Long before Nigella Lawson (who was born in the same year, but began focusing on food much later), India had its own posh, alluring “domestic goddess” in Karen Anand, who started writing in Gentleman and The Independent while she was still in her 20s. As the Indian economy – and urban appetites – opened up to the world, this remarkable pioneer ventured into everything possible in this arena: over 20 books, television, restaurant consultancies, gourmet food production, and farmer’s markets. As described in her delightful new Masala Memsahib: Recipes and Stories from My Culinary Adventures in India, it has been “one helluva rollercoaster ride.”
Some of the details of Anand’s adventuresome life will be familiar to those who have followed her career. She was born in Bombay to Goan parents, and raised in London. Whilst pursuing diploma studies in Paris, like so many visitors to France before her, she had a culinary awakening, which became her passion after moving to India when she married the late film producer Gul Anand. As the newly liberalizing nation became interested in what we still mostly call “continental food”, here was our picture-perfect interpreter, guide, champion and cheerleader. What is more, she was (and remains) super-hard-working and highly reliable, with an unusual meticulousness about getting things exactly right.
Masala Memsahib: Recipes and Stories from My Culinary Adventures in India, which will be launched at the Goa Heritage Festival on November 17th in Campal, is unlike anything Anand has done before, with an unusually intimate tone that is as much memoir as recipe book. It has six chapters: Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Memorable Meals (which ranges very widely from Assam to Kashmir to Coorg). There are recipes, but also lots of food memories, along with acute, lovely pen portraits of people who have been important to the author’s journeys. For Goa, for example, there’s Chef Urbano Rego of the Taj, Caetano D’Costa (legendary founder of Florentine in Saligao), Marie Wadia (Anand’s great-aunt), the formidable grande dame Maria de Lourdes Figueiredo de Albuquerque, gourmet chorizkars Dominic and Rosalina Fernandes, Corinne Miranda (whose son Pablo is now one of the hottest chefs in the country), Celia and Ruben Vasco da Gama of the brilliant Palacio do Deao in Quepem, and Naomi and Lenny Menezes (who happen to be my parents).
Via email, I asked Anand about her fascinating life in food, starting with the question of how this Bombay-born Goan wound up in London at the age of 6. She told me that “we were actually on our way to Canada and stopped in London for a few months. My father’s brother and mother were already there, and a few months stretched into forever. I think my father felt it would be a new beginning. Like many Goans and Anglo Indians, he felt that independent India wasn’t as hospitable as expected, and they felt marginalized in many ways. They didn’t speak Hindi very well and my father’s next post (he was working for Caltex) would have been a big promotion to Delhi, which he wasn’t looking forward to. One of the key factors that prompted the move I think was our education. He was well qualified and found a job quite easily. My mother on the other hand, took a long time to adjust...to the weather, to cooking, to doing housework.”
Anand has often written that meals were not particularly inspiring at home, partly because her mother was compelled to make it (and, it should be noted, the food in England was generally godawful until large-scale migration changed the scenario). It was in Paris that she first became inspired, and started to understand what she loved: “I was totally immersed in French lifestyle, living with a French family on the left bank, went to the Sorbonne, spoke French like a native, ate French food, learned to cook French food (from the nanny in the family who was from Lyon, the heart of French gastronomy). I was like a sponge at 18 and absorbed everything. I thought I would live in Paris forever. My world started and ended in Paris.”
So far, so good, in the familiar diasporic story, but Anand became that rare outlier who looked back to India. She says “I didn’t plan anything! There was nobody doing European food in the 80’s in India. Even luxury hotels struggled with contemporary international cuisines, and the poor chefs had no exposure to the rest of the world. Those were the days with no international credit cards, and $500 allowance to travel abroad, and I had come fresh off the boat - so to speak - from London and Paris, full of ideas and raring to go. I had studied Political Science and French, and there was nothing much I could do with that in Mumbai. I had worked briefly in media with the Cookery Editor at ELLE Paris and really enjoyed that. I was young, nice looking, had a funny accent and went to the right parties in Bombay [so] doors opened, and media lapped it up.”
Masala Memsahib: Recipes and Stories from My Culinary Adventures in India was completed in lockdown in 2020: “I felt I needed to write, perhaps some sort of catharsis. I love MFK Fisher, Claudia Roden and Ruth Reichl [three of the greatest writers in the genre] and felt this approach to food writing had not really been attempted in India.” When I asked Anand how it feels to be launching this impressive new book in her ancestral homeland later this month, she told me that “I think my soul is Goan and every time I return, a bit of my heart stays behind. This may be the smallest state in India but it is unique. As a woman, you enjoy a sense of freedom you find nowhere else in the country. My Goan parents were simple, warm, generous people who taught me values, gave me a marvellous education and supported everything I wanted to do. I can ask for no more.”