Busybee Speak

 

Behram Contractor a.k.a Busybee was the first food writer of the country and everybody agrees nobody could or can match up with his style of writing. His daily column ‘Round and About’ reigned supreme for 36 years until this great writer passed away on April 9, 2001. Here are some of his classic food quotes

As a child, I was fed sheep’s liver, raw. This was on medical advice. I had no objection to that. I would eat it even today. I was also medically advised to drink donkey’s milk, a female donkey, naturally. This I refused. A donkey used to come to our colony just for that purpose. The animal's presence was imperative because you had to drink it the instant it was milked. Otherwise, ants germinated in it.

 

Among all the local junk food, the one I like best is the onion bhajia. It is essentially a traveller’s food, also a drinker’s food, though it goes very well with afternoon tea. The onion strips are deep-fried dark, along with the bhajia dough, the dough tightly clinging to them, very crisp on the outside. When you bite into them, you get the onions in the mouth, but minus their offensive odour.

 

I am also not a great fancier of French food. I like their posh foods, caviar and goose liver and escargot, and their basic soups, but not the rest of the food. I think it is grossly overrated, and certainly, I know I am wrong when I think so. After all, I cannot be right and the rest of the world wrong. I like German food, though. Simple foods, such as meats and mashed potatoes and black bread. And their frankfurters and Nuremberg sausages. And I like pig’s knuckles, large pig knuckles with all the fat on it, with horse radish and Munich beer. My one last desire in life is to be in Munich, during a beer festival.

 

I also have this habit of dipping everything in my tea. Not just bread and butter, which most people do, but cutlets, kebabs, chicken pattice, mutton samosas, onion bhajias, everything. My food tastes better that way. More importantly, my tea tastes better after all the dunking it has got, it acquires the flavour of all the food that has passed through it, particularly patrel, or patra.

 

When I was working in the kitchen of a hotel in London, I was pining for some rice and dal. So I devised what I still think was an ingenious method. I would take a rice pudding from the steamer, empty it in a plate, then pour mulligatawny soup on it and eat, rice and rasam. Sometimes, there would be a lentil soup, then my cup of joy would overflow. No doubt, the rice was sweet, but the mulligatawny balanced it.

 

Few pleasures in life match drinking in the afternoon. Only if you can afford it, should you indulge in it. More than the food and drinks, it is the ambience of drinking, dining and gossiping in a bar on a working day in the middle of a working week. There is some arrogance in this, not being among the workers of the world for 90 minutes. To sit back and relax, and not think of the work piling up on the desk.

 

For a person who has been drinking all his life, both heavy and indiscriminately, I am singularly uninformed about liquor. About the only difference I can tell is between Indian whisky and scotch. This is easy. They are like diesel and unleaded petrol. You drink Indian whisky, even the most expensive label, and it races down the throat and into the arteries like a fire engine. On the tongue, it is rough and coarse, in the stomach, it sits uneasily. The next morning, there is a hangover and the mouth tastes like, as the man said, the bottom of a parrot cage.

 

Take it from a retired expert: most country liquor tastes and smells foul, of cockroaches, rats, gutter water, rubber football bladders and the spray from the old Flit pump. In fact, the most pleasant, or least unpleasant, among all the tastes and smells, is the Flit spray.

 

The best food in the world, I think, is available in Hong Kong. Also, some of the most exotic. I had the webs in the duck’s feet – the leathery skin that keeps the duck’s toes together. They were served fried, with very thin pancakes, or chappatis. I was instructed how to eat it. I placed a slice of the web skin on the chappati, then put a tender spring onion alongside it, a little sweet sauce, made from dates, then I rolled it all in the chappati and ate it. Occasionally, I could crunch a soft bone in the skin. The best part was I did not have to eat the roll with chopsticks and make a fool of myself.

 

In boarding school, everything was organised and orderly, including food. For instance, for breakfast, on alternate days, we used to have two slices of bread, buttered and un-buttered. Buttered on one day, un-buttered the next day. There was continuous trading in food among the boys, and the rates were more or less standard. A boy could trade an un-buttered slice of bread for a banana, or the rim of a buttered slice for the same banana.

 

English pubs have pub grub: Steak and Kidney Pudding, Mulberry Pie, Ploughman’s Lunch, a slice of roast beef with Yorkshire Pudding, Toad in the Hole, Quiche Lorraine. Bombay pubs have chicken tikka and aloo tikki, which they once used to serve free at the bars at Natraj and West End Hotels, to attract customers to the bars.

 

Once, at the food festival organised by the South African Airways, I had ostrich and crocodile meat at one go. So did half of the non-vegetarian invitees. There is a distinction; there are people who are vegetarians, who will not touch any meat, then there are non-vegetarians who will eat only conventional meat; finally, the non-vegetarians who will eat most any meat.

 

The best Parsi breakfasts I have had have been in modest Parsi-owned hotels outside Bombay. At Il Palazzo and Dina in Panchgani – Mahabaleshwar, and Oliaji’s in Devka. Here, besides the eggs and the porridge and Mala’s jam and the rest, they serve a meat dish – a wet Parsi kheema with new potatoes, or kidney, liver, or best of all, a gently cooked brain, made in its own juices, with chopped tomatoes and kothmir. At Oliaji’s on the beach, there is an addition: fresh Bombay Ducks and sweet morning toddy.

 

For a great tea-drinking country, England makes only passable tea. In Europe, you can forget tea, and America makes such outstanding coffee that it would be stupid to drink tea. The Arabs drink tea in tiny tulip glasses, with two cubes of sugar and no milk. It is lovely out there, but the same tea you try to make here at home, it comes out rough and raw.

 

Taj was the first to start a buffet lunch. It cost Rs. 5 or Rs. 7, I forget the exact amount, but the idea of serving yourself and eating as much as you liked was quite interesting. Go hungry, I used to be advised, then eat as much as you can, paisa vasool. Of course, I never did go to the Taj buffet, Rs. 5 and Rs. 7 out of a monthly pocket allowance of Rs. 10 was a lot of money.

 

On a Sunday, we had dal-paya for breakfast. A friend brought it early in the morning in a tiffin-carrier from the famous Baara Handi in the Minara Masjid lane, off Mohammad Ali Road. We ate it with the lamba pav, available in the bakery in the same lane. The dal was sticky with the melted jellies of the paya, we dipped the crusty fermented lamba pav in it, then ate it. The bones almost melted in the mouth, the marrow coming out in easy bursts. And we washed it all down with a large gulp of strong Hasmukh tea made with condensed milk.

 

Khichri-saas. The rice yellow, the saas white, the pomfret gently poached. The right blend of sweet and sour, with the tiniest of baby tomatoes floating in the saas. When it comes to sweet and sour, the Parsis are at least two classes and 15 lessons ahead of the Canton Chinese. Ah, superb.

 

On the occasion of the Parsi New Year, some thoughts on the Parsi dhansak. What is dhansak? It is rice and masala dal, the meat cooked in the dal. And the meat is always mutton, large pieces of it, with the bone, and the marrow in the bone. It is never chicken, Chicken Dhansak is a sacrilege.

 

Among my favourite foods is paneer. Not the Punjabi paneer, which is rolled in masalas and fried and eaten in pakodas (made famous by Kwality, three decades ago) or with green peas. It is the Parsi paneer, squeezed out of milk and water, and of a texture so smooth and velvety that even the Swiss cannot match it.

 

 

 

20 One of the pleasures of going to a Parsi wedding is having the old Parsi aerated waters by “aapro Rogers and aapro Duke.” My favourite is the raspberry. It has a bright, cheerful red colour, lighter than Campari, more sparkling than red wines, and it actually tastes of raspberries. I also like Pick-Me-Up, both for its name and the taste of the drink. I think the name is a forerunner of such other action names as Do It, Thums Up and yes, Rimzim.

 

For some 10 to 15 years of my life, I had lived on country liquor. For several years, I used to patronise a place in Pasta Lane. It was considered a safe place to drink because police also drank there. The liquor was good because it was distilled from all the rotting vegetables in the Colaba Bazaar. In the monsoon, it was better, because the vegetables rotted more.

 

Outside, it is Ovaltine weather. Why Ovaltine? It sounds appropriate, though I dislike Ovaltine intensely. It is a childhood horror, when I was forced to drink Ovaltine, with bits of cream floating in it, and sticking to the sides. That was the worst part, the cream. I would try and carefully remove it, with my thumb and index finger, before swallowing the muddy liquid. Or emptying the cup in the basin, if nobody was looking.

 

In Baltimore, I used to go every morning to the Wet Oyster Bar at the Lexington Market. The whole place was wet. I stood at the bar as a man in a leather apron picked up large shells, prised them open with a hatchet, put them in a plate and slid them to me, along with lime and Tabasco, plus a plastic cup of Budweiser beer. I alternated between oysters and clams, both salty with the sea water that had seeped into the shells, and occasionally I drank clam juice.

 

I have had goat’s eyes, or one eye, in Baghdad, jugged hare in Stuttgart and London (the meat is very tough), pig’s knuckles with sharp horse radish in Nuremberg. Eyes of pomfret, I have been eating since childhood. Unless I am eating with knife-fork and do not want to soil my hands, I always choose the pomfret’s head, and eat the eyes last.

 

These last few days, I have been doing a lot of fusion eating. Punjabi paneer fry with Russian caviar, Gujarati dhoklas with French pâté de foie gras, egg bhurjis with a scattering of Mediterranean olives inside, etc. I have pretended to like all this, since I do not want to upset the chefs, but I really don’t. I like to have one taste in my mouth at a time, and preferably for an entire meal, and not a medley of tastes which confuse the palate and the mind.