When a Mumbai resident sent a picture of the ‘medu vada’ he was eating to Gordon Ramsey, the “bad-tempered chef”, he got what he wanted.
‘Medu vada’ are doughnut shaped fritters made from black gram and served with coconut chutney and ‘sambar’, a lentin-based vegetable stew with tamarind juice. They are eaten for breakfast mostly across south India, or as a snack or ‘tiffin’, across the rest of the country.
My wife orders the vada from our neighbourhood ‘kada’ or kitchen, and they come with endless tiny plastic containers of chutney. I love these ‘desi’ doughnuts, though they are full of carbs and full of fat as they are fried in oil. They go well with a bittersweet brew of coffee and chicory.
Ramsey immediately replied to Rameez, the Mumbai resident, saying, “I didn’t know you could Tweet from prison,” referring to the frugal-looking repast.
While Rameez was happy to get a response from the celebrity chef, others got hot under the collar over what they perceived as a nasty remark.
One Indian caustically replied: “Well, at least this prison food tastes better than your half-cooked steak.” Another Tweeter by the name @rangeeladesi hit back at Ramsey saying, “Every cuisine that you are ignorant about is not from prison.”
Rameez, however, saw the funny side of the comment, saying that “People are getting too sensitive about it. I wanted a hilarious response,” he said.
One thing I have learnt over the years is that you do not make fun of people’s food even if it looks, tastes and smells terrible, or about their unseemly food habits.
Wide range of cuisine
Living in a city with a multicultural population makes it even more difficult not to say, “How can you eat that?” when you look across at your friend’s plate when you are out dining at his or her favourite eatery.
Dubai restaurants and eating joints offer a wide range of cuisine and foods that you can easily avoid: from huge tongues of buffalo in spicy ‘nihari’, to fried sheep’s brain and burnt-black crunchy fish heads.
Nobody has offered me a side dish of fried insects as starters yet, that I am told are crunchy and nutritious, but I am sure they too will eventually be available on the menu here one day.
I am from south India and get cheesed off, so to speak, if people call me ‘khatta’, or sour in Hindi/Urdu, in reference to the proclivity of people from Hyderabad to add tamarind juice to their dal (Lentin soup) and to chicken and fish curries, though the sour juice is sure to set most people’s teeth on edge when they taste it for the first time.
As people became more global, working in foreign countries and travelling to new places, they have strangely become more sensitive about their own eccentricities and seem to have lost their sense of humour.
Anything you say nowadays has to be weighed carefully before you utter something about someone’s silly looking food. It’s becoming quite difficult living in such a politically correct world.
Food has gone from something that you ate to provide yourself nutrition and to eat with friends to strengthen bonds, to something that can ignite a civil war.
When an Arab friend asked why we eat in Lilliputian starvation-diet size portions, I felt slighted. The friend was remarking on the tiny, receptacles in which we place the various vegetarian curries. These curries are added to the boiled rice or to be dug into with chapatis, the flat bread.
In this junk-food eating world, too many people who cannot cook or do not intend to cook, for some reason watch cooking shows and Gordon Ramsey gives them something new, a show where he decimates people with insults. It is a new way to relax.
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ mahmood_saberi.
