Mutton Pallipalayam in a Kongunadu restaurant, and more good food adventures of Zac O’Yeah

Zac O'Yeah's latest book 'Digesting India' (Speaking Tiger) has a cheery narrative of food from different parts of India he had travelled to as a travel writer. (Zac O'Yeah photo by Anjum Hasan)

Creator of one of the few detective-fiction protagonists from Bengaluru, detective Hari Majestic, is Bengaluru’s own Zac O’Yeah. He is actually Swedish but having lived in the city for about three decades, Zac is practically an old-time Bengalurean. Over the decades, Zac has travelled the length and breadth of India along with his wife, author and poet Anjum Hasan, delighting in the sights and cuisines. After publishing 15 books, both fiction and nonfiction, the forced sojourn at home during Covid-19, got the author to finally write about his culinary adventures. The book Digesting India (Speaking Tiger) has a cheery narrative of food from different regions he had travelled as a travel writer.

“To make the best of the lockdown, I decided to spend it in contemplation and think through what I had done in the past and if there’s any ‘red thread’, and it struck me that more than anything else I’ve been obsessed about finding good food, exciting eats, rare restaurants,” Zac said over email. “I realized that my life had been a great grub adventure through the cuisines of India and then I figured it might be something worth writing about: A memoir of meals. I asked a friend, Mita Kapur, who has also written books on food, if I should really write it and she said, absolutely yes, and she’s of course working as a literary agent so even before I wrote it, she knew it’d get published.”

Zac isn’t on social media or phone - although a sneaking suspicion lingers that he has a stealth phone hidden away - he is prompt on email. And unlike what we think of Swedish noir writers, Zac is funny and entertaining. And, if you have ever met him, you can imagine his blue eyes twinkling with mirth, at the funniness of it all. Excerpts from an email interview:

The book is about you eating your way through India. Could you share the highlights with us?

There are too many highlights when you talk about Indian food, which is why I had to write a nearly 400-page book about memorable meals. Let me put it this way: it's a bit pointless to speak of Indian cuisine at all, but rather one should really rephrase it as the cuisines of India. Like Europe that has so many cuisines, from Greek to French, Italian to Spanish, Nordic to... I was about to say British, but if it wasn’t for the Indian influence in the form of Chicken Tikka Masala, the Britons wouldn’t even have a national dish; but anyhow, India is as complex from a culinary point of view. Even samosas differ depending on where you travel, there’s not one single samosa but many kinds. That’s the beauty of eating in India, the food isn’t standardised as a one-dish-fits-all concept...here you get so many versions of let’s say, just to take one random example, biriyani. There’s probably a hundred different ways to cook it even if the name is the same.

Somebody once told me that in India, if you travel a hundred kilometres, the food will be completely different from the previous town. So, in my book, I look at just this. I travel and then I eat, and I’m in a new paradise, often about some interesting story behind its food. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, everybody will go to Chettinad which is getting pretty famous for its cuisine in recent decades, and which I love by the way, but you can also travel virtually next-door to any place in the Kongunad region, which seems to be the heartland of the state, and find gourmet dishes that are probably cooked the same way today as millennia ago. A thrilling dish I stumbled upon there is the Mutton Pallipalayam which one only finds in Kongunadu-style restaurants, although Kongu restaurants are quite rare and the only one I know of is Junior Kuppanna which is a small local chain that has branches here and there in south India. Otherwise, I believe, the cuisine is mostly home-cooked. And this Pallipalayam is actually a rather humble dish to be Indian, with less masalas and very little oil compared to Chettinadu cooking, but that’s also what makes Kongu food so alluring. It’s homely, a bit rustic, very natural, and I believe Mutton Pallipalayam is actually cooked without adding oil at all, but just the fat of the meat itself does the job. And then the spicing is very subtle, apparently the meat isn’t even marinated before-hand, so here we have an ancient Indian dish that could give French ‘nouvelle cuisine’ a run for its money!

What is your memory of the first Indian food you ever ate in India?

This is a bit of a trick question I think, as I was pretty much an idiot when I first came to India. I remember asking for a spring roll and rice in some restaurant in Delhi’s Connaught Place. This must have been way back in 1991 on my first visit and my idea of Asian food was really hazy. Today I ask myself, why did I fly to India to eat spring rolls when Delhi is famous for butter chicken? And naturally, the waiter objected and said that I’d need some gravy to go with that. I told him that in Sweden we always have spring rolls and rice and ignored his advice. Afterwards, I realized that he was completely right and I was being stupid. So, to eat in India is an IQ test and I think my IQ went up from 130 to 180 after I started writing about Indian food.

What’s your advice to first-time travellers to India who are eager to try out the cuisine and to those who are apprehensive to try out its cuisines?

Apprehension causes unnecessary tension, so stop apprehending. Other than that, I think facilities have improved here so much from how it was 30 years ago. Those days it was mandatory for tourists to sample Delhi Belly, Bangalore Bowels, Bombay Bathroom Foxtrot, and Calcutta Chromosomes. These days the hospitality industry is doing a world-class act and one needn’t worry unnecessarily if one eats in good restaurants. Even street food is generally safe. The only recent mishap I’ve had was when I was in a rush and ate a burger in one of those American chain restaurants and that really put my motions in motion. But as long as I stick to my vada-sambar religiously, I never have any gas tricks. So, my main advice to anybody travelling around India, is to stay away from international burger chains and stick to local foods. Then you can’t really go wrong.

Some places, like Kozhikode, you have described in detail as a hotspot for spices. Tell us more about such hotspots.

Kerala is definitely a major hotspot when it comes to spice trading, especially the north Kerala towns like Kozhikode that you mention but also Thalassery which has lent its name to the finest quality of pepper on sale in European shops, often labelled as Tellicherry Black. These were essentially port towns from where the spices that grew in the Western Ghats were shipped out.

Then there are the old colonial harbours, like Goa and Puducherry, which were occupied by the Portuguese and the French, respectively, and where interesting hybrid fusion traditions sprung up.  I mean, if it hadn’t been for the Portuguese planting chillies in Goa, Indian food would not be so spicy. Today, chillies are the number one ingredient in many Indian dishes. On my latest visit to Puducherry, I scored a bag of vadavams that are sun-dried spice balls typical of a particular Tamilian community, but which fascinated the French colonials so much that if you travel to Paris, you’ll find that they even today have a beloved spice mixture that goes by the name of ‘vadouvan’ that they use to make mild Indian-flavoured soups, seafood preparations and, especially, duck stews. So, to get back to your question, India is full of spicy hotspots where food comes in steaming hotpots.

What is your comfort food? Do you cook? If so, which is your signature dish?

When one is travelling and tired and eventually reaches someplace, really the best thing to have is thick dhal served with warm rotis. Though I don’t cook it myself, at home my wife cooks Indian staples, because all of them are too complicated for me to figure out, you know, measurements like ‘take the suitable amount of panchphoron and cook it in the proper manner’ are hard to decipher for somebody who grew up with Swedish cookbooks where measurements are extremely precise. Therefore, when I cook, it is either Chinese or Mediterranean, stuff that I’m fond of preparing, and is generally quite easy to make. Like, north African couscous with grilled veggies or a Chinese-Vietnamese style noodle soup. Simple food, but only if one sources very good ingredients, is hard to fail.

What drink would you pair with most Indian dishes?

Now that you ask, I’d say that a pint of lager goes well with almost any Indian dish. And if you need proof, then just consider how popular ‘B&B’ is across India, probably half of all restaurants tempt you with that combo of beer and biryani. Every single pub I’ve gone to in Britain inevitably will offer curry, if you want something a little substantial to eat with your stout. It is a perfect pairing.

Zac O' Yeah on books