Anjan Chatterjee, by all accounts, is an interesting person alright. An adman-turned-restaurateur, after all, is almost guaranteed to be that. His story is one that will inspire almost any would-be restaurateur in a country where almost everyone is one. The man behind a score of well-known ads, Anjan started his alternate career with a passion and a small Bengali restaurant in Mumbai, where, in the initial days, he and his wife would ostensibly cook the food personally and serve it to guests. From that, he has now built one of India?s biggest, pan-India chain comprising not just Oh! Calcutta, but also Mainland China, a restaurant that has been claiming to serve such ?authentic? food that Anjan decided to risk opening an outlet in China itself a couple of years ago.
While I don?t buy claims as to as-Chinese-as-real-Chinese (because the food in China is very different), I have no doubt that many people will confess to be Mainland China regulars and for good reasons. When it started out, it offered some really great bites at even better prices?a sureshot formula to success. And while today the food quality may be more variable and the prices higher, Mainland China has its fans. It is precisely these people who may be tempted to pick up The Mainland China Cookbook, complied by Anjan, with a large number of restaurant recipes. My advise to them would be: don?t.
The test of the pudding lies in its taste. And so, last weekend, I decided to try out a vegetarian recipe from this tome: with lots of corn in my ref, potato and golden corn Tsinghoi style, begged to be tried?combining as its pitch went, ?the starchy taste of potatoes, the sweetness of corn, the hot chilli and tangy tomato paste?. I won?t go into the process but the dish turned out to be a stodgy non-entity. It wasn?t a complete mess, because after all, however gooey potatoes and corn are?you?re still likely to ladle them up. But it isn?t something that I would ever make for guests?and not even for my five-year-old daughter who loves Chinese food, with much sweet corn and even more cornflour.
There are several problems with this cookbook. The first, its lack of pictures. Many unfamiliar recipes call upon a cook to at least know what a dish is expected to look like. And for those who like cookbooks as their bedside reads, three-fourths the fun is in looking at scrumptious food. In this day and age of Nigella and 24×7 food channels, being niggardly with your photography budget is unforgivable.
But some of the best cookbooks in India are poorly produced. You only have to take a look at so many of Jiggs Kalra?s offerings or indeed at my bible from the Sailana kitchen (the best cookbook on Indian food by far) to notice that? though Pratibha Karan?s Hyderabadi and Biryani books with excellent recipes are much more lavishly treated. Poor production and lack of visual support is excusable if the recipes themselves are special. Unfortunately, here they aren?t. While some of the Mainland China recipes are so absurdly simple that anyone could rustle them up with a suitable grocery budget and bottles of sauces and rice wine stacked on their kitchen shelves, others look regrettably too complicated even to attempt. The latter should have been simplified and an overall philosophy of food from that particular region given to make things more comprehensible. With enough random recipes floating on the Internet, a recipe collection, needs to provide more insight into the hows and whys of cooking and not merely hand out a mile-long ingredients list and tell you to dice potatoes into one-cm cubes!
We in metropolitan India are now at a stage where we are looking at more authenticity and a better understanding of regional cuisines from around the world. Upmarket restaurants these days take care to clarify whether what they offer is Cantonese or Peking or Sichuan or Singapore-style Chinese (even if in the end, they do land up making concessions for the Indian palate). There is a growing consciousness about Chinese food as belonging to different regions and schools and not being a monolith. While Anjan gives us short notes on each school at the beginning of the book, the recipes seem to be mostly general without clear provenance.
A more sophisticated and serious attempt should have been in trying to educate the reader as to the cooking principles and distinctive ingredients of each school. What are the antecedents of Konjee crispy lamb vs say, ?shredded chicken with celery and wine?. In fact, recipes may even have been classified as such and not dumped under broad ingredient categories of meat, seafood, veggies? As far as I could make out, most recipes involve the use of the same common ingredients?Shaoxiang wine, vegetable or chicken stock, soy sauce and, ahem, my favourite bugbear cornflour. Stock up on these and you?ll have Mainland China style food. That?s all you need.
?The writer is a food critic