Canned Heat

In a few weeks time the rather genius pop-up, Tincan, will be shutting its doors and relocating to New York. It's been a brilliant coup - a restaurant selling tinned food slap bang in the middle of London's West End, and without doubt better then most of the fare on offer around it. Personally I've always been fascinated by food in tins. My mother, a good but unadventurous home cook, never really had the courage to attempt anything English beyond egg and chips or draw on the huge range of tinned products available  in the seventies. Her meals were limited to Indian and pretty much cooked from scratch so eating anything canned was to glimpse into an exotic world of pleasure. Even then the range was limited; baked beans, soup and occasionally sardines and tinned peach slices. Not for us tinned spaghetti and meatballs or spam or vegetables of any sort - definitely not potatoes, a concept I still find bewildering.

Talk about being a slow learner,  it wasn't until my mid 20's that I first tried Heinz Macaroni Cheese though it was well worth the wait. I can distinctly remember being beguiled by its pale, sticky blandness and mystery chemical taint that could surely only have been attained using illegal food additives. It was (is) a great canvas for culinary experimentation. I can lay claim to having invented several  dishes - in particular macaroni cheese simmered with chips and garnished with chopped pickled gherkins (a little tang to cut across the mass of sticky carb) and a 'delux' version with tuna (tinned obviously) mixed in.

Of course it's easy to behave stupidly around tins. During a period of anxiety, revising for my undergraduate exams, my sister told me to eat fish - it was good for the brain, she said. I bought 20 cans of tuna and my method was to eat one raw for breakfast and one cooked as an evening meal. I lasted four and a half days before succumbing to feelings of nausea and depressive thoughts. Acknowledging my weakness, I resigned myself to producing an extremely mediocre academic performance instead. To add an extra helping of abuse she clarified her advice saying, "fresh fish, you idiot, not tinned".

The tin can and canning process really took off in Europe in the early part of the nineteeth centurry. Not quite as old is the Indian variant  - the Tiffin Tin or dabba. This is a kind of multi-tiered  tin can only with the added bonus of being reusable; three or more small metal containers sit snugly one atop another all bound together by a metal clasp. This simple stacking system has allowed generations of wives to send a home cooked lunch to their husbands working in the heart of the city.

Spend any time in Mumbai and you will see the Nehru hatted Dabbawallahs ferrying tiffin tins to their office destinations. They're an eye catching bunch in their white shirts and Nehru hats as they gather to share out their rounds before attaching a dozen or more wire handled canisters to their bicycles and dispersing into the traffic. Everything about the process seems anachronistic, from the uniforms to the simple coding system at the heart of their delivery system. Yet each year millions of lunches are delivered with barely a fault in one of the most congested cities in the world.

It sums up perfectly the enigma of India; how out of the chaos and seemingly impossible, comes something simple and perfect, something greater than the sum of its parts.


If you like a little romance with your Indian take away then you must watch The Lunchbox. I saw it twice on a flight recently - outbound and inbound - and it's now my favourite foody film. The plot revolves around a simple mistake. A tiffin lunch delivered to the wrong person. This in itself is a curiosity worthy of exploration given how rare this actually is.

The food is received with surprise and much pleasure by Saajan,  a widower,  whose normal tiffin, of mundane fare, is provided by a local cafeteria. The cook responsible for this treat is Ila, a woman on the cusp of middle age. Married with a young daughter of school age, she feels she is becoming distant from her husband. Taking advice from her 'aunty' one floor up in the block she lives in, she attempts to rekindle their love for each other starting with his lunch.  Alas despite her best efforts he doesn't notice since he now is also receiving a tiffin from another source (the cafeteria formally supplying our hero).

Mumbai is a bully of a city and its most abundant and hapless victims are commuters. In connivance with wealthy landowners in whose vested interest it is, the city remains located on a tatty, ear shaped piece of land detached from the wide open spaces of New Mumbai across the water.  As the film brilliantly captures, the reality for millions of commuters is several hours of misery each day crammed nose to armpit in trains or sitting trapped in congestion on the roads. The intractability of carving a niche in this city is matched by the even trickier negotiation of personal relationships outside of family and cultural norms. Ila's husband's detachment towards her is not strictly brought on by the strain of commuting. There is another woman on the scene and Ila foresees her life becoming one of subservience and invisibility.
 
A captivating story line is literally delivered by the dabbawallahs and with plenty of food to tantalize; peas kachori, stuffed bitter gourd, a fragrant masala rice studded with shiny whole red peanuts, a rich yellow dal topped with succulent tomato. What's more Sajaan is so mannered in his ways that  even watching him eat is pleasurable. There are also culinary insights into the real lives of Mumbaikars survive in the city from the frugal lunching on bananas to the commuters who save time by chopping their vegetables on the train home.

The scenes of the dabbawallahs singing on their way home feels timeless but what of the future of this service? While tiffins remain popular in Mumbai changes are happening which may make my photos, taken in 1997, a less common sight. Commercial providers of tiffins are finding that increasingly their customers no longer like their food served in traditional steel containers. They want disposable containers, perceived as being more hygienic. If there's no need to recycle the containers then what becomes of the carriers? If you only need someone to deliver then you lose the magic of the system. And perhaps someone's chance of falling in love.

A small corner that is forever ...Punjabi

In the early nineties my mother started to complain that her local Indian grocery store was always running out of fresh coriander. It would seem that non-Asians were buying it; outrageous behaviour, coming into our stores and taking our herbs....

Back then an increasingly well travelled, culturally informed, domestic population was waking up to the pleasures of this delicate and versatile herb. Today pretty much all the main supermarkets stock 'ethnic' produce from eddoes to galangal and alphonso mangoes, much of it air freighted and in the shops in just a few days from harvest. I don’t hear any complaints from my mother now and what’s more she doesn’t agonise over the details like transportation and how exactly we in the West are able to enjoy produce of a better quality than people in the country it is grown in.


I, however, still do and so when I discovered that there was a farmer in Lincolnshire growing not only coriander but also small aubergines, chillies, mooli, saag and bitter gourds for the UK market I was intrigued. That was ten years ago but when I met Colin Martin I was amazed to discover that he had been growing these 'specialist' crops for three decades. Colin is based in Spalding, the heartland of Britain’s potato and onion production. Back in the early 70’s Colin received a telephone call from a Pakistani fruit and vegetable company based in Bradford. Could he, they wondered, grow vegetables favoured by Asians?

Bitter Gourd - only for older Indians

“They were already buying spinach from us and it just so happened that the market for the salad crops that we grew was going through a downturn. So I took their request very seriously.”

Small aubergines - great for stuffing

Colin travelled to Bradford to meet Rafi, the late owner of Rafi and Company Ltd. By then Bradford has established itself as the main centre for Pakistanis in the north of England and demand for fresh, familiar produce was high at the household level and starting to increase in the restaurant trade. So, having established what varieties were to be grown and just how feasible it all was, a business friendship was born that has spanned 4 decades.


So fruitful has it been that from the original 5 acres set aside for them, Colin now farms 700 acres in Lincolnshire and Portugal, with 80% of his herbs and vegetables for the ethnic market. The rest goes to ASDA. To put this into perspective, for the same period of time Colin has been supplying Bradford with his British coriander, horticultural production in the UK has halved - self-sufficiency is not part of the UK government’s food policy.  Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring access to healthy food is. Colin does both, allowing consumers to buy vegetables just one day after harvest.  And it's grown in British soil with all that implies for the UK's water footprint and other environmental considerations here and abroad.

Colin is a real farming entrepreneur.  He diversified when he had to, takes an interest in both his product and clientele, and does his best to minimise resource use while maintaining an honest product. Honesty is a quality demanded by consumers, campaigning groups and (some) retailers.

Less so by our policy makers. In their drive to meet greenhouse gas targets recent Governments have been happy to talk up how much UK emissions have fallen in recent years. However this has been met in no small by our importing much of our horticulture leaving other countries to shoulder most of the environmental burden.

Lincolnshire Saag - a Punjabi staple

Getting Ready Meals ...ready

A few years ago I helped develop a curry sauce recipe for the trendy 'wholesome' fast food chain Leon. Now I've been doing the same thing for ASDA. Not quite so cuddly; they're currently number 2 in the supermarket rankings, a real giant of the corporate world. I was asked by a food manufacturer to help them develop recipes for a range of premium Indian ready meals for ASDA including a chicken balti.

Whatever the dish and whoever for, the challenge is the same; how to replicate 'authenticity' on a vast scale working to strict budgets, using bulk ingredients - pre-prepared in the case of garlic and ginger, in massive cooking vessels and without the 'love' factor that all good food needs.

What's more it has to match the retailers view of what customers expect of such a dish. Unfortunately for the most part this still remains trapped like a fly in amber in some 1980's lurid red, sticky, tomato based sauce; flock wallpaper in a bowl. I say this based on what was shown to me in the development kitchen. The balti dish I was asked to work on was made with a 'balti paste' procured in good faith from a company boasting of its attention to detail when roasting chillies etc. It tasted of the sherbert lemon sweets I ate as a kid - far too acidic but with a chili kick. I suggested ditching their use of this and to his credit this is exactly what Development Chef Richard Pearson has done. Instead he's chosen to follow a method I demonstrated.

Lamb with okra

A balti is typically cooked on high heat in a short space of time in a karahi or wok. One common method is to boil chicken and spices first for 5 or so minutes before adding oil and cooking for a few minutes more (red meats like lamb tend to be pre-cooked first). It's an unusual technique and the opposite to what is done in much of South Asia. Of course it's the all important spice mix which is key to the taste. In Kashmir where baltis are thought to have originated, people make a basaar (or masala)  rich with asfatoeida which is native to the area and also fenugreek - both seed and the dried leaves. This combination gives the balti its distinctive taste and fragrance. If you want to cook a very quick curry then this is the technique for you. Adding the oil near the end of the cooking process gives the lovely glistening browned meat.  Drain off any excess oil before serving.

Scaling Up

Once you've cracked the spicing the challenge is to recreate the searing heat required on an industrial scale. The manufacturers plan is to cook the sauce in huge 'kettles' separate from the chicken. Straight away this factors in problems when trying to recreate a dish, that there will be no meat juices flavouring the sauce in the normal way.  So other techniques are used to recreate what happens on the small scale, using meat glazes etc. These less familiar names are often what confuse and concerns shoppers when they read the list of ingredients on the side of a ready meal pack.

I saw nothing to fear or arouse suspicon on Richard's cooking list - beyond the mysterious 'balti-paste' which was jettisoned.  Naturally I will be very interested to taste what his team finally comes up with.

As much as foodies love to loathe ready meals they serve they serve an important role in the diet of millions of people in this country. Why else would they called convenience food? No matter what you feel about the lack of domestic science provision in schools, they help those people with no culinary skills to feed themselves. And there's a strong argument to say that they are the most energy efficient way to feed us all.