Last Christmas - this Christmas

You can have just so much of a good thing: "Jingle Bells", "Away in a Manger",  "The Twelve Days of Christmas". So I switched to the BBC Asian network. What did I find but Tav Bains who claims to have recorded the first Indian Christmas song. Really?

Anyway you can't have too many of my mince pies.  Mmm ........ yummy!

Last Christmas I did a buy and try. I bought from ASDA, Bettys and our local baker


This Christmas I did a make and bake with an all butter, ground almond and cinnamon pastry, a filling of brandy and ginger spice mincemeat.


Brandy is my favourite liqueur.

Ginger is my favourite spice


According to Wikipedia mince pies have been around since the 13th century.  Apparently Oliver Cromwell and his less than merry men tried to ban them. Why are they called mince pies when there is no meat in them? Not everyone knows that, incidentally, because one of my guests once asked "A Halal version for me, please?" I told him that he had missed the boat. Originally mince pies did have real mince meat and the spices had to be there to preserve or more likely mask the rancid meat. Nowadays we have fridges so we can enjoy the spices for themselves.


Why spice at Christmas? it's because its expensive, scented and special for this time of year. 

Donkeys Deckchairs and Dinner

The English – for which purpose I mean those of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic heritage - say that they love animals yet they eat them.  Many if not most of us who hail from Gujarat are vegetarian but yet we do not make a fuss about animals. Very few of us keep pets and we certainly don’t kiss or cuddle them or speak to them in baby talk.  The bond between man and beast was a mystery to me until I took up riding and communicated with a horse for the first time.

This particular cultural gulf between my community and our English fellow Bradfordian s was brought home to me when I was coming home from my first visit to my senior school.  The school was some distance from home and the journey involved a change of busses and a walk through a park.  It was a particularly hot day and I set off with another girl from my neighbourhood.  Somehow we got lost and we wandered through a predominately white estate.  

The neighbourhood seemed quite prosperous because the houses were red-brick semis so it seemed to me at the time  rather than the Yorkshire stone terraced houses where my family lived.   A family was sitting on striped deckchairs in the garden picnicking on sandwiches and beer.  I had never seen anybody behave like this in my life and I was fascinated.  I suppose I must have been staring at them because one of the shouted: “What are you looking at, you dirty Paki?”   At that very moment a donkey emerged from the front door and the fellow who shouted at me began stroking and feeding the animal with the same hand whilst he was gnawing on his butty.  May be the donkey may have liked my Carrot Sambora side dish too.

Ingredients serves 4

750g/1lb 10oz carrots – julienne
1⁄2 tsp black mustard seeds
2 tbsp ground nut oil
4 cm piece of fresh ginger mashed
1 medium green rocket chilli chopped
1⁄4 tsp salt to taste
1⁄2 tsp ground coriander seeds
1⁄2 tsp ground cumin seeds
1⁄4 tsp turmeric
1⁄4 tsp garamasala Juice of
1⁄2 a lemon
2 tbsp fresh chopped chives
1 tbsp fresh coriander

Preparation

Squeeze the fresh lemon juice and julienne the carrots.

Method

1. Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat.
2. Add the mustard seeds and when the popping has stopped, add the carrots, ginger, green chilli, coriander, cumin, turmeric and salt to taste.
3. Stir-fry quickly for 2-3 mins or until the carrots begin to soften; remove from heat.
4. Squeeze over some lemon juice and sprinkle over the garamasala, chopped chives and fresh coriander and serve.

Now I have to explain that to call someone a donkey is a particular insult in Gujarati.  It is at least as bad as calling a woman a cow in English and possibly worse.   When I was a little girl I was prevailed to take a ride on a donkey on the beach at Scarborough. It was supposed to be a pleasure but I was horrified not because I was afraid of the height or being bitten but because I was repelled by the animal itself.  I clung to the leather for fear of being defiled by its fur. 


My companion wanted us to make ourselves scarce but I was still transfixed.   I said to her in Guajarati: “They don’t seem to know what ‘dirty’ means.”    That was my first experience of racism.

Grub and Górecki

On Friday 25 November 2011 the Warsaw Philharmonic performed at St George’s Hall in Bradford and I was in the audience.

St. George’s Hall is an intimate auditorium and I was in the second row - close enough to make eye contact with the conductor, leader of the orchestra and the outstanding young violinist Kuba Jacowicz. It was a wonderful programme – Brahms, Mendelssohn, Górecki and Beethoven’s Fifth.

Beethoven’s Fifth was one of my first albums.  I remember walking up the cobbled back streets clutching it under my arm.   It seemed as delicate as the papddoms we used to make once a year.   The kids on the street were gob smacked.   They could not understand how I could squander my pennies on such a luxury.   And although they didn’t know it they had a point because we didn’t have a record player until several years later. 

But it was worth it to me.   I had first heard the music at our school assembly and remember the thrill as I listened to it.   We had a different piece of music every morning and had to guess the composer.    

After the concert was over, we were rewarded with an encore.   The artists could see how much we enjoyed ourselves for we clapped and clapped as though we were pounding spices for a masala.

When I was younger I visited three Poland several times including a more recent visit and have a lot of friends there.  I introduced them to curry and cooked for a large group who loved the spicing and they introduced me to some of their delicacies.  Here is one of my favourites Gołąbki - Golumpki steamed cabbage leaves separated by dunking the whole cabbage into hot water for a few mins and carefully peeling off each layer, these  cabbage leaves are then filled with mince pork or beef , onions, mushrooms, rice or barley,herbs and spices if desired and rolled up into parcels, the parcels are then baked in the oven with a tomato sauce topping.

Most people who are not from Bradford think that we only know about curry but we have had a very substantial Polish community in our city for many years.  The Bradford Polish Club will celebrate its 50^th anniversary very soon. 

There are of course lots of other communities in our City - Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Chinese, Irish, Jews and of course folk from the Indian Subcontinent.   Cultural diversity is not new to Bradford. Our city may have been even more diverse in the 19^th century when the textile industry was booming.   For example, there must have been a large German community because a neighbourhood just a short distance from St George’s Hall is still known as Little Germany.  

In this blog I shall celebrate the food of some of those communities as well as that of my own Gujarati heritage. 

Tale of two kitchens

Most days, inspiration for cooking comes to me from my travels but I also cherish memories of the food that comforted me when I was a child.

I remember trying to watch and learn in what must have been one of the world’s smallest kitchens at my terrace home in Bradford.  The capacity of the kitchen  was one and a half adults and I was the half.  Into this space were crammed pots, pans and the usual utensils as well as more exotic items as such as the lowyou (a heavy cast iron deep frying dish) tawars and strong metal or stoneware dishes for grinding masala

Everything was stacked, stored and arranged neatly around a sink and cooker that doubled as a work surface.  Finding one’s way around this kitchen was comparable to solving a Rubik cube or playing chess.

I used to watch my mum conjure up the family feast.  

Sometimes she would pound ingredients into a paste with her full body weight until she judged the texture to be just right.  How she managed to crouch in that tiny kitchen!   Her agility was a wonder to behold.   I had to recoil to make way for her.   

Other times I would stand on the tips of my toes marvelling at combinations of spices, fresh lentils, masala and funny looking vegetables including a firm purple khun that simply amazed me. I tried to make khun puri at the age of 5 and wondered why it did not taste like purple violets sweets.  

Although my mum, must have been constantly on the watch for and anything likely to fall on me she allowed me to see the battered flat round Khun puris frying.

These days I am bigger and so is my kitchen.   Nevertheless, my kitchen is still orchestrated and brought alive with the same discipline, passion and creativity that brought my first kitchen senses alive. The only difference is that it is now my mood that governs my menu.   Tonight fish is shouting out to me with a spicy tamarind and garlic marinate served with some zesty lime bananas and baby rotis.   Sounds just the ticket…..