Lucknavi’s know their food

Just doing a quick foodie post as I thought the last few days of food has been excellent, a city of real foodies Lucknow whether it be decadent sweets and deserts or the finely minced gilawati kebabs that are so revered throughout India. If you have been reading the previous posts then you will no of our recent foodie experiences and the fact that we were being taken to tourist traps where the food was pretty good on the whole but you never felt like you were experiencing the proper cuisine of India, it was all a wee bit tame. Saying that, it is pretty difficult to go headfirst into trying everything because of the obvious problems of our westernised bellies being not able to cope with food. The preparation standards with everything being washed or cooked using the pretty lethal tap water even cutlery and glasses have to be inspected closely.

We have stayed mostly on vegetarian food which has been great in places but how I’m yearning for a really rich north Indian chicken/mutton dish cooked in plenty of ghee spices and finished with a touch of cream or yogurt. Baby steps I keep saying to Lily.

So back to Lucknow, once we ventured further out of our hovel on our second day and were immediately met by stalls and stalls of puri sellera, cheap crisp shells of puffed wheat filled with a spicy chickpea mix, raw red onions and squeeze of lemon and then a very thin tomato dressing all very nice and usually about 20 rupees for four a perfect snack mid morning.  

Further on into town and you start to see the abundant sweet stalls selling ludicrously sweet cakes, sugared dough’s and fried vermicelli type things all swimming in jaggery in some form and unfortunately most of the time pistachio, cashew and almonds so there off my list due to my highly irritating allergies. There was one dessert that was on every stall shimmering away in the lunchtime sun its called Nimish. A large flat dish piled up with lashings of what looked like whipped cream topped with decadent hand rolled silver leaf, pistachios, almonds and a little bit of saffron, I then plunged a bit deeper and asked the store holder how it was made and then uncovered a few secrets of this eye-catching dish. It was in fact whisked up cream and milk and it was finished with rose water, obviously sugar, cardomon and nutmeg. The story is that the original recipe had morning dew in it which was collected around the grounds of your classic muglai palace and it was added to the dessert, I cant imagine it added much to the flavour but I suppose it was what had been done for centuries. I hasten to add the store owner told me that this practise is quite tricky for the average shop or street market vendor as you can imagine a dry dusty city centre is not the best place to go round scooping up dew.

Another romantic dish of the Lucknow area is the kebab either veg, mutton or beef these hand minced morsels delicately spiced and fried on a planche are a reason to visit Lucknow just for a kebab served with green chutney and a few sliced onions and a punchy green chilli make a cracking lunch. The stall I went to reluctantly gave me the odd ingredient but from what I saw and tasted it looked like very finely ground mutton (and I mean supper fine) plenty of ginger, garlic and green chilli and then the dry spice mix, due to the vendors reluctance I can only guess these were coriander, red chilli, fennel and fenugreek powders (there may have been more) but it was delicious tender, warming and comforting with the accompanying garnishes giving a perfect sourness to balance everything.

The kebab was originally designed for a toothless prince so he could digest super soft and fine kebab without being able to chew it, I’m sure that would have been quite the sight a gumless Les Dawson like chap clamping down on a kebab like a catfish. I have to be honest I got the last pointless fact from Rick steins series but I though it was an interesting fact.

Any way I’m sitting writing this blog on a lovely train journey back to Delhi Lily’s watching a Reece Witherspoon film giggling wildly to herself just had some food delivered to our seats a nice samosa and some of my new favourite snacks aloo buijia which is a fried spicy string potatoes and half a sandwich filled with something no idea what was edible and nice to have a bit of cheap white bread.

Lucknow was great for food the biryani/pulao, kebabs and the desserts oh and a cracking aloo gobi from a local restaurant, who new how good raw onions could be sweet and touch of bitterness but with a bit of chaat masala and squeeze of lime, a revelation

Spice man sounding off on my first all food blog hope you enjoy if you want any recipes to anything I come across leave a comment and ill do my best to post on the next post. On to the mountains we go.

Luke