Early this morning, as I grumpily fished a pip out of my nimbu paani while contemplating ways to drive urban pigeons to extinction — starting immediately with the two that had woken me far too early by wrestling violently on the window sill — I suddenly understood exactly why my homemade sev puri only remotely tastes like the sev puri I get from my usual chaatwala.Looking back, it must have been the clouds of dust raised by the wrestling pigeons that sent the synapses in my brain pinging against each other to bring about this revelation. Because really, a nimbu pip and the contemplation of a deliberate avian extinction could not possibly have caused the word ‘terroir’ to pop into my head, just like that. (Sev puri, on the other hand, is always on my mind. It needs no reason to pop into my head. It’s just always there.)‘Terroir’ (pronounced: ‘terwa’) is a fancy French word used by fancy French winemakers to explain why their wines are so uniquely fancy. In the olden days of the newly liberalised 1990s, when foreign companies were entering India at the rate of 16.3 per second and I could call myself a ‘lifestyle journalist’ with a completely straight face, I got to meet a lot of fancy French winemakers who spent hours telling me about terroir.These explanations always began with the disclaimer that the word ‘terroir’ has no real definition in English. And then, they went on for what seemed like decades about soil, water, climate, fertiliser, wooden barrels, etc etc, until I finally said, ‘Got it! You mean ‘environment’. Let’s try a glass or six of the product of your environment now.’ (For the record, the terroir was almost always excellent. Hic.)Thanks to the dust raised by the wrestling pigeons, and the fact that sev puri is always on my mind, I was hit by the revelation this morning that terroir does not operate only in French vineyards. Everywhere, all over the world, everything we eat and drink is the product of terroir. And that is why, no matter how much smelly black salt I throw into the chutneys for homemade sev puri, there are three reasons why my sev puri will never taste the same as a chaatwala’s sev puri.First, the dust in my house that settles invisibly into my chutneys and on the boiled potatoes and chopped onions and tomatoes is not exactly the same as the dirt of the streets. It lacks the tang of real street grit — that mix of tar, asphalt and muck from the inner recesses of potholes that is kicked up by thousands of passing vehicles.Second, there are not enough carbon monoxide and fossil fuel particles in my household atmosphere to add that certain je ne sais quoi that street-side chutneys always have. Unless I allow buses, autorickshaws, cars and trucks to whizz in and out of my kitchen at will, there will be no spewed exhaust in my chutneys and my homemade sev puri will never taste like the real thing.Finally, the water I use for the chutneys is all wrong. In the first place, it’s (allegedly) purified water that emerges from a machine and is certainly less full of minerals (lovely euphemism, no?) than the water used by my chaatwala. And second, the quality of the sweat that drips off my body and into the chutneys as I stir them on the stove is not the same as that of most chaatwalas. I use an anti-perspirant with a floral fragrance. The scent and taste of artificial magnolia does not really work for genuine sev puri.Perhaps, instead of plotting how to send urban pigeons into extinction I should work out ways to bring the terroir of Mumbai streets into my house. But that’s for later. First, I have two urban pigeons to make into a pie.
from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3fJuF2a
No comments:
Post a Comment