DISCOVERY: Tastes that shaped me (Part 1)
It is said that, we are the sum total of the experiences we have. Many of the experiences can be bad, a few can be good. Some of them can be shortlived while others can have a lasting influence on you. But food- both good and bad doesn't really belong to any of them. They can be intense shortlived experience and at the same time you can carry them with you to your grave.
Most of my personal experience with food or rather the process of discovering good food has had unique and interesting stories associated with it. Few of these have come from good restaurants or places that are supposed to serve good food. Some of them had been when I was extremely hungry. I must admit that sometimes the circumstances had been a major contributing factor but later I realized that they had been just one of the many factors that came together at the same time and the same place to make the experience memorable.
Lets consider a situation - you are very hungry, I mean extremely and terribly hungry. You will pounce at the first edible thing that you come across. But many of chance discoveries of good food had been under these circumstances, when I had been patient enough to wait for 'fate' to take me to the right place! Last summer, during my internship, we went to see the Mercedes Benz Museum at Stuttgart. It had been a day long affair and after that (with some drama) had reached the Stuttgart city center (actually the Scholssplatz). We hadn't had anything after breakfast and that was like 8 hours ago. We had been in Germany for just a few days and were still getting accustomed to the place, so we were not very eager to experiment food, yet. We came to a place that had a Macdonald's and a Pizza hut next to each other. While rest of the people were arguing as to which one to get into, I noticed something very interesting. Right next to these shops was a small one having some sort of cylindrical slab of meat in a vertical rotating stand being slow heated by a vertical oven. It looked very appetizing, so we decided to give it a try. And man, ..... the feeling was .... well, quite frankly overwhelming. This was my first brush with the Doner Kebab (a Turkish dish that has become a German fast food legend). Actually we had a Doner Roll, instead of a normal Doner sandwich. The marinated, grilled meat shavings, the lettuce, onions and tomatoes along with the yogurt and paprika tasted something out of heaven. Though I have had many a Doner Kebab's elsewhere, (Tubingen, Munich, Ulm, Konstanz, Paris) the one from that shop in Stuttgart really has something unique in it. I had it 2 more times after that incident and every time it surprised me, pleasantly.
The internship opened me to many new kinds of food and allowed me to experience newer cuisines. While in Paris, I had promised myself not to have anything from Macdonald's or similar chain. So after a hard morning of sightseeing on our first day, feeling terribly hungry, we (3 of us, rest preffered the MacD and the gay parade!) went into one of the hundreds nondescript Bistro's that dotted Rue St Germane. It consisted of a 3 course meal with wine. I had grilled Salmon and Pasta along with a glass of Chardonnay but the real highlight of the meal was the warm bacon salad that was served as a starter. It was rather simple - bacon in some sort of white sauce with some lettuce and a very light sour dressing. The effect was out of this world!
But every time I'm terribly hungry and I'm on the move, I don't end up having a memorable culinary experience. Most of the time I end up eating something very bad and at times even revolting. But treks have hardened my palate and I have developed a good ability to consume anything that is even remotely edible and stay without food for surprisingly long period of time (once I had survived on just a bag of Lays and a packet of Good Day for 33 hours). Most of the bad food had been on flights and trains.
Getting back to the summer of 2007, Germany is synonymous with beer. Though I am not a great fan of beer, I made it a point to try and develop a taste for beer in Germany. But alas, after quite a few attempts (including a disastrous episode in the bathtub!) I had almost given up. There are a million varieties of beer available in Germany and finding the right one can be quite a challenge, as I realized. The Pils, Dunkel, Alts were not for me, so I had survived most of my stay in Germany on Coke and Reisling. Just about 2 weeks before my date of return, Dr Zhang (I shared the office with him and Daniel) took me to a barbecue held on the occasion of the inauguration of the MRZ. And there on Anurag's insistence, I found Hefe-Weizen! This was the beer I was searching for - very light and refreshing and not very bitter either. That day, I almost consumed a liter of it! I made it a point to have as much of it as possible before I came back.
Though it took me rather long to find the bitter of my choice, sweet was the easiest to find. Two of the most memorable sweet dishes during that period were - the Chocolate mousse at the Museum(an upmarket restaurant in Tubingen) on occasion of the MRZ Inauguration Symposium banquet and ice-cream (coffee flavoured on to be precise) from a nondescript Gelatto in Venice.
You might think that all my culinary experiences happened outside India but the fact is that were extremely mobile during this period (5 countries in less than 2 months) and experimented heavily with all kinds of food that we could lay our hands upon (and afford ... so the Foie Gras, the Caviers and the vintage wines were out of range), so statistically the chance of discovery was much larger. Since they occurred so fast, I find it easier to recall them.