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.
Indian cooks build their dishes, it strikes me, in the same way that the country’s musicians play kritis (devotional songs) and ragas (the classical Indian Karnatak form). The kriti allows a singer not only to show off his talents but to sing in praise of the divine. A raga isn’t a melody but melodic potential; it allows for the combination of hundreds of different notes, ornamentations, and pitches. They sometimes bob and weave, taking off in countless directions before returning to the original phrase. Improvisation and symmetry meet, as in a jazz tune that will never be heard again in the same way.
In india, the spiritual is heard and seen everywhere. Even in the smallest villages, little neighborhood Hindu temples and shrines lie behind walled areas. Like the entrance to Disneyland, the roofs are swarmed with vibrantly painted statues of gods: Shiva, Ganesha, there must be millions of them. It makes the Roman gods look like members of Planned Parenthood. Out here, people may not even know what goes on 15 miles from their town. They stay within; there is something that goes down, not out, that has great depth.
I felt I needed to better understand this way of introspection before I could even think of cooking an Indian dish. The spiritual is such an integral part of their lives. So I spent ten days in silent retreat at a vipassana meditation center near Chennai. Vipassana practitioners don’t relinquish control to a higher being but work toward detaching themselves from their desires, to accept things as they are. With about 30 others I sat, eyes shut, without speaking, focused on my breathing. This may sound simple, but for a cook used to running in many directions at once, it was a very difficult thing, a powerful thing. And in this silence I felt layers of myself peeling away and an openness beginning to root itself. I was ready, then, to continue my journey.
I headed for the neighboring state of Kerala, which, in its customs and its cuisine, even in its tropical breezes, is another India. Switchbacks traversing the Cardamom Hills, thick with coffee and tea plantings, led us to the coastal city of Cochin, where, in the harbor, “Chinese” fishing nets, arched like bows poised to shoot arrows toward heaven, emerged from the water groaning with mackerel and gray mullet.
One of those gray mullets, plucked from the bay not more than three hours earlier, was soon on my plate at a harborside restaurant. The chef smothered the fish in a curry paste, wrapped it in banana leaves, and steamed it, instructing me to scrape some of the curry onto the plate so that the fish maintained its “separateness.” Unlike many of the curried fish dishes I’ve had, in which the long simmering left the fish tasting funky, not fresh, this mullet had integrity and intense flavor. It was the best thing I’d put in my mouth since I’d arrived in India.
I was growing anxious to get into the kitchen again, to shop for vegetables and grind spices, to stir the ingredients together over a fire. I could feel myself waking up, I guess you could say, and it felt good. So I left Cochin for Thelliyoor, a small village where I’d arranged to spend two weeks with a local family, the Nayars, learning to cook like a Keralan.
That can mean different things, depending on whom you’re cooking with, for Kerala itself is a masala of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus. Although Kerala means “land of the coconut”—and every dish here, regardless of the religion of the cook, seems to pack a cup or so of the stuff—Nayar is also the name of the ancient warrior caste of Hindu Brahmins, who are vegetarians. So for me, Keralan cooking would be without meat or eggs.
The Nayars—Sidu, her husband, and their teenage son—are landowners who live in the middle of a lush rubber plantation. Their home is compact and comfortable, with a long, shaded porch, a small prayer room (where Sidu spends a couple of hours at the beginning of each day), and a kitchen that in most ways resembles a typical American setup. But she never uses the oven. Everything is cooked in granite Chinese-style woks on the stovetop.
And every meal, Sidu says, is constructed along Ayurvedic principles, which call for all six tastes—salty, sweet, bitter, sour, astringent, and pungent—to be included, and for harmony among the elements to achieve good health. If the body’s system is out of balance, an emphasis on a certain taste might bring things back into alignment.
Ayurveda aside, a way with a spice grinder is the true measure of a Keralan cook, because the grind can significantly change the taste of a dish. If you roll the spices, you break them in a different way, which in this part of the world can lead to verbal sparring matches. You may hear a man say, “My wife cooks better than yours because she grinds spices better; they are finer.”
Just behind the kitchen, outdoors, Sidu’s assistants were grinding spices for an aviyal, a Hindu classic of mixed vegetables with coconut and tamarind. I walked back to watch them and was greeted with a chorus of giggles; they self-consciously covered their mouths. A man in the kitchen is a rarity here.
They took cumin, cayenne, and turmeric and ground them, continuing to roll the mixture with water until it looked like clay slip. It was that smooth and shiny, even though it was all particulate, and formed this incredibly beautiful mass that blended into the wet masala.
As Sidu and I grated coconut with a strange little utensil especially designed for the task, she told me the Hindu story behind the aviyal. Bhima, a Pandava prince, was poisoned and tossed into the river by rival Kaurava princes. Brought back to life by the king of the underwater world, Bhima returned to his family just in time for the feast that marked the end of their period of mourning for him. The feast became a celebration of his return, and Bhima himself contributed a dish, a potpourri of vegetables picked at random.
Aviyal, in accordance with the Bhima myth, is made with whatever vegetables you have on hand. In Sidu’s case, there was drumstick, a large, mottled yellow-green cucumber-like vegetable that’s woody on the outside and tastes like zucchini. We halved it, scooped out the centers, and cut them into a baton. Then we repeated the process with a small eggplant, a yam, green bananas, long beans, and snake gourds. The tamarind paste was mixed with water, and we let the vegetables simmer in it, in the wok, then scattered grated coconut and curry leaves over the top.
As we cooked together, day after day, and ate together night after night, I slowly began to separate salty from bitter from sour. And I began to distinguish the aromas of coriander, mustard, ginger, garlic, onions, fenugreek, and tamarind. The layers started to peel away.
I experienced this same feeling when I went to a performance of the centuries-old Keralan dance drama, Kathakali, with drums and gongs and singers accompanying actors in elaborate crowns, big striped skirts, and colorful face paint. Everything seemed too exaggerated—the gestures, the makeup, the stories of heroes and gods. But then I listened carefully to the interchange of the small cymbals (the ilattalam) and the gong, and I realized that each drum in the ensemble was associated with a different type of character, and that the singers were bending notes in a way I’d never heard before, the dancing actors speaking through the stomp of a foot, the flick of a wrist. Exaggerated textures became a seamless whole.
Back in the kitchen I learned about varying texture at every meal, about creating a balance by serving both wet and dry foods. A wet curry, such as aviyal, would be served with a dry curry, such as thoren (which means “dried out”). Sidu’s thoren incorporated seasonal cheera, a red chardlike plant with basil-shaped leaves and foot-long stems. We stir-fried grated coconut with the masala, red chiles, black mustard seeds, and cheera in a wok. Sidu taught me how to make it come out dry, barely beginning to caramelize, her signature stroke.
And behind each dish, I began to see, was an operating principle. We were not trying to coax the essence from a vegetable, to raise and cook something in such a way that it would taste as much like its idealized form as possible, as we do in the U.S. The idea in Indian life, whether it’s playing the most intricate raga or cooking the most aromatic curry, is to build and build, to dignify the ingredients with the complexity that spices and technique can provide. It’s not a matter of disguise, but more of creating a stratification of flavors that reflects the hierarchy of the cosmos. It’s about spiritual mimicry.
So just as I began to figure it out, to dissect each dish and memorize each scent, to do the thing that all chefs do, I realized that figuring it out was the least of it. That cooking like an Indian means cooking as you live, working out a balance, filling it with spice, and always looking at what your hands -produce as something beyond the individual ingredients, as a story and a gift, and as something that perhaps should always remain a bit of a mystery.