Sonal Ved’s ‘India Local: Classic Street Food Recipes’ is a mouth-watering read

Rahul Verma

There are two kinds of people in India: those who love street food, and those — a very, very slender section — who don’t. Sonal Ved, clearly, belongs to the first group. You read her colourful descriptions of the various kinds of chaats you get in the country, and know that she is a card-holding member of the street food lovers’ club of India. And I, as a life member of that group, completely understand her emotions.

Her new book, ‘India Local: Classic Street Food Recipes’, is a compilation of recipes of street food dishes. It’s a brave endeavour, for any project like this is bound to be subjective and evoke passion, as no one volume can do justice to the rich, food-laden streets of Delhi.

Not surprisingly, while I enjoyed going through the recipes — and the mouth-watering pictures by Karam Puri — I missed many of the dishes that, to my mind, are an essential part of street food. I would have liked reading recipes for Hyderabadi biryani and Dilli ki nihari. And I missed Odisha’s dahi vada aloo dum, a tasty dish of vadas topped with dum aloo.

Of course, most of the dishes she mentions are old favourites: from Banarasi tamatar chaat and ragda patties to Ram laddoos and Bombay sandwich. Ved, whose earlier books include one on samosas and another on tiffins, brings out the regional tweaks in some popular dishes: Maharashtra’s dahi papdi chaat, for instance, is flavoured with red garlic chutney, which you won’t find in Delhi, where some of the older stalls use yellow pepper in place of red chilli powder. Among the dishes I am still to try out are Bengal’s lal aloo Wai Wai — instant noodles served with potatoes in hot tomato gravy — and Manipur’s paknam: fish and leeks cooked in turmeric leaves. The book includes dishes that have moved out of their own regions into metros across the country. Momos, for instance, are a greatly popular street food dish but were hardly ever seen in Delhi’s street corners even 30 years ago. Ved also mentions sha phaley — Tibetan, meat-filled patties.

The recipes from Ved’s kitchen are innovative. The avocado taco chaat sounds especially good. She mixes diced avocado with onion, tomatoes, cucumber, green chillies, red chillies, chaat masala, cumin powder, lemon juice, peanuts, coriander leaves and salt, and then spoons this mix into taco shells, topping them with mint-coriander and date-tamarind chutneys.

There’s so much to write about that I can understand she would have had to pick and choose. But I still feel that some regions didn’t get the space they deserved. Take Kolkata, where street food is a way of life. In the busy office areas, you will find the streets humming with people and food. One of its most-loved street food dishes is the Dacres Lane chicken stew, a delightfully light dish of chicken cooked with chunky pieces of green papaya and carrots, served with buns. And a book on street food should include Delhi’s gola or sutli kebab, kebabs so soft that they have to be held together by a piece of thread or sutli, which is how it gets its name.

A book on a subject like this has to be a work in progress. I look forward to the next volume — and then the next.