Is the bread pakora delicate, nuanced, considered? No chance. Do we wolf it like animals? Hell, yes
My husband, whose approach to shopping is an eccentric mix of scoring items recognisable only to the hardcore foodist, and trolley dashes around the marked-down sections of supermarkets, hit paydirt with a reduced number from our local Tesco. (Sorry. I know.) It was a deep-fried sandwich of Mother’s Pride-type bread stuffed with spiced potato and peas, and labelled, gnomically, “ethnic snack”. Laughing, I posted it on Twitter as yet another example of Tesco’s crimes, only to be told by food writer Maunika Gowardhan that it was “bread pakora”, a favourite Mumbai street snack. You never stop learning in this gig.
Some Twitter chums speculated that “ethnic” might mean “Glaswegian” (ach, draw your horns in: cliches are cliches for a reason). And the next time I meet this extraordinary thing, it’s in Horn Please, a Glaswegian Indian joint. Here it sits on its slate, a puffy, bronzed bruiser, half-meat, half-fish; it’s hard to tell which is which, given its comprehensive gram flour battering, sticky tamarind dip and hectic cocktail of spices (I’m getting cumin, fenugreek, curry leaves, coriander). Is it delicate, nuanced, considered? No chance. Do we wolf it like animals? Hell, yes.
Continue reading...