Hindu

Online edition of India's National Newspaper

Interview originally appeared in May 2001

Meet Shoba Narayan

by Padmini Devarajan

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Meet Shoba Narayan, winner of the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for the year 2001, given by the James Beard Foundation. This is one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of food writing in the US. A freelance journalist based in New York City, Shoba Narayan was short listed along with Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Alan Richman, reputed restaurant critic of GQ magazine.

In an exclusive email interview with Padmini Devarajan, Shoba speaks of the award, her career, family and life in the US and harks back to the India of her childhood.

We are thrilled to hear about the award. How does it feel to be in the shoes of a winner?
It feels wonderful! I was floating on cloud nine for a couple of days till my four-year-old daughter brought me back to earth with her usual questions and demands ("Amma, can I have twenty candies?"). Now, all of a sudden, I am being recognized as a 'food writer' and several magazines want me to write for them. Quite a change from the time I used to seek magazines out, pitch them stories, and receive rejections.

The award must have come to you against stiff competition. How was the experience?
I didn't even know I was in the running. The various magazines-- Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Saveur, etc.-- send in the entries themselves. One evening, Gourmet magazine called me up and told me that I was short-listed for the award. They invited my husband, Narayan, and me for the gala awards dinner, which was held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York. There were about 400 people in attendance.

Right at the beginning, the President of the James Beard Foundation told the audience that they had received 450 nominations. The nominations were sent to a panel of 50 judges all across the United States. All identification marks such as author byline, name of magazine, photos, etc., were removed from the entries. Each entry was denoted only by the author's social security number. After the judges made up their scorecards for all the entries, Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, tallied the results and presented them to the James Beard Foundation in sealed envelopes. In her opening remarks, the President of the Foundation told the audience, "Even I don't know who the winners are. In fact, nobody in this room knows who the winners are till the envelopes are opened," which made it all the more suspenseful.

Tell us more about the award.
The James Beard awards are considered quite prestigious in the food-writing world. There are several categories-- magazine feature with recipes, magazine feature without recipes, newspaper feature with recipes, without recipes, investigative report about food, restaurant review. My award, "The M.F.K Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing" was the last award of the evening. Everybody told me that the reason my award was the last one was because it was the most prestigious of the James Beard awards, which was all very nice, except I was tense the whole evening.

They had organized it very well. We had a sit-down five-course meal-- the appetizer, the salad, the fish course, the meat course, desserts, petit fours, coffee and tea. With every course, they had special wines, champagne, dessert wines, and liqueurs. Since my husband and I are vegetarians, they gave us mashed potatoes and mushroom soup. Not that I could taste any of the food because of the suspense. They gave three awards between courses, so that the audience didn't have to stay hungry till all the awards were given. The magazine feature writing awards were presented first, then the newspaper feature writing awards, and so on. They presented my award after coffee and tea.

What are your comments on the attitude of the westerner to cooking?
I think the big difference is that Americans "fix" food and we "prepare" food. American home cooking is all about convenience. When I go to my local market, Fairway, on Friday nights, I see Americans buying a couple of artichokes, some tomatoes, a salad dressing, some chicken. They chop up the vegetables, grill the chicken and they are done with dinner. Indian cooking is more involved. Even with a simple dish like beans poriyal, the beans have to be of a certain width, so you can't just toss them in the food processor for cutting. You have to do it by hand. In the year 2000, over New Year's, I had about 23 people from my in-laws' side, who gathered in our Manhattan apartment to celebrate New Year. They are a fairly traditional family and so ordering in from a restaurant was not an option. The main thing I remember about those few days that we all spent together was, all the women-folk congregating in the kitchen and cooking. It was a lot of fun but a lot of work. Now an American woman would have simply bought frozen vegetables, and microwave-able dinners, or ordered in for the week.

American restaurant cooking on the other hand is very involved since they base it on elaborate French cooking techniques with white sauces, cream sauces, poaching, roasting, etc. Nowadays, fusion cooking is a big deal in America where they use Eastern spices from India, China, Thailand, with Western cooking techniques. One of New York's star chefs, Jean-Georges (pronounced John George) has his restaurant near my apartment, and Indian and Thai spices heavily influence his food. For instance, he will use tamarind on a roast chicken.

What are the general taste preferences of Americans?
My feeling is that interior America may not be as receptive to ethnic food, but Americans in big cities are very aware of world cuisine because there are so many ethnic restaurants here. This is particularly true of the East and West coasts-- New York, California, where you have a profusion of Mexican, Italian, Indian, Thai, Chinese, and European restaurants. My husband and I used to eat out a lot. We've tried every kind of cuisine there is and have certain favorites in each. We like Italian pesto sauce for instance, Mexican salsa and guacamole, vegetarian sushi rolls, Ethiopian Injera bread which is like a giant chapathi, and many types of pizzas. But we cannot last a week without Indian food, or in my case, narthangai with sambharam (buttermilk), which is a Palghat favorite.

How are the Indian restaurants in America?
They are mostly North Indian restaurants with heavy sauces and rich Mughlai spices. In large cities like New York, we have a few South Indian restaurants. The problem is that you can't get simple dishes in any of these places. For instance, a simple cabbage curry with ginger, green chillies, and perhaps, some coconut. No restaurant serves that in America. The sad thing is that Americans think that Indian food is over-spiced because of the food in Indian restaurants. A common complaint among my American friends is that in Indian food (at restaurants), you can hardly taste the vegetable or the meat because the spices overwhelm everything. That is simply not true. My mother makes exceptionally tasty food with just one or two spices (salt, turmeric, and asafoetida, at the most). My husband and I prefer simple foods nowadays-- you know, the kind of food that we make at home.

This is quite different for me because a few years ago, I was the opposite. I used to love malai koftas, paneer bhujias, bhatura channa. I still eat them, but only occasionally. My father says that we all return to the food of our childhood as we grow older, and it certainly is true in my case. Nowadays, I want the food that my mother makes at home, and can't get that in Indian restaurants.

What about restaurants in Chennai? After all, you grew up here.
Gosh, there are so many restaurants in Chennai that I love. My brother studied at Vidya Mandir in Luz and of course, Shanti Vihar was a big favorite of ours (this was 20 years ago, and I don't know how it is now). Also in Luz, there used to be this tiny restaurant called "Bombay Halwa House" or something, near Vidya Mandir, opposite Mysore Silks. They served a chapathi and a bhaji, which was hot and delicious. This was just a hole-in-the-wall, as they say, with no air-conditioning. In fact, I don't know if I could eat there now. I love the dosas and idlis at Saravana Bhavan and Woodlands. I've eaten at Dakshin, and the other five-star restaurants but don't particularly care for them anymore. They remind me of the restaurants I eat at in America. What I look for now when I come to Chennai is either home-cooked food, or old-style restaurants where the waiter recites the menu, and the coffee is served in stainless steel tumblers. R.K. Narayan has written about the comfort of listening to a waiter reciting the menu while you make up your mind. Can't remember which book, but he talked about asking the waiter to recite it again, just so you can decide between the idli and the dosa. It seems so civilized.

Nowadays, I depend on friends to take me to the hot eating-places in Chennai. I've never eaten at Rayar's and regret it. A restaurant that just serves idlis from 5.30 to 10.30 a.m. is a great concept. In fact, my editors here want me to write about it, but I don't know if it still exists. As a food writer, I look for unusual restaurants. Unusual from the western point of view, which rules out all the five-star restaurants with their menus, cutlery, and western style table arrangements. For Gourmet, I am writing about Grand Sweets, and Pondy Bazaar. For another magazine, about Ambika Appalam. It would be great if I can find a restaurant where they serve on banana leaves in a wedding-feast style but also hygienic food since I would want American readers to feel comfortable eating there. Indian ambience with American hygiene

You grew up in Madras. Can you tell us a little about your childhood, and your views of the city?
Madras is home to me. Always will be. I grew up in a fairly traditional, middle class family. You know, suprabhatam in the morning, idlis for breakfast, Carnatic music classes after school, boys playing cricket at our street corner, mallipoo, the occasional cutcheri or eating out, guests visiting constantly. I know that mine is not a unique experience. In fact, in Indranagar, where I grew up (and I consider it paradise), many of my neighbors continue this lifestyle. There are still boys playing cricket outside Hindu High School, there are still girls in churidars flitting from home to home, my Mom still makes idlis in the morning.

Unlike my husband who grew up all over India, Madras is the only home I know. It is the city that I love best. What's great about it is that change comes slowly to Madras. While you have the nightclubs and the pizza parlors (which didn't exist when I was growing up), you also have the temples, and the mamis bargaining with vegetable vendors, the crowds at Pondy Bazaar in T. Nagar. My friends tell me that the Madras I grew up with is vanishing, that the sari is vanishing, that people eat pizzas instead of dosas, that Carnatic music is dying, that college students nowadays are more westernized than ever. I don't know, but if that were true, it would be a sad thing indeed.

Does living in the US inhibit your writing in any way?
I am sure it does because you have to explain many things to an American audience. Since I write about India, I have to explain what a pottu/bindi is, what our spices are, and our customs. The other part of the issue is the American audience itself. The other day, and you are not going to believe this, a kid in my daughter's preschool was sobbing away for no reason. Everybody was distraught, and all of us mothers went up to Sarah and tried to find out what the matter was. It seems that Sarah's parents were divorcing because her mother had just discovered that she was a lesbian and had moved in with her female friend. We didn't know what to say to the child.

While I was a young teenager in Madras, I used to rant and rave about how conservative our society was, and how traditional my parents were. But here it is the other extreme. There are no rules. And I am not sure if that's a good thing, especially for young children.

How has the US perception of India and Indians changed in recent years?
Indians have long been perceived as one of the most successful ethnic groups in America. Last week, I went to a charity benefit dinner that was organized by the American India Foundation. Its leaders are Rajat Gupta, head of McKinsey, and Victor Menezes, head of Citigroup, both of whom spoke about raising millions of dollars from American corporations for India. As you know, they got Clinton to visit India. Indians now have the economic and political power to involve political players like Clinton, and mobilize opinion and funds for India.

Do you stress the importance of nutrition and health in your food writing?
Vegetarian food is considered nutritious here, and as a result, the food that I write about is automatically labeled as nutritious. Several doctors have told me that the South Indian diet with our rice and paruppu is extremely nutritious.

Any thoughts to round off the interview? What are your future plans?
Random House has signed me up to write a book of food-essays, so I'll be working on that, in between freelancing for magazines. My parents may visit us in November so I am looking forward to that. I really miss Madras, so why don't you bottle up some filter coffee and jasmine flowers and send it to me?

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