food markets than Sorbonne lecture halls. Having a family of my own has been a wonderful opportunity to feed people every day and I’m delighted that my own children phone daily on the way home from school to ask what’s cooking. My family indulges me in planning holidays primarily as an opportunity to take in new cuisines rather than monuments, museums or landscapes; self-catering holidays involve packing up and shifting almost the entire contents of the kitchen (I recently came across a holiday inventory which runs to several pages and lists everything from three types of sugar, bouillon and mincemeat to muffin cases, measuring cups, a food mixer and an electric oven). The only diary I’ve ever religiously maintained is my food journal. In it, I plan family meals at least a week ahead, document everything we have eaten or ever could eat, rate newly tried recipes, list meals at restaurants and other people’s houses, paste recipes snipped from magazines. It’s often the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing at night. Nothing, though, had ever come close to the obsessive quest that led me to spend brunch-time gazing at the business end of a butcher’s cleaver. A few months earlier, I had eaten something that fundamentally changed how I think about food. Lahori Gate is a remnant of a wall that once enclosed the city built for a Mughal emperor. Within this boundary, if you squint and strain and cover your nose, it’s still possible to imagine Shahjahanabad: an ornate balcony peeking through the dense undergrowth of tangled electrical wires, a stained and chipped marble fountain piled with grain sacks in a once-tranquil courtyard, or a glimpse of a courtesan’s ghost in Chawri Bazaar. The Khari Baoli spice market is a daily opera in which the flower sellers provide the overture when they cut open giant sacks to display a tricolour of marigold, jasmine and rose, more than enough to supply every temple and shrine in Delhi. Then, as the spice vendors’ shutters go up to
The Book of Aleph
SP R I NG