The Wandering Gastronome

Pamela Timms explores the delights of Old Delhi in a delicious tale full of feasts, friends and forgotten recipes

Much like its rich, indulgent street food, Old Delhi is considered exciting only in small doses by those who hail from the city’s more planned parts. In a happy reversal, Pamela Timms found her sanctuary in the walled city’s streets, which teem with chaos, surprise and adventure. Moving here from grey Scotland in 2005, Timms found herself in a sanitised version of India—the expat colonies of south Delhi. It was the food and the people of this sheher which offered an alternate idea of her new home.

In Korma, Kheer and Kismet, her culinary chronicle of five seasons in Old Delhi, Timms writes of how she and her husband would escape here ‘whenever we needed a break from our dysfunctional farmhouse and lose ourselves in the crowds, a world and several centuries away from our screaming landlady and kitchen full of fake appliances… Dagobert D Runes once observed that “people travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home”, but for us, nowhere was this less true than in Old Delhi, where absolutely nothing reminded us of home.’

Through Timms’ jaunts and her hundreds of rickshaw rides, we experience her leap of faith into a world of food that would never pass a health inspection and of unlikely friendships. Intrepidly embracing food prepared right above a gurgling naala, paying no heed to the white heat of Delhi summers, walking into strangers’ houses at 4 am, she is relentless in her search for Old Delhi recipes. Timms lists them at the end of each chapter, but this does not chip away at their magic; almost always, they contain unknowns such as ‘Allah’s blessings,’ additions of spices quantified as ‘Aisa hi hai’ and even moonlight.

Timms is the kind of person you’d like to be stuck with on a hot, listless afternoon. She is observant and detail-oriented, and she has a penchant for finding the amusing in the mundane. A comical scene features Mr Naseem, a friend of Timms’ landlord, and his ingenious, henna-ed comb-over that is a ‘startling bright orange approximation of a full head of hair’. In this chapter, set during a clammy monsoon, she writes: ‘The pinkness of the room only enhanced his orange hair, which was faring badly in the humidity. A whirring fan was wreaking havoc on the carefully arranged strands; every so often an entire flap of hair at the back of his head would rise then slap back down. Eventually, it refused to resume its correct position and fell, moist and lifeless, on his shoulder.’

Korma, Kheer and Kismet is as much about Timms’ love for food as it is about her affection for Old Delhi’s people. Timms leads us to wonderful characters: a gangster korma cook; a kheer maker who talks only in cricket metaphors; the dozen sleeping people crammed into a shanty that produces daulat-ki-chat, a source with no daulat of its own at all. Among all the people she finds and befriends, Mr Naseem has the best advice on how to respond when plied with endless plates of food in Old Delhi: ‘“Do not is-stop your hand!”’

As Timms herself says, however, her book is not a guide to eating through Old Delhi. It does not discipline its commotion into a neat grid and tell you where to eat. Instead, Timms draws upon her European love of aimless ambling, so that a kick of serendipity leads her to ‘macroons’ made from desiccated coconut and glacé cherries. Though korma, kebabs, kheer and paranthas remain the big heroes of Old Delhi fare, the surprises are Delhi’s oldest Durga Puja food, old-fashioned bakeries and versions of dainty English sandwiches. For, even in a place that once seemed nothing like her native country, Timms finds a sliver of home.

Ultimately, Old Delhi shows her and us that street food cannot be removed from its environment; without its setting, it sags. Also, in spite of all its glory and vibrancy, it is incidental. The temporal nature of the book is not just about the seasons but also the pulse of each day: ‘In the grand Old Delhi scheme of things, you are small fry, an inconsequential by-product of what you perceive to be picturesque, exotic, mind-boggling but for those who live and work there, it’s just… well, life.’

Five Seasons In Old DelhiKheer and KismetKormaPamela Timms