We’d trade places with Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid any day.
For three decades this Toronto-based couple has backpacked around the world, notebooks and cameras in hand, searching out the most delectable and authentic food. They photograph it, write about it, then come home and test recipes in their urban kitchen, eventually producing ravishingly illustrated books filled with beguiling tales of their latest journey and adventurous recipes. Somehow they’ve managed to take their two sons on their travels, escaping the stultifying trap of regular school.
In their latest book, Mangoes and Curry Leaves, Alford and Duguid leisurely wend their way through the Great Indian Subcontinent. This is a journey they’ve taken many times before (they met on a hotel rooftop in Tibet, not the subcontinent but close) and they write with passion and authority about the cooking of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Luckily, the book doesn’t even try to offer a comprehensive view of the cuisines of these regions. Rather, it is an intimate diary of the places they’ve visited, the people they’ve encountered and the great food they’ve eaten.
Dipping into the book, we felt as if we too had skipped school to travel alongside the authors. In Ladakh, north of the Himalaya, we shared tart dried apricots and tea with a goatskin-clad Dard woman at a monastery festival. In the desert of western Gujarat, we salivated hungrily as Sona Bai and her 12-year-old daughter made a simple potato curry, fragrant with chiles, turmeric, black mustard seeds, cumin and coriander, and baked flatbread on a clay griddle. And in Udaipur, we spent days with Sangana Bai creating a tandoor oven, kneading and mixing heavy clay, straw and manure, building up thin layers that must dry overnight, until the four-foot-tall, barrel-shaped oven was finished. This episode, by the way, perfectly describes the gaping difference between Alford’s and Duguid’s style of travel and our own.
On their journey, they’re “continually amazed at just how good common everyday food is.” This is the mantra behind the more than two hundred traditional recipes in the book. Among our favorites are Coconut Chutney, spiked with tamarind, ginger and green cayenne chiles, Chile Shrimp Stir Fry from Goa, subtly flavored with cinnamon, clove and cardamom, and the lovely Bengali Fish in Broth. In the later, chunks of cod are tossed with turmeric and salt, then stir-fried in mustard oil and cooked in a fragrant broth with tomato, zucchini and eggplant. It was a perfect one-dish Saturday night supper.
Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, Artisan, 2005.
To read more about the award-winning authors and their four previous books, go to their website, www.hotsoursaltysweet.com.