The OBF quest

I’ve always thought of what I label ‘One Bowl Foods’, or OBFs in short, as comfort food at its best. Every time I have some it gives me a sense of cosiness which not many other things in life seem to offer these days!

Though not perfectly formed in my own mind yet, let me try and put my finger on this sketchy concept:
1. The simplest definition of all: it must be food traditionally eaten out of a bowl. (duh!) Any food, I hear you retort, can be eaten out of a bowl but the onus here is on ‘traditionally'. If you try to be clever and circumvent this, by eating mashed-roti-and-vegetables, or a tandoori chicken out of a bowl and make a feat out of it, then be my guest; but it will not –in my eyes at least- count as an OBF.
2.An OBF must be prepared as a single entity. It cannot be many things made separately and mixed in a bowl.
3.An OBF must be substantial enough to be a meal in itself- which rules out clear soups, or desserts.- bowlfuls of ice cream, soufflé, or basundi are in their own right great comfort foods but (sigh!) do not make this particular list.
4. Readymade foods are excluded! Pouring popcorn or peanuts or chiwda or cashews into a bowl and munching on them is great, required even, for a movie watching session, but OBFs? Uh huh. Negative.
If anyone, on reading these points thinks I’m being a tad too technical, or a bit too pedantic, or just leaving out too much, or being spectacularly unfair to the ice cream, they can make up their own imaginary food-type and define it themselves, but this one is mine, and not open to change!(Except, sometimes, I may include the ice cream on a generous day. Who said ice cream can't be substantial enough to be a whole meal!)

I. Eating in:
OBFs are the saviours of the just-home-from-work-exhausted cooks! After all, there’s just one thing to be made, what could be simpler! The home made OBF is a non-fussy species. Frequently, in the South East Asian variety, a soupy base with whatever-is-at-hand thrown in works just fine. Or, even better, if one has a steam boat like Sahil does, the whole thing can be shifted to the dining table, and be converted into a fun family activity! Pastas and risottos are great OBFs, as are some Indian foods: Dal dhokli, with strips of rolled out dough soggy in dal, is wonderful; as is bhisi bele, the South Indian rice mush loaded with never-before-heard vegetables.

II.Eating Out:
Alright, I admit that making an OBF at home is not always the easiest thing: getting hold of the ingredients can be quite painful. Not many of us have galangal, lemon grass and star anise lying around, or deveined prawns artfully arranged on ice waiting to be thrown into a curry. A Burmese khauswe, if i recall, needs finely-chopped-and-fried-onion, finely-chopped-and-fried-but-separately-from-the-onion garlic,fried-until-brown peanuts and a great deal of whatnots just as a garnish before you eat! And that is where one leaves the OBFs to restaurant chefs. Wagamama, the British chain of noodle bars serving Japanese food: mainly noodles, meat, vegetables and soup in enormous bowls, is probably the pilgrimage destination of the OBF lover. Sit on one of their slatted benches and hear the hundreds of people around you slurping away, and you quickly reach a state of One-bowl-nirvana. Pune restaurants too, have some OBFs on offer, though probably such a dedicated-to-the-cause place is yet to open up. I never tire of the green thai- or the laksa curry at Polka dots. Flag’s has a nice Khauswe. (But then what does Flag’s not have.) Trikaya seemed to carry five-or-six types of East Asian curries on their menu. Kokum has a toothsome South Indian chicken stew with a wonderful peppery aftertaste. (Ok, you need an appam with that, but let’s ignore that). And I’m still in two minds on whether or not bhel qualifies as an OBF, but if it does, that opens up an entire new spectrum of potential places I can rave about.

OBFs are completely devoid of pretension. The presence of a bowl itself gives me licence enough to slurp, glug, gulp, blow, spill, splash and what onomatopoeia have you. None of that fold-serviette-on-lap, or cut-without-scratching-the-dinnerware, or no-elbows-on-the-table drama for the OBF, thank you very much. Now if thats not comfort food, what is!

Gained in Translation

I’ve always believed that the menu card is a wonderful way to get your first impressions of a restaurant, before you allow the chow to arrive and either confirm or refute those impressions. And for me, the sign of a fancier restaurant in a menu is not the thick white card, nor the matte finish, not the leather binding with embossed lettering:- It is the little descriptions of everything there is on offer.

Apart from making the place seem la-di-dah, I think its terribly practical, especially for Indian food. The most straightforward reason: To help the uninitiated eater choose what he wants. Indian food can be quite a web of regional names, and it can be difficult to figure out what to expect, without the translations to help! And more often than not, there’s a proliferation of superfluous names that one has to look past. If a place has on its menu, say, a chicken pahadi kebab, a kashmiri kebab, a banjara kebab, and a nawabi kebab, none of them really talk about the method of preparation or the spices which go in etc. (In restaurants which have countless numbers of such nondescript kebabs on their menu, I routinely wonder if they really make as many or just depend upon the customer sticking to the basic tikkas or seekhs. Some day I dream of ordering all of them and check if it puts them in a fix.) On the other hand, if these embellished names are accompanied by even a short list of the ingredients that go in (‘with cream and cashew paste’,etc) my suspicions subside. Also, it can bring down the need to ask the waiter, who can be a)condescending, as witnessed in a previous post, b)utterly clueless about what happens behind the closed doors of the kitchen or c)needlessly persuasive. Thirdly, I feel its human to appreciate something more once you know the influences that have gone in, or how painstaking it is for the chef. In a ‘ Chicken marinated in a yoghurt-based paste with cardamom and saffron, slow roasted in a coal tandoor’ ,I’m sure to detect the nuances of all these, which I probably would have missed if all the menu card said was ‘chicken someortheother kebab’. Taste, then, is gained in translation.

So descriptions and translations are helpful, but restaurants can get carried away. Especially if its one of those kinds of places, where you spend half your day reading the collection of essays that is the menu- (‘Mini medallions of veal with a hand-crushed red-and-black-peppercorn crust, with a three mushroom and Bordeaux sauce, served with a mushroom mousse, steamed asparagus with butter and our home-grown new potatoes) and what finally arrives occupies one eighteenth of the plate which, even with the daintiest of little morsels, is over in two and a half gulps. Entertaining, surely, but definitely not filling.
That lovable know-all, Bill Bryson, encounters a hotel in England in ‘Notes from a Small Island’ which specializes in these: ‘Fanned Galia Melon and Cumbrian Air Dried Ham served with a Mixed leaf salad’ and the like, and he’s bewitched. Lines from the book: ‘ I was greatly taken with this new way of talking and derived considerable pleasure from speaking it to the waiter. I asked him for a luster of water freshly drawn from the house tap and presented au nature in a cylinder of glass, and when he came round with the bread rolls I entreated him to present me a tonged rondel of blanched wheat oven baked and masked in a poppy seed coating’.

The next time you visit a restaurant, check the menu cards and the minute they seem to loquaciously rant on about the food, immediately give the waiter a solid piercing 'Who needs you!' look.