By Simran Uppal
“Why can’t I,” he exclaims in glee, “have garam masala with za’atar in black treacle?” He peppers our whole conversation with these tiny, bright flashes. At one point I feel like listening to him is like my favourite moment in cooking again and again, when you pour a tarka – smoking hot ghee and spices – into a simmering pot of dal, and everything is sparkling and sizzling and smells like the gods.
Mother Tongue is, in part, a love letter to these cities where diasporic grocery stores from all over the world are piled on top of each other. The Leicester of Gurdeep’s upbringing is there: the first British city with a person-of-colour majority, he proudly tells me, and the place he “got to experience all of India, all the subcontinent [in], through the exchange of food.”
These are all, loosely speaking, what Gurdeep brilliantly calls “flavour chords”. These are the heart of how he makes his fundamentally pleasure-first, intercultural approach to cooking accessible to the reader. We have, he says, access to “much more emotionally sensitive prose” when talking about music than about food
Fried dried shrimp – chilli – garlic – onion – salt and maybe lemon juice. Fried shrimp – chilli – mung dal. White bread – butter – balachaung – lemon juice.
By Simran Uppal