Does the Apple Fall Far From the Tree?

hello everyone i was born in delhi uh in a rather large house by the river and as soon as i was born the first thing that happened to me after i came out of the womb was that my grandmother came in she dipped her little finger in honey and wrote on my tongue om which means i am and in that one moment with my very first taste my life was affirmed who i was was affirmed and in the combination of writing and food i was immediately connected to the community i come from which is an ancient community of scribes who are also happen to be known as great lovers of eating and drinking and in fact my community is often called sharabi kababis sharab standing for liquor wine and kebab for kebabs which stand for all of good food so we were sharabhi kababis but also scribes and in that one moment everything was confirmed and i was connected to my ancestors at the same time so what happens in india is that we all all of us come from such communities they're different communities uh thousands of them exist all over india they have their own defined religion or sub-religion they have their traditional foods they have their own palette of tastes each one has a different palette of taste and a culture and customs that constantly tell them who they are and what group of indians they belong to now i come from the the north of india which is a wheat eating area but if you go to bengal west bengal is the state now and they have a diet mainly of rice and fish they live by the sea they have a long coastline and there is a huge ganges river delta which is one of the largest deltas in the world where a lot of the fish comes from and a lot of rice also grows in that area so that is what they eat and strangely enough they will not eat fish from the sea they will just not go out into the sea and it is i don't know why that customer rose maybe they were afraid of the sea and also within indian custom there's a fear that you will lose cast and if you cross the seas i don't know why they didn't go other people in india do but bengalis will not eat sea fish they will only eat fish from their particular delta so in their communities they have another custom not the custom i have in my community when a child is about six months old the priest comes in there's a little ceremony and they put a rice pudding sweetened with honey on in a little bowl and in that same tray that holds the bowl there is a fish head and this is placed in the child's lap the child somebody holds it of course the child is fed a spoonful of this particular rice pudding and the child looks at the fish the fish looks back at him and something is confirmed between them that they will the child and as he grows up we'll eat the fish and we'll eat rice and that is what is the food that he or she is going to remember for the rest of their lives and that will be their food and when bengalis have another thing which i find very interesting they one of their favorite fish is a fish called hilsa which is rather like the shad in america it has a lot of bones now the bengolis don't sit around with tweezers picking out the bones they don't do that they keep eating the hilsa and they have the way of collecting the the bones in one cheek and it somehow the tongue keeps pushing the bones to inside that particular cheek and like tobacco it sort of grows and it sits there and when the meal is done they take the whole ward out and discard it so that that is a custom that comes from their way of being and eating now it has always been a very curious thing for me why do people eat what they eat what makes one group of people eat something that um another group will not touch at all and i i find this uh very very interesting because it is not something that you can pinpoint you can't understand it and if you for example look at the japanese which i find very interesting once when i was in japan i i decided to follow a group of children they were teenagers they were going into a movie and i know what americans would buy when they go into a movie i know what indians would buy when they go into a movie but what were these japanese teenagers going to buy when they went into a movie they went in and they bought packets of dried squid and this is what they chewed upon for the re the time they were watching the movie and of course they have developed a taste for it they will eat dried fish and rice for breakfast i've known school children in japan eat whale for lunch in schools and they will have fish that is raw in uh in the form of sashimi or sushi uh for dinner so they and they have soy sauces but they also have fish sauces so they grow up with fish of various kinds and what we may not eat they will relish and again in japan they i was wondering they don't have milk so there where is the creaminess in their food but there is creaminess and i remember i was staying in a 300 year old inn in kyoto it was the tabaraya inn and they gave me something to eat which i had never eaten before in that form in my life and i thought it was absolutely delicious and this was yuba which is the skin of the top of soy milk as it is boiling and they take the skin off and uh it was served to me in the in and i said what is this thing i have to find out what it is so they said one of the oldest yuba making establishments is just less than a mile away and why don't you go we will arrange for you to go and see it being made so i said i wanted to do that now it happened to be a sunny but snowy day a beautiful snowy day and big flakes of snow we're just sort of drifting to the ground it was a gorgeous kind of day and i walked from the tawaraya inn to this place it was as i said quite a bit of distance and right in the middle of town in the middle of modern buildings there was this old barn 300 year old barn and i went inside knocked on the door a man in very traditional japanese clothes opened it and i went in and it was warm inside and there was a heart and there was a cauldron boiling it was filled with soy milk and this gentleman called me and then he put took stirred the pot and let a film form on top of the soy milk and then with long tweezers he lifted up this uh this little sheet that had formed and put it on the in the bowl and then he put a few drops of the most gorgeous soy sauce a drop of sesame oil and a few thin thin slices of spring onion scallions and he said taste and it was gorgeous it was creamy and yet it had a little bit of texture it was a little resistant and it tasted of japan and it was wonderful so these are things that you discover as you go around the world that these are cuisines and people are eating things that you don't even know anything about and i had the same feeling when i went once to i was in singapore and i was with a chinese family and a young mother was making a soft-boiled egg for her little toddler two-year-old toddler so she opened the egg and put it in a bowl and then she did the same thing she put a little soy sauce little sesame oil few scallions and she gave it to the child and i thought now this child this will be the taste of home for him this will be the mother's taste for him this is something that he'll always remember and will form the pattern of tasting in his mouth forever so all these things go back to something that your mouth is trained to eat in a certain way i also remember at one time i was in in padang which is in sumatra indonesia it's the westernmost big island in indonesia and in padang they're all they're muslims mainly and they are pretty self-efficient the way they grow up in their family so for their dinner for example they have a fish pond where they have fish so they can get a fish they have chicken they can chop the heads off saying bismillah because you can't do it without saying that and then eat the chicken and all the spices that they eat are generally fresh and they will get them from the garden so from the garden they were getting ginger they were getting galangal they were getting red chillies and they were getting fresh turmeric but then they used something that i had never used before and that was the turmeric leaf and they took the turmeric leaf which grows very easily it's on top of the plant and they either ground it in the spice mixture or they just put a part of the leaf in the rice so the rice it's a very aromatic leaf and it flavored the rice in the most marvelous earthy turmeric kind of way and if any of you are interested in in trying this which i suggest you do you can buy fresh turmeric the root it's a rhizome actually in any indian market and you plant it in soil and you water it just a little and after a while the leaves will sprout up now i live in new york in upstate new york i have a house where i do all this growing and i have to i put it out in the summer and i bring it in uh in the winter but i grows year after year and it's the most wonderful leaf to know something about but it is a taste that i associate with padang in sumatra it's one particular taste in one particular town in one particular country and these things develop in their own in little pockets and it happens throughout the world in some form or the other now india as you know is known for its spices uh we are magicians we really are magicians in the way we use spices and that's because we've been doing it for a few thousand years so we know a little bit about it and all indians share this kind of knowledge and it's a painterly knowledge when you think about it it's like a palette and you have all these 50 60 spices that are in your cupboard the way you use them just as a painter knows that you can take yellow and you can take blue and uh you can make green so in india we know our spices and we know that each spice has its own taste but if you combine you get a different flavor which is the sum of its parts so you can combine 2 3 4 20. 30 spices and they will all the time have a different taste a different aroma depending on how you treat them because each spice can be treated differently as well if you take cumin seeds which a lot of countries use so if you use it plain it's like you know one grayish color but if you roast the spices and grind them whoo it turns bright pink it's another color and then if you pop it into hot oil it turns a third color so you are getting three kind of tastes out of one single spice then you take mustard seeds i call mustard seeds the jekyll and hyde of spices because when they are just crushed they are pungent and they are bitter but if you pop them in hot oil they turn nutty and they turn sweet so the spices themselves have different flavors can be that can be brought out of them and in in different parts of india in different regions of india they use different combinations of spices and i can actually tell if i walk into any indian kitchen and close my eyes most of us can tell where that kitchen is for example if i go in and i smell roasted peppercorns roasted coriander uh roasted fenugreek seeds and maybe i smell a little coconut oil and maybe i smell some fish i know i'm in kerala in on the western coast of india so different combinations it's a different taste palette for every part of india and it is essential to know the difference because that's how we differentiate between the foods of different states now chefs in the western part of the this world train either with other chefs or they train uh with each with they go to academies of various short to learn how to cook but there's one part of india where they go to the temple to learn how to cook and this is in south india it's a special temple called the udp temple it's in karnataka it's in the state of karnataka where you go to the temple of course you can go to pray but you can go to work there and learn to be either a priest or a chef and it's a very interesting setup i i once went there myself and what happens is that the people who come come to eat there and they come by the hundreds and thousands every day to eat so they're big dining halls where they come and sit down and the the room is cleared and banana leaves are strewn in rows on the floor and people come and squat not squat they sit cross-legged behind each banana leaf and then the servers come and they serve simple foods like split peas and vegetables and rice and the people eat and then they finish and they leave so i was standing there watching all this happen and everybody said get out of the way get out of the way and i said what's going on and i heard this thundering noise and a group of cows like a herd of cows came galloping in and they came galloping towards me they climbed the steps of the of the temple and they went in they ate up all the banana leaves they licked the ground and then they thundered out and then they washed the floor and then they were ready for the next group to come in and and start eating so there are particular customs in different parts of india and then they are followed now these particular people come and learn how to cook here the kitchens have cauldrons that are like this high they have a stepladder that they go on to and they have a paddle with which they stir these spots and when one set of food is made they pour it into a big wooden boat from which is it is going to be served it's cooked in such quantities one of the most important uh spices that are used in in this particular place is uh asafoetida now i don't know how many of have heard of asafoetida it is a resin uh that comes from a tree my husband plays the violin so the rosin he uses on his bow is rather like asafoetida it looks like asafoetida but asafoetida has an a very very strong smell it's uh it's been called devil's dung it's uh it's it's a digestive the main purpose for our using it is that it is a digestive and it's meant to cure even horses of gas so we use a tiny tiny amount of it in uh in our food and uh in fact if you go to this udp temple uh you will be able to buy the the little vessel where you crush the asafoetida and where uh you can store the asafoetida and this is of course used as i said as a digestive it's a very important digestive and of course this brings me to the whole indian preoccupation with food as medicine now i don't know about the rest of the world though i have heard once i was in france and a french doctor in the toulouse area told me that for bedwetting the best cure is fried mice and that is the traditional cure they gave the children fried mice and supposedly they stopped in fear of the mice they stopped bedwetting uh and in india there's every single person has a knowledge of food as medicine and it isn't as if they go to college to learn anything about it it is just something that comes down from generation to generation is just passed down and it's not considered at all ruled in india to ask questions about bodily functions people were like hello how are you how's your constipation today uh are your stools still pebbly uh so these kind of questions are routinely asked in a very happy kind of way just to to see how somebody is feeling uh now in our particular household we were a large family we have about 30 people in a big extended family that lived together my grandfather started sat at the head of the table then my grandmother and my grandmother always knew what was wrong with any one of us and she always had a cure for it and i may have read dozens of books on ayurveda but she had not read a single book what she knew came from her mother and that was absolute and what is more it worked every single time it worked so if you had a loose stomach then your regimen was rice and yogurt rice and yogurt and you kept eating that till you were cured and it didn't take long it took a day and you were you were fine after that and if you were at all queasy then it was right uh a ginger tea you were given ginger tea for high blood pressure there was always a garlic and then there was asafoetida anytime you cooked beans of any sort uh asafoetida was definitely put into it as a mouth freshener it was uh always roasted fennel was passed on the table to freshen the mouth as was cardamom as were cloves these were all considered great mouth fresheners and of course then there was turmeric which is both an antiseptic for inside the body and outside the body it's a very very important seasoning in india we don't use turmeric because we like our foods to be yellow we use them because of its great antiseptic qualities and its great ability to cure inflammation and i have to tell you my story about turmeric when we are four sisters and when we were three of us when we were in our sort of early teens we decided to have our ears pierced and my father said you're not going to these village people who just push an earring through and it was a wonderful way the the village women did it best but my father would have none of it he said you are going to the family doctor now the family doctor knew nothing about piercing ears but that's where we went because that's who my father sort of trusted more and the family doctors took a needle you know and went through with a big fat thread and which he pulled and we were all yelling and screaming anyway our ears were pierced and then the following day we all had infected ears so then that's when my grandmother came into the picture she said don't worry these doctors know nothing and then she came in and she had clarified butter which she heated with a little turmeric and that with a swab she dubbed that into on our ears and we were cured so if we my father had just let us be uh it would have been fine but of course the the yellow of the turmeric we went to school for the next week with yellow ears but uh we were cured certainly of uh of the the infection and at religious festivals in india when people millions and millions of people go to religious festivals and they invariably get all kinds of diseases they get bitten by mosquitoes so you will see people if you go to one of these big festivals in india you'll see they're walking around with yellow faces yellow hands this is what they they've got turmeric rubbed all over their bodies and if they get the slightest bit of infection the turmeric just takes care of it and then they are they are cured so as i've been going around uh as i was going around india sort of collecting information on recipes and things like that i once stopped off in a city called lucknow which is in northern india and it was winter i had a very very bad cold and a cough and i was feeling absolutely miserable and i landed up at one of my aunt's houses and she for breakfast and she said would you like some tea and i said yes yes please i'll have some tea but without any milk or sugar and she was startled by that and then i i she said would you like some toast i said yes i would love some toast but without any butter so she said you're not looking after yourself you're going to get sicker and sicker and sicker and you're not eating the right thing but you wait sit here and i will help you and she went into the kitchen and she made an infusion a tea which had black pepper it had fennel seeds it had holy basil which we call tulsi in it it had ginger in it and she brought the tea to me and i drank it and within 24 hours i was cured uh at another place on the same uh trip i was going around and i was in varanasi the banaras the holy city on the ganges river and i was with a family who whose occupation as a family group was money lending money in some form of the other they're known as banias in their particular community in india and they are very careful with their food their food is cooked by a cook who has to be bathed and clean in the morning then he cooks his food and he doesn't put it in serving dishes after that in order for the food to remain pure it has to go directly onto the plate of the person who's eating and these we call thali's big round plates with little bowls in it and the food goes directly into them so it stays pure from the cook to the eater there's nothing in between so i had this wonderful meal with them and after the meal uh this lady of the house began telling me she said do you know a preparation for a woman who has just given birth we have this wonderful uh smoke that we use for these women they sit a stride a chair a hollow chair and we burn the smoke and it just goes up the body and completely heals the body after childbirth do you have the recipe for that i said no i don't and i would love to have the recipe she said i don't know the recipe but i will go and ask my mother-in-law who knows the recipe and there were sort of curtains drawn in the next room she went through the curtains closed them up again and disappeared for a while and then after a long time she came back with this long roll which came from an adding machine on which this recipe was written there were 50 ingredients one after the other and i thought my goodness how do you make this with so many ingredients it must be difficult but i thought i would try because it was a wonderful recipe and i thought this kind of wonderful smoky spicy smoke would be something that we should all learn something about so as i was thinking this this finger came out of the curtain which was obviously the finger of the mother-in-law and started wagging at me and saying if you leave even one ingredient out you will die so the each of all our families have this kind of uh gift to offer you special recipes for all kinds of uh occasions now rice plays a very very important part in indian food there are many people in india who are just rice eaters they will not eat too much wheat they can't live without rice we know that rice originated in india thousands of years ago well before the birth of christ maybe 10 000 bc we're not sure at the same time it could have originated in the mekong delta uh at the same time but certainly rice was there and recorded in in indian history we know that 500 years before the birth of christ buddha lord buddha had a pudding made of rice and mangoes and honey and we know that when he was dying in his last days and he was on fasting he was ate eating just a few grains of rice a day one of alexander's companions alexander came to india about 200 years after budha's time in 300 bc around that time and they found rice growing their marvels at this grain growing in water and planted in rows they had not seen anything like that they also saw sugarcane for the first time they had never seen sugarcane and they described it as honey made without the uh the work of bees and they were completely enchanted with with all that and uh so rice we know was was always there and it has always been a part of our uh all our ceremonies in india at a hindu wedding for example the husband the wife the mother and father everyone the priest keep throwing rice into the fire and the reason for doing it of course is because rice is a symbol of fertility and uh it is why is it a symbol of fertility i asked the priest that and he explained it to me that rice is planted in one place but it can't uh bear fruit until it is transplanted in another place so that is why a bride is rather like rice in order to have children she will have to be transplanted somewhere else and that is why it is a symbol of fertility it's also a symbol of prosperity in india and in the western india in maharashtra when a bride comes into a house they place in the door near the doorstep a canister of rice piled high and the bride gently kicks it in she kicks it into the house so it spills into the house so the idea is that the bride is bringing prosperity and wealth into the house uh in many uh countries of asia people will go out for dinner but if they have not had rice in the meal they will feel as if they've not eaten and i've seen that in many many countries in japan i remember spending a lot of time with japanese officials of various sorts we were with a a team a bbc team we were shooting and i remember we were shooting various aspects of sake uh the drink and we were being wined and dined by some of these sake people and the officials took us out and they were mostly men and the men all ate and drank till midnight and i was told that it when they went home they would have their dinner and i said how can they have their dinner they've already eaten they said no no no because their wives are waiting and their wives will have dinner with them and if they have they don't eat the rice before they will wait and when they go home they will have rice with their wife therefore they will have eaten with their wives and they can say with a straight face i had dinner at home with my wife uh so and i i think this i remember the same thing uh happening in in singapore there was a singaporean gentleman who owned a french restaurant and uh he invited me for dinner to show me what all singapore has so we had this wonderful french meal three courses i was absolutely full and at the end of that he said so shall we go out now and have some rice noodles singaporean rice noodles i said aren't you full he said no no no no i'm not i'm full but i'm not satisfied and that is a very important thing so this brings me to the the subject of our the symposium what is cooking we are all born into certain cultures and the culture is like a mother we run away we experiment we are modern people we try and find new things we want to find the best lobster the best crayfish we want to cook it in amazing ways with something we've just foraged from the forest but in the end what what are we looking for we are looking for satisfaction we're looking for satisfaction in some form and i think that for each person that depending on the background and inclinations is a very individual kettle of fish amongst our wonderful modern chefs in america i've watched a korean american chef who will always have some kind of maybe kimchi or something in his food it's very modern food it's very creative food but floating in there is the kimchi that he will he can't forget he can't leave that behind i've seen a chinese american modern chef and there his fatty pork the buns steamed buns somehow they can't they don't go away they're somewhere in there and they will always find surface in some way or the other french chef will his butter is very important and in some way the butter will always be there and i in an indian chef again an indian modern chef in america his desserts will not be without the cardamom because that somehow is the mother they always run however experimental and modern they are there's always the little running and touching the mother to make sure that is still alive and well in their hearts and in their minds and they need to affirm their roots in some way now and then there's renee what do you say about renee he's one of the most brilliant chefs i've ever met but at the same time i would venture to say that i think in his last life rene was japanese thank you