The piano led me to the stove. It took a while, but you get to things when you develop a temperament for them. As a musician, I was a practicer of endless scales, a musicologist, and a composer of not so remarkable scores. And when the work of music school began to frustrate me, I’d run into the kitchen for release, cooking from that old reliable, The Better Homes and Gardens Casserole Cookbook, or from the Larousse Gastronomique that a roommate had given me. I’d get lost in it, as if I no longer existed—something that wrestling with a piano trio never did for me. And since I didn’t know what French food was supposed to taste like, it all tasted good.
Gradually a temperament developed, a shift from fivefinger exercises to French culinary school. But my musical sensibility carried over into the kitchen. I hadn’t been able to bear listening to Wagner until I was in my late twenties, Mahler until I was nearing 40. As a pianist weaned on Bach, Mozart, and Brahms, it took me half a lifetime to learn to appreciate the histrionics of Liszt and to admire how Chopin blurred the line between theme and ornamentation. So it was with food. While I loved the use of secret ingredients (say, adding celery seed to enhance the flavor of a tarragon chicken), I resisted what I considered to be food with indecipherable layers.
That mind-set worked for me for decades. At the age of 30, after cooking in Paris and New York, I landed in Los Angeles, and, with my restaurant Trumps, became successful at a time when chefs in America began to be given celebrity status, especially those of us who were inventing a cuisine that was unabashedly Californian.
A chef’s run, though, lasts only as long as the run of his new ideas, yet coming up with those ideas began to take its toll. Maybe success had been too much too soon for me. Certainly the neuromuscular disorder Kugelberg-Welander disease, with which I had been diagnosed 20 years earlier, was becoming increasingly debilitating. By the late ’90s, when I’d reached my late forties, I was exhausted, bored, and at an impasse in the kitchen, as well as in spirit.
I didn’t know how to shock myself out of this malaise, other than to experience something that would confound me aesthetically and spiritually. That’s when I began to fix on India.
For me, Indian food was like a Mahler symphony, its beauty evident but its construct encrypted. Although in Western cooking things are basically one- or two-dimensional, Indian cooking is far less obvious. The most basic flavors are fairly simple—garlic, onion, ginger, mustard seeds, curry leaves, red chile powder. Then there’s the second tier of spices—cardamom, fenugreek, asafetida, tamarind—and, ascending even further, saffron, poppy seed, cinnamon, fennel seeds, star anise, the list goes on. It’s incredible how many different-tasting dishes can result from these ingredients.
Indian culture itself is layered more densely than an artichoke. This is a country where the verses of songs were once painstakingly etched into palm leaves, where it can take three months to hand-weave five meters of silk for a sari, 30 years to hand-carve an entire temple from a single 70-ton piece of granite, and where the great epic story the Mahabharata runs more than 10,000 pages. One could hardly expect such a people to eat plain boiled vegetables. It was to southern India, then, that I turned to restore my culinary soul.
On the road from Chennai to the 18th-century enclave of Pondicherry, oxen with painted horns lumbered along, the bells strung around their massive necks piercing the stillness of midday. Women carried baskets of sticks home to their huts to stoke their cooking fires. Rice paddies began to line the road, here and there crevassed with veins of water, like the gnarled fingers of the sea. The Bay of Bengal was visible to the east, and to the west, brackish lakes where people fished.
In the Pondicherry flower market, pale petals were meticulously woven into garlands, worn in celebration or offered to the Hindu gods at temple. Here are some of the poorest people in the world, yet they buy flowers that will last only two days. There is a trust in fleeting beauty.
And in the state of Tamil Nadu, fleeting can be the operative word. As I drove through village after village of stick shacks with mud roofs, the air was thick with exhaust fumes and the place was desperately crowded and overrun with monkeys and cows. It was not the India of dreams, of tourist brochures. Yet despite the cacophony, there was an order to things, and a strange beauty. You just had to look harder for it.
As I ate at street stands and small restaurants, I began to see that beauty in the deceptive simplicity of the dosa, the lacy sourdough crêpe filled variously with potato, onion, and a masala of spices. The batter must be fermented at just the right temperature, and it must have a consistency thin enough to be smoothly whirled and flipped around a hot griddle, producing a delicate golden-brown pancake, a miracle of six ingredients (urad dal, rice, fenugreek, salt, baking soda, and oil).
I poked my head into a small hotel-restaurant kitchen in Chennai, where I watched the cooks start seemingly every dish with the Indian mirepoix of onion, garlic, and ginger. A heaping teaspoon of red chile paste was added, then vegetables, until it became a hundred different things: a dal; its cousin, the spicy lentil and vegetable stew sambar; a dry curry called thoren. The dishes ascend in complexity, as if toward a higher state of being.
Many of them meet in the symmetry of the dishes in the midday meal, sometimes served on a banana leaf. First rinsed with water, then dried, the leaf has warm food placed on it, allowing the release of an enzyme that not only has Ayurvedic healing properties but imparts a unique aroma to the food. The placement of the food is very specific: rice just be-low the center, and on top the pickles (say, mango and lime), relishes, and condiments (dal and sambar); vegetarian dishes are arrayed around the edges, and pappadam rests near the rice. An ordered palette of saffron-colored foods, whose purpose is to flavor rice in as many ways as possible, its very base is impermanent, serving only for that moment.
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