‘The India Cookbook‘ | Holiday tables with Sunita Kohli’s friends

“I think very architecturally,” states Sunita Kohli, over a phone call from her home in New Delhi. The Padma Shri awardee and design maven — who has restored and decorated several Indian landmarks, including the Rashtrapati Bhavan — is speaking to the structure and formatting of her latest publication, The India Cookbook: From the Tables of My Friends (Aleph Book Company).

Her philosophy for constructing the pages of a cookbook or planning a dinner party aligns with her professional practice, she says. “Like in design, the more you work at it, the more you’ve prepared for it. In the end, the designed space should look effortless. The same thing goes for a home meal or a dinner party, you’ve got to think things through and do a little preparation beforehand.”

The India Cookbook: From the Tables of My Friends

In this follow-up to her popular The Lucknow Cookbook (co-authored with her mother Chand Sur), we get to learn about the delicious dishes from the homes of Kohli’s friends, new and old, from across the length and breadth of the subcontinent. “This cookbook has recipes from literally my oldest friend Nasima Faridi Aziz — we’ve been friends since the age of three-and-a-half in kindergarten at Loretto Convent in Lucknow — to those I’ve met in the recent past,” Kohli, 78, says.

While there’s an order to the recipes according to region, and exactitude to the ingredients in the cookbook, the instructions themselves are invitational. They resonate with the casual yet careful manner in which recipes are actually exchanged between friends. There’s a nudge to employ our senses in the process of preparing these home-style dishes for our own dinner parties: touch to see if the lotus stem is tender, taste to tell if the sourness has reduced, smell for changes in the masalas, and so on.

Sunita Kohli
| Photo Credit:
Shubham

The tomorrow that never came

This choice in the easy methodology of the dishes is also telling of the many means employed by Kohli to patiently get these recipes out of her friends. “If somebody asks me for a recipe, I would write it out and give it to them immediately,” she claims. But, that wasn’t the case with compiling these personal recipes for the book. “Dilshad Sheikh, known for her legendary dinners at her Srinagar home, and sister to actors and producers Feroze, Sanjay and Akbar Khan said, ‘Oh Sunita, I don’t know how to write all this, but if we meet I’ll tell you and you can write it’.

So, I went to meet her, took down the recipe for surkh murg [page 3], and when she saw the final draft, she boldly pointed out that I’ve made errors in taking down the recipe and made me re-write it, imagine,” she says and bursts out laughing.

Alfresco buffet luncheon for Parisian friends in the courtyard

And there was the actress Shabana Azmi, who promised to send her recipe for Hyderabadi biryani [page 126] ‘tomorrow’ to Kohli. “That tomorrow never came for many tomorrows,” she tells me. “Eventually, I said, ‘Shabana, please can you not send the recipe’ and then she sent me a badly taken photograph of a handwritten page from a family cookbook, and asked me to transcribe it. While doing it, I realised I couldn’t read the end. So I called her and she says, ‘You’re a good cook, you’ll know what to do’. My friends are really crazy!”

Shabana Azmi
| Photo Credit:
AFP

‘Not afraid to try things out’

Kohli hasn’t simply eaten each of these dishes at her friends’ homes, she has made some of them part of her own dinner menus, too. And she isn’t afraid to try things out with them either. “For a dinner last October, with Frank Wisner, a former American ambassador but also a close family friend, I tried out naarangee pillau [page 220], an amazing pilau where everything is made in orange juice. The mutton and rice are cooked in orange juice and it is finished with saffron and caramelised orange rinds. I can’t tell you the khushboo [fragrance] of it,” she says. “Even if it isn’t perfect, they are my friends. They won’t judge me forever,” she adds, offering it as a tip to tackle one’s own future experimentations with friends. “But also be an easy hostess and have easy-going friends,” she quips.

“The naarangee pilau was a dish I inherited from my mother-in-law. They migrated to Lahore from Delhi. Food was a big thing at my in-law’s home, but it had a more delicate flavouring from food in my own childhood home. I grew up in Lahore, but my mother’s family was from Lucknow, so my home food had bolder aromatics. The exciting thing about this recipe is that I feel like I’m returning it to India, the place it was created in by my mother-in-law.”Nusrat JamilA former journalist and newspaper editor based in Lahore

While Kohli thinks “that this is a terrible statement about herself”, she admits that “I probably can’t think of many of my friends separate from my association of them with a particular food dish”. She has the same system with places. “Even on a visit to archaeological sites, I’m more likely to remember a nearby restaurant or dhaba. I have an unbelievable memory for these details,” she flexes. “For me, Preetha Reddy [chairperson of Apollo Hospitals] will always be associated with spicy pickled avakkai biryani [page 115] or Shirin and Priya Paul [who runs the Park Hotels chain] with their soothing Sindhi kadhi [page 38].”

“The Sindhi kadhi and Sai bhaji recipes were my mother’s favourites. We make them often in our Punjabi household. So even if I don’t speak Sindhi and have never visited Sindh, it is as close as it gets to celebrating that part of my heritage.”Priya PaulHotelier and art collector, whose mother was a good friend of Kohli’s

Priya Paul

“Sunita and I are dear friends, who travel together with a group of women who do historical tours across the country. I contributed the recipe of podi kura maasam [page 114] or crispy shredded lamb, which is specific to the homes of the royal families of Vijayanagaram, which I belong to. It is a twice-cooked dish, and can be kept outdoors for a long time. It doesn’t need refrigeration and therefore was a perfect snack during the hunts. A kind of meaty trail mix.”Vidya Gajapathi RajuOf the erstwhile Vijayanagaram royal family

Vidya Gajapathi Raju
| Photo Credit:
Johan Sathya Das Jai

Podi kura maasam
| Photo Credit:
Johan Sathya Das Jai

Notes from Pakistan

But if we think Indian hospitality is legendary, then there’s nothing to beat the generosity of Pakistan, she says, having just returned from there at the time of this interview. Kohli was born in Lahore, and her parents and husband, Ramesh, were born in areas in and around in Undivided India.

Author William Dalrymple gave Kohli his recipe for tiger prawns

She recalls a wonderful dinner with Yousaf Salahuddin, a cultural figure and grandson of the poet Iqbal, during the Lahore Lit Fest at Haveli Barood Khana where she ducked into the kitchens to get the recipe for dhania murgh (page 223) by interviewing the “cook with a beautiful face”. “The first thing she says to me in Punjabi: ‘Don’t be afraid of these recipes. They are super easy.’ I recorded her telling me the recipe, and transcribed and translated it for the book. I also got two more recipes from that night’s decadent dinner for myself,” she admits, mischievously.

The author is a Bengaluru-based poet and writer.