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Indiana Nirvana
I like to work on my food columns early in the morning, long before my taste buds and my stomach (and most people for that matter) are fully awake. Usually this arrangement works just fine, giving me an oasis of calm and quiet for writing, but this morning, as I reread Santosh Jain's new Indian cookbook, Vegetarian Nirvana: A Passage to North Indian Cuisine, my mouth is watering and my midregion is growling loudly and insistently. My dogs think we are being invaded by alien canines, but it is only my appetite, roused by dreams of frying spices, fragrant curries, and pungent pickles. I've been a fan of Santosh Jain's Indian cooking for many years. She was once an organizer and cook for the Indic Society dinners that raised money for a chair in India Studies at I.U., and I have taken many cooking classes from her. My voice was one of many that begged, "Santosh, why don't you open a restaurant?" and "Santosh, please write a cookbook." I don't think the restaurant is ever likely to happen (she's afraid it would take all the fun out of cooking) but the cookbook is here at long last. Vegetarian Nirvana is a real treasure. Santosh supplies the kind of kitchen lessons you would get if you were learning to cook the old fashioned way, the way she learned to cook, at her mother's knee. How to make delicious dishes, yes, but also how to compose a menu, how to improvise, how to organize your time. The recipes are all of Santosh's devising — either classics she formulated for an American kitchen, or personal innovations that she has perfected over the years — and they are arranged into menus to take the guesswork out of creating a meal balanced as to nutrition, flavor, texture, and difficulty of preparation. I've watched Santosh cook many times, always surrounded by a crowd of avid students who had as many questions to ask her as I did, limiting my air time. To write this column I needed to interview her in more depth, but an interview about food without food seemed like a wasted opportunity. It would be great, I hinted strongly, to have a cooking lesson all to myself, where I could pick her brain on Indian cooking to my heart's content. She bit, bless her, inviting me over to her kitchen for a private cooking lesson, with our husbands to join us for dinner afterward. Oh bliss, oh joy, oh fun afternoon! I do love this job of writing about food! Santosh greeted me with a hug, wearing a drop dead gorgeous purple and gold silk sari. With her silver hair capping her head, her eyes crinkled and smiling, her gentle Indian accent narrating every step she takes in the kitchen, she is a powerful force behind the stove. She knows her subject cold, and speaks with iron confidence about what she is doing. On this evening we (and I use the word "we" loosely) cooked Dhuli Moong Dal (a soupy dish of yellow lentils, slow simmered with spices and finished with a quick fry of cumin seed, onion, tomato, garam masala – an Indian spice mixture – and paprika) and Shahi Baingan, a superb dish of fried eggplant cooked with onion, spices and yogurt. She finished up by making chapatis — whole wheat bread dough rolled flat and cooked on a griddle for a few minutes, and then set on a rack over a hot burner where it puffs up like a blowfish (it settles down again a minute later and looks kind of like a thin loaf of pita but so light and chewy!) This alone would be a terrific meal — most nights Santosh's dinners consist of a dal and a vegetable or two with chapatis and rice. But as my husband arrives and hers emerges from his study, she is producing new dishes and turning a great everyday meal into a feast. She adds samosas (fragrant vegetable turnovers) with tamarind and cilantro chutney to start, followed by spicy mushrooms and broccoli, a luscious panir dish (an Indian cheese that can be easily made in the home kitchen), dumplings made from gram flour in raita (spiced yogurt) and gulab jamun — panir based dumplings soaked in syrup — for dessert. It is heavenly — the Shahi Baingan is the best Indian eggplant dish I have ever eaten, bar none—and we are so full we can hardly move by the time we are sipping tea. We may not be able to move, but we can talk. Over dinner Santosh and Chaman Jain tell us about the food tradition they share. Both are members of the Jain religion and do not eat any meat (thus her vegetarian cookbook.) Coming to Bloomington with small children in the 1970s presented a real challenge. Grocery stores did not carry exotic ingredients and much of Santosh's cooking was improvisation. Other families might have given into the temptation to Americanize their diet, but for Santosh, cooking Indian food was an essential part of the way she wanted to raise her children. "When you learn to cook, you learn your culture," she said. It is the way your children learn about their religion, about their parents' childhood stories. So central is food to her family that her husband, daughter, son, and niece all helped her put her cookbook together. A crucial question for any cookbook is this: Can regular people cook this food? We can. Santosh, in person and in her book, has that most elusive of teaching skills, an intuition about what her students already know and what she needs to tell them, not wasting time on unnecessary instructions but not leaving us floundering or wondering what she is talking about. When I am cooking Indian food in my own kitchen, it is always with her voice in my ear, and invariably what I am cooking comes out just the way it is supposed to. I'd like to think that it is because I am such an excellent student, but I know where the credit really lies. Santosh Jain's book, Vegetarian Nirvana: A Passage to North Indian Cuisine, is available at local bookstores, through amazon.com, and through 1stbooks.com. She will be teaching a class on Indian cooking at the Bloomington Cooking School on January 29th. Call 333-7100 for reservations. If the class fills up, a second one may be offered. Taste your way down memory lane—contact Christine Barbour with your
favorite restaurants from Bloomington's past at barbour@heraldt.com.
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