food talk
Kebab sans meat

The vegetarians have long been nagged by the feeling that when it comes to kebab, they have to contend with scarcity. Pushpesh Pant gives the recipe for a refreshingly different nadru (lotus stems) kebab.

Kebabs come in myriad shapes and flavours: shami, seenkh, boti, tikka, barra, patthar, dora, goolar, chapali, tatti, galouti, kakori bihari and what not. The mouth-watering morsels are fashioned out of chicken, lamb or fish and tease the palate with irresistible seductive temptations.

When the Indian meal is served in a restaurant, course-wise, these come as starters, traditionally the kebab has been paired with roti/parantha as a convenient ‘one-dish meal’. Some say that the Turks brought it to the subcontinent and others brandish substantial evidence to prove that shule and bhadritaka—the native kebabs—were enjoyed by the denizens of the Indies centuries before this.

The vegetarians have long been nagged by the feeling that when it comes to kebab, they have to contend with scarcity. Not a few gifted chefs have tried valiantly to treat them with an even hand creating kathal or kele ke kebab; Osman Miyan, scion of the legendary Tunda Kebabiya from Lucknow, even has on offer a subz ki galouti and the one and only Muhammad Farouk turns out an extremely tempting ‘melt-in-the-mouth’ meve mawe ki seenkh.

Good old paneer was blended with palak by the celebrated Madan Lal, the late star of Welcome Group Maurya, to give birth to the delicate hara kebab at the Bukhara and Raminder Malhotra it was who, inspired and mentored by Jiggs, plated during his stint as a guest artiste at Dilli ka Aangan at the Hyatt Regency with bhutta kebab but it cannot be denied that soon comes a time when the limitations of the vegetarian kebab repertoire become glaring.

It is only rarely that one comes across a truly impressive, refreshingly different ‘veg’ kebab. We must thank Mrs Neeraja Mattoo, gifted teacher, author and, above all, a most gracious host for treating us to nadru kebab during a recent visit to Jammu—a dazzling gem of a kebab.

Her son Amitabh, at present the Vice-Chancellor of Jammu University, had invited us to share ‘pot luck’ and we ended up gorging on a right regal repast. We have since tried to replicate the recipe at home and though our own efforts fall short of the standards of the original, they have still retained the lip-smacking charge. We strongly urge our readers to try it out for themselves.

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