because of the lack of ladi pav in your life). :)
pixy, the poor thing has since told me in no uncertain terms that he does know the difference between one and another and prefers the one with the harder crust (I was going to call it "the genuine article" but do not like being racist--er, regionalist--er, bakerist!--about this). However, he was very busy in Bombay and bought the one that he thought simulated the pav experience most closely. Unfortunately, my food love is all about texture and his is all about taste, so there you go--we'll probably never quite resolve this and it will remain an insurmountable cultural difference that we will cast up to each other in the course of any nasty fights. ;)
nandini, yeah, yeah, I had to wipe some drool off the screen... ;) Now do stop cursing him, he thinks this is very bad publicity for him! (And thank you--you do too, in another sort of style entirely)
Must add here (for ND's sake) that Mr. Scribbler is rather a dear in many ways and by far one of the nicest cousins-by-marriage a gal could ask for.
I mean, the boy took me out when I was in B'lore and fed me good food and indroduced me to Pecoes and Blossoms - first class chap I say!
> (Note: Some readers of this blog have been making plans to lure her away. )
I don't know what you're talking about! Just because we renovated the kitchen, furnished the downstairs apartment, sponsored her visa, and sent plane tickets to her...
Though you are quite correct that the Pav is "required reading" with Goan sausages. I'll have to make arrangements for the A-1 baker's son, too...
( twisting my moustache with diabolical laughter ) Muahahahahahaha!
-W
*ding* I suddenly know who the diabolical mustach-twirling chef-stealing thief is!
As I was twisting my moustache and bellowing with maniacal laughter I remembered that the A-1 bakery had a kind of bread which Mrs. Diabolical Villain referred to as "Gutli bread". Is this the same thing as the vaunted "Pav"?
Gutli bread was absolutely delicious with Goan Sausages(especially if you rushed home quickly so they were still warm from the oven) but I never found true bliss until I had sunnas with Goan sausages. After a hard day's work of villainy there's nothing quite like it.
-D.V.
pixy, who is ND? Is that my maternal unit you are referring to so lightly? And, yes, methinks you have correctly arrived at the identity of this moustachioed villain--AND you know where it lives!
Dear Mr DV,
Hands off our cook. Gottit?
Now that the pro forma threat is done with, let's get on to the pav. Gutli = kadak = brun pav--the one on which you can potentially break your teeth (though it's great if it's hot out of the oven and you eat it quickly with butter... and maybe ham). The pav I'm singing about is the normal pav, the softer version...
No mention to maternal units, though she will be gratified by the vote of confidence no doubt. Merely referring to the other comment(er) who was in the process of cussing out Mr. Scribbler.
PS: I love Guti pav better than regular pav. Something about the crust combined with the soft bread within that drives me into a gastronimical tizzy! I remember that we used to stop at the bakery on the way home and my dad had to always buy 1 pav more than needed coz I would polish off one in the car on the way home!
PPS: We always got a little extra summthing summthing from A-1 as my dad and Mr. A-1 were school pals. Coincidentally, I was school pals with Mr.A-1's daughter!
Um, lady - I'm not Goan (though most of my friends are), and they say the slang word 'Mac' or 'pau' for Goan came from the konkani "Jesu, marie, jose! Maka Pau!" (Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Save us!)
There you go.
Super super post by the way! Will go back and re-read now. Slurp. is this ldi pav like the Goan poie? Which I love slurp.
Much love.
bikerdude: Aha, you have hit on the crux of the complication. Paunv = bread (as in maka pav di)and pau = reach out for (as in Maka pau)..... so the confusion is quite justified and it makes sense that so many theories on the origin of "mac/maka pau" as a soubriquet float around. :)
And yes, poee is very similar. I still think the Iranis do it better, but then I am biased.
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