In this fun and unpretentious book, learn how to cook simple and tasty Italian khana using locally available ingredients. Listen also while Ritu Dalmia speaks casually of her failures and successes, and revels in the 20 minutes it takes to slowly stir the rice as it cooks to make risotto - a stress buster, she insists... like ironing clothes - somewhat mindless and relaxing.
Why Italian and not Spanish, Greek, French, Lebanese, whatever?
I think I was an Italian in my last birth, it is one country I have been at ease with since the age of 10!
But also, I think it is a cuisine which came closest to my taste buds, and all my buddies in my impressionable growing up days were Italians so somewhere the influence rubbed off on me.
Your book has clearly been written by a smart, capable, hardworking and highly articulate person! How is it that someone with these attributes dropped out of school?
I barely managed to finish school, because I had already started working in my father's company.
He was in the marble and granite processing business, and I was marketing for him. There was a lot of travelling back and forth to Italy.
One of my character defects is impatience. I guess I was in too much of a hurry to step into the real world.
There's this cliché I still believe in: "My education came from travelling and meeting people!" However if I was to turn back the clock - yes, I would have gone to college, had a blast for those years, and then thought about what to do!
You've called yourself a "fake chef". What exactly do you mean by that?
I am not a trained chef who went to CIA or even Pusa Institute for that matter. Cooking for me was a hobby and it just happened to become a profession as well.
In Italian cooking, the most important thing is the ingredients. The method is child's play, unlike Indian cooking which involves fairly complicated methods, so the truth is that I'm not just a fake chef but also a lazy chef. That's another reason I opted for Italian!
Since you don't have formal training, do you find food critics intimidating? How do you handle them?
In the early days, yes, I did find them intimidating. I had a huge row with one of the most important food critics when I opened my first restaurant. I thought she had no clue about what she was writing, and as per her I was a rich spoilt young Marwari brat trying to go all glamorous with a restaurant and all.
Well today she is a very dear friend, whose criticism I accept gracefully and nor am I scared to tell her when I do not agree with her view point. I believe in my product and every one is allowed their view point. I do not try to change my cooking as per their taste buds, and they have stopped trying to tell me how to cook.
Your first venture as a restaurateur failed with MezzaLuna when you were only 21, but since then you have done well twice, with Vama in London and now Diva in Delhi. Can you tell us what you learnt about what to do and what not to do to run a successful restaurant?
Destiny, destiny, destiny... MezzaLuna was more or less the same product as Diva. It was a matter of timing: Delhi was not ready for this sort of restaurant in 1994.
Yes, with Vama I learnt the business part of restaurants, and the most important thing I learnt was to never compromise on food cost. If you want to be smart about it, keep your fixed overheads low.
Tell us about dressing mutton up as lamb.
In India we do not get lamb. We get mutton, which is goat meat. It is tougher than lamb and has a different texture, taste and smell. However Indian cooking has a great many ways of tenderising the meat, and I have no qualms using them, whether it is using papaya or soaking it in milk. The results? Brilliant.
I would have thought we wouldn't be able to do without our pressure cookers to make Italian khana?
I can't imagine where you think you would you use your pressure cooker?
Umm, how about to make stock? Two or three CTs instead of hours and hours in a thick-bottom pan?
My dear, you are talking about SHORTCUTS? Ok, I admit it might work for stocks. But don't you think it lacks the romance of stirring the pot, taking a deep whiff as the stock cooks, with you humming a sweet song under your breath all the whileâ¦
Ok, another awful question: you know when you finish a bottle of olives there's that brine left over⦠do you know of any good use it can be put to?
I actually think brine makes a great base for salad dressing... just turn it into a big bottle of salad dressing. I even use the oil that sun-dried tomatoes or olives come in...
Your tomato sauce recipes don't ask for much sugar, much less than would be used in most of our Indian Italian sauces. Do you think we should tune our palates to authentic Italian flavouring, or can we just add more of what we want - mirchi, salt, sugar?
As I say in the book also, I personally do not believe in a so called "hard and fast recipe".
