Searching for Amritsar's Soul in a Pan of Hot Oil

While Da Vinci might argue that in simplicity lies the ultimate sophistication, I a mere, humble nobody choose to disagree. There is something perfectly vulgar in simple things. And this rough, un-pretty edge to simple things is what makes them so earthy and wholesome.

If Fish Amritsari was a girl, she would be a simple, earthy and wholesome country lass doing an item number!

Pile the virulent orange pieces of freshly fried fish high on a stainless steel thali, slap some raw onions and lemon quarters on the side, pour a few (large) shots of good ol' Old Monk rum into glass tumblers and serve it on a cold winter night around a raging bonfire...and there will be merriment, songs and perhaps an occasional brawl.
Fish Amritsari belongs to a world populated by weather-beaten faces, dusty cowboy boots/blue-and-white Bata Hawai  chappals, unshaven faces, dirt beneath the fingernails, large trucks with neon signs, camp cots and dusty highways. Take it out of this world, dress it up with vinaigrette reductions and vegetable art, pair it with a vintage French wine, serve it in expensive china, dismember it with your carefully placed fish knife and fork and you would have just destroyed the soul of Fish Amritsari, which lies in street stalls in crowded markets that fumigate your olfactory canals with their charred meat smells. It is perhaps the name "Amritsari" which gives the dish its charm rather than the actual bland looking white meat tacked on to it. It truly is the gloriously evocative name which conjures up old markets, the spires of the Golden Temple and centuries of history with a mere utterance.

My experiences with the dish itself have been wildly disparate. On the one hand Fish Amritsari is the stuff of my childhood memories. Dinners to the Army Officer's Institute located inside the impressive Fort William in Calcutta, were a weekly tradition. This grand British citadel used to be the pivot of the empire's defences at some point in history, however as a frivolous youngling oblivious to even the most obvious historicity of things, to me it was a mere cluster of walls, tunnels and buildings. The only highlight was the nice family club (the aforementioned Army Officer's Institute or AOI) which was a space for weekly entertainment, movies, May Queen balls, New Year parties and bingo nights. The point of the flashback is the connection with Fish Amritsari - a regular feature on the weekly dinner menu which maintained its spot on our preferred menu with each changing season due to my particular affinity for the dish. As a hybrid Bengali-Punjabi child who hated all the maach and maccher jhol she was fed every day (and today misses dearly), this orange fried fish preparation was something from another planet. Having none of the characteristics of the fish she knew, this dish was her own way of rebelling...by loving a fish dish that was disrespectful and considered a non fish dish according to every Bengali piscine norm because you couldn't taste the damn fish inside the orange Amritsari skin.
The second experience with Fish Amritsari was in the Deluxe Suite of Best Western Merrion Hotel, Amritsar where the weekend romantic/cultural getaway with the husband had transformed into a medical nightmare with the selfsame husband contracting dengue upon arrival. As I sat taking in the city skyline through the large picture windows of our incredibly plush room (the only bit of Amritsar I would see on this trip), I gnawed my way through a gigantic plate full of Fish Amritsari, I wondered at the popularity of this dish. The fish gleamed white inside its slightly soggy orange case which had separated from its body as it cooled. I tried to like it as much as I tried to be a good nursemaid and not have selfish thoughts about a ruined holiday...and in both cases I half succeeded...and half didn't.
This is one of my first posts where I will put up a recipe. I take no credit for it. It is in fact the much feted celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor's recipe. And like all his recipes, it is darned simple (am beginning to like the connotations of the word) and gives you a "no frills" dish swimming in authenticity and flavour.
Also I am putting up this recipe as I have strangely mixed feelings about this dish. I am not convinced it is a winner. I am not convinced it is a loser. In the midst of a crisis of indecision, I am hoping this recipe will be like a beacon of light drawing a lost sailor home or like a team mascot convincing me to believe in my losing home team.

Sanjeev Kapoor's Recipe for Fish Amritsari

Preparation Time: 15 mins
Cooking Time: 10 mins
Serves 4

Ingredients:
King Fish/Sole/Singhara fillets cut into fingers - 600 gms
Red Chilli Powder - 1 Tbs
Salt to taste
Carom Seeds (Ajwain) - 1 Tsp
Ginger Paste - 2 Tbsp
Garlic Paste - 2 Tbsp
Lemon juice - 1 Tbsp
Gram Flour - 1 cup
Oil to deep fry
Egg - 1
Chaat Masala - 1 Tsp
Lemon wedges - 2

Method:
Take the fish fingers in a bowl. Add red chilli powder, salt, carom seeds, ginger paste, garlic paste, lemon juice, gram flour and mix well. Set aside for a bit. Heat sufficient oil in a kadhai. Break an egg into the fish mixture and mix. Put the fingers, a few at a time, into the hot oil and deep fry till done. Drain and place on an absorbent paper. Serve hot sprinkled with chaat masala and lemon wedges.

The Accompanying Image for Sanjeev Kapoor's Fish Amritsari

Dear reader while you go through it, do take a minute to deliberate why fish in all its multicolored states and deboned avatars is still by and large an alien creature in the land of five rivers. The average Punjabi  makes fillets out of the most characterless fish, bludgeons any inherent flavour with spices and food colour into a kind of rubbery acquiescence and then usually deep fries them till even a seasoned gourmand wouldn't be able to distinguish between a piece of  wild, fresh river sole or a clump off the bottom of your shoe's sole.

I think it is quite apt to end with this piece I read in Punjab Newsline, an Internet news portal called the "Secret of Amritsari Fish". Its weird humour and surreal implications had me going from the word "fish". And I quote...

"The best fish for the dish are the verities caught from the Harike Pattan and Beas rivers."

So dear reader if you do land up on the strange shores where verities are fished out of a lake, fried and served to you with a sprinkling of good humour, you will know you have arrived in Amritsar...

Box of Rain

Raj Kapoor and Nargis in an iconic still from the film Shree 420 (1955)

"Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain."

- Billie Holiday

 

When I was younger, I saw life around me in its myriad hues. I saw it through a rose-tinted eyeglass I had crafted carefully through the years of my youth. And I believed in the romance of the rain. 

Calcutta is a city of bespoke romance. An oft-repeated event is customized to the individual skin. Like walking in the rain.

This fading, gloriously old-fashioned city is frozen in time. Fairy dust spewed by a mischievous imp floats around on some rare, wet, summer nights brewing trouble, drawing people together and spreading love. 

On such nights with a last magical stroke of the clock, time stops. Somewhere in the city, a woman big with child rests her tired muscles on a hard metal bed in between pregnant contractions. Her waters break in a frenzied gush. Almost in unison, the sky which has been still, breathless and silent till now, erupts in thunder, lightening and rain. The rains, they come. The lovers, they rejoice. They jostle for space under a single, slightly bent umbrella. their shoulders graze each other lightly, occasionally. It sends twin frissons of an awkward desire through two shy young lovers. They move away in embarrassment, only to be cajoled back into the space under the umbrella by the persistent pressure of Lady Rain, Patron Saint of Romance. 

 

An image from the newspaper of the wet streets of Delhi

Now I am older. I wear the bottoms of my trouser rolled. My days lie enveloped in a grey shroud. My deep slumber is interrupted by the ceaseless patter on candy striped window awnings. I wake up to a world pooled with slush, mildewed bread and green life crawling up my once-white walls.
I walk through flooded stretches of crater-sized potholes, markers of streets that once were. I collide with abandoned cows, cars with "Gujjar Boys" emblazoned on the back glass, bits of flotsam, bits of jetsam. I come home empathizing with drowned crows and bedraggled cats. I bring with me a trail of slime.
Romance just doesn't cut it anymore. My head crawls with hypochondriac nightmares. I can almost feel clumps of mould sprouting out from under my chin.
I crave for comfort food. I crave my mother's monsoon meals that cure everything from a case of blues to a cloudy cold. I crave the smells emanating from her magical kitchen that pierce through the grey blanket with the brilliance of a drop of sunshine trapped  in a multi-faceted crystal.
Every evening, I come back home and collapse on a rubber mat in a sodden tangle of rubber slippers, oversize umbrella and wet plastic bags and go over my wishlist before I can summon up the courage to let the damp out of my body and soul.

Wishlist

Khichudi:

Variously adapted and adopted as khichri, kedgeree, khicharee.
Food for the Gods. Simmered in gigantic cauldrons, it is the kind of yellow that feeds the masses and spreads festive joy.
Food for the body: A hearty and wholesome brew of the sort that is a cure for every ailment in its varying degrees of mildness and severity.
Food for the soul: the piping hot, bright yellow and glutinous mass is sunshine on a plate. Top it with Alu Bhaja (thin strips of turmeric and chilli coated potato deep fried in boiling oil), Beguni (batter-fried slices of brinjal) or Begun Bhaja (thick slices of brinjal fried in the same way as the potatoes), thick slices of fried aromatic Hilsa (the goddess of all that is fishy in Bengal) and/or a fluffy omelette stuffed with onions and green chillies. For this meal I would enter into a Faustian pact. This meal on a rainy day and my cup runneth over for now and evermore.

Onion Pakoras:

The crisp outer layers melt in your mouth to reveal the sweet onion bulbs inside. It is like popping a liqueur chocolate in your mouth and waiting for the surprise of alcohol melting all over your tongue. A delicate underpinning of green chilli and cilantro, a fine dust of the mysterious chaat masala and three bowls of tomato, mint and green chilli sauce form the  trusty sidekicks for the pakoras which launch an unabashed attack on the wet gloom. These golden fritters shaped like the tentacles of some alien octopi emerge onto the gray horizon like half a score visiting stars from a  neighboring galaxy.

Chicken Soup:

The strangely titled books such as Chicken Soup for the Latter-day Saint Soul have done little to take away from the ubiquitous comfort of inhaling the aroma of a large bowl of steaming old-fashioned chicken soup. The hunks of meat, the chunks of onion and carrot and the brown broth oozing with fresh flavours come together in a perfect opera. They sing to me of sunny days and warmer climes. This soup regulates the temperature around the cockles of your heart.

  

Coffee:

Not the kind that comes with smiling faces and elaborate maple leaves etched into its foam. Not the kind that makes you giddy with its decaf, low fat, mocha, caramelized, hazel nutted options. Just a (normal sized) cup of my mum's hand-beaten frothy and light coffee made out of Nescafe,  granulated and refined sugar and Mother Dairy's double toned milk and served in my favourite cup which is slightly chipped around the edges. Hot enough to sear the tender flesh at the edge of tongue. Hot enough to burn a chink into the gray armour clothing my heart.

Jalebi:

If a pretzel was born in India, it would be called a jalebi. However, it would be sweeter on the palate and more pleasing to the eye. This light and airy counterpart of the clunky European baked confection is a treat for every season. The hot molten jalebi breaks into a thousand delicate drops of sweet sugar syrup in your mouth. Hot jalebis fresh off the griddle served with a chilled kheer (a concoction made by boiling rice,milk and sugar) or a thick slab of vanilla ice cream are the stuff of a rainmaker's nightmare. They foretell days of endless sunshine without a drop of rain.

 

Gene Kelly singin' away in the rain

Checking things off my wishlist will mark a return to romance. The romance in simple things. The joy in a simple life. It will make me want to walk in the rain without a care. It will make me want to sing...in the rain.