TMCnet News
No reservations(The Economic Times (India) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Management consultants have much to answer for. Downsizing, re-engineering, impenetrable vision statements, jargon filled PowerPoint presentations and the use of 'workshop' as a verb, to name just a few. In such a catalogue of sins a rather bizarre book on a celebrated chef is not going to count as much, but I'm still putting it there. Because Odette Mascarenhas' book on her father-in-law, the famous 'Masci', presiding chef at the Taj in Bombay in the '50s when it was the most glamorous hotel in India, could have been a really fascinating bit of Indian social and culinary history. If only Mrs.Mascarenhas, described in the book as a management consultant and expert in Behavioural Skills Training, could have resisted hijacking it for the management tome she clearly wants to write. Early on in the book we get a sample of what we're in for. After a 19 page preamble that includes potted biographies of all Chef Mascarenhas 's children, personal tributes and a poem of uncertain purpose, Mrs.Mascarenhas gets down to the facts. Masci, or Miguel Arcanjo Mascarenhas, to give his properly sonorous Goan name, was born in October at the time when farmers put their rice to ripen, into modest circumstances that included, not surprisingly, for rural Goa, a few pigs to take care of the toilet. Compared to this important detail, the actual year of his birth is deemed irrelevant. Having noted the pigs the reader might want to move on, but Mrs.Mascarenhas wants to make some things clear. Her next para clarifies that pigs notwithstanding, Chef Masci always maintained the highest standards of hygiene in his kitchen. And on the same page she throws in the first of many boxes in the book labelled Case Study based on her own management experiences. This one has a HR manager lamenting the difficulty of getting technicians to maintain hygiene standards when they come from backgrounds with none. "I wonder... can they adopt a paradigm shift?" ponders Mrs.Mascarenhas, and leaves us rather queasily wondering what if they can't. Back to the chef, we're told that early in his life his father became paralyzed followed by his mother, which meant the young Miguel had provide for the family. For historical context, Mrs.Mascarenhas reproduces a press cutting which tells us that in 1922, "Stalin was worming his way to power. Freud was telling a horrified world about the libido. In India Miguel Arcanjo Mascarenhas... was watching and waiting: one day he would make that perfect souffle." Then its back to the management seminar with Masci's father's paralysis prompting Mrs.Mascarenhas to ponder 'Paralysis of Analysis'. "In other words... What if?" she writes. "Did young Miguel wonder 'What if my father gets better' or 'What if I wait for someone to send us aid.'" What if you just got on with the story instead? The book proceeds like this, sequentially interesting, amusing and infuriating, and sometimes all three at once. Its one of the most inadvertently entertaining books I've read, but also a real waste of some fascinating material. Masci's life, as is revealed to us in snippets between Mrs. Mascarenhas' management musings, is a fascinating partly for the conventional rags to riches story, but even more for the institution it took place in. With so many major hotels today, its easy for us to forget how the Taj was really a centre for cosmopolitan life not just in this city, but across the country. Everyone who was anyone who came to Bombay stayed at the Taj. We also forget, living in the shadow of the moral police, what a lively social scene and nightlife Bombay had in those days, thanks to the many expatriates who lived here and even more passing through since the city was a stopping place on sea journeys further into Asia. The Taj was the centre of this life and Masci was at the centre of it all, catering huge blankets, making towering ice sculptures and desserts, cooking to meet the particular and often peculiar tastes of the foreigners and maharajahs who stayed at the Taj. Mrs.Mascarenhas' has amassed a huge collection of clippings and photographs of the period, but just presents it without attempting to draw a larger history out of it. She just wants to get back to her case studies. The book has recipes and a few menus, but here too more could have been done. Masci's food was firmly in the French style of haute cuisine perfected by Escoffier (whose management practices might really have been of interest), but he clearly appreciated and could cook Indian food. The recipes include Potage Masci, his daunting sounding creation of ravioli stuffed with sheep's brains and spinach in a chicken soup, but also plenty of Goan dishes. By making a closer study of the food, Mrs.Mascarenhas could have created a more fitting memorial to Masci by chronicling his work and his skills, but she prefers anodyne anecdotes about how good he was to orphans. She also makes mistakes - claiming, for example, that the recipe for Byculla souffle is lost, when Jennifer Brennan has given it in Curries & Bugles, one of the best known books on Raj food. All that being said, Mrs.Mascarenhas deserves credit for doing this book at all - and producing a nice looking book. Masci deserves a tribute and the pictures, press cutting, recipes and anecdotes are worth documenting. They might have been nicer without the case studies and jargon, but its better having them than not. This book seems to be part of a welcome trend towards memorialising the food of a past or passing generation. Another example is Cooking At Home With Pedatha by Jigyasa Giri and Pratibha Jain which documents the Andhra vegetarian food cooked by president V.V.Giri's eldest daughter, the aunt of the authors. This again is a beautifully produced book with some excellent touches like a good visual index of ingredients. It also covers a cuisine that hasn't quite received its due, all of which gives the book a value that helps one overlook the book's occasionally simpering tone, for example in a rather cringe making epilogue poem (why all these poems?) that paints a picture of Pedatha as a hallowed fount of ancient wisdom. The actual pictures of her seem to show a tough old lady who's rather more human and interesting than that! Books like these tend to be produced by amateur writers and it could be argued that its not fair to hold them to high standards. But I'm not sure that such condescension is fair either - to their subjects, to the food they cover, or even the writers themselves. What they are doing is important. We need documentation of Indian food habits, recipes, culture and personalities, all the more urgently as modern trends drown them out. But its frustrating to have it done in such unthinking and, in the case of Mrs.Mascarenhas, bizarre ways, and one hopes that future books of this kind will be better. If they want an example, Penguin India has recently issued Chitrita Banerji's The Hour of the Goddess: Memories of Women, Food and Ritual in Bengal under their imprint, expanded with recipes from the original published by Seagull in Kolkata. Its a brilliant sequence of essays on Bengali food, looking at it analytically in the context of Bengali culture and the history and geography of the land from which it comes. It is also a tribute to the many women who Banerji saw cook it, from her long widowed grandmother, her mother, aunts and others like the woman who came to grind the spices. Banerji's book is a documentation, analysis and celebration, of a kind that other books like this should aim to achieve. |