It was his recipe for seekh kebab, which called for throwing some garlic, mint, coriander, chillies, lemon and salt into a blender. Pretty regular stuff so far. And then came the kicker – half a cup of fried onions. Not fresh, not sauteed, but fried and rich with the flavour of caramelised goodness. The resultant mix, more of a paste, smelled glorious and tasted even better.
I consider myself a food enthusiast. And with the exception of eggplants – or anything with the texture of mulch (no offence to eggplant enjoyers, but also, why?) – I will eat pretty much anything put in front of me. But never before have I felt compelled to gulp down spoonfuls of a spice mix just by itself. Not until I found myself standing in my kitchen with Masalamandi by Sadaf Hussain, spoon in hand, the paste clinging to it, wondering if it was acceptable to ditch the whole kebab-making process and just eat this stuff as is.
Sadaf Hussain
Masalamandi: A Guide to the World of Indian Spice Blends
Penguin India, 2024
Having spent many (if not all) afternoons after school watching every cookery and travel show produced between 2008 and 2014 on every television channel – TLC, NDTV Good Times, Fox Traveller, Food Food, you name it, I had seen it – I had somehow never come across this recipe before.
Convinced of having learned the cooking equivalent of the world’s most well-guarded secret, and to preserve the last vestiges of self-respect after drooling over the marinade, I proceeded to actually make the kebabs.
Buoyed by the sheer accuracy of the recipe – a sniff of the marinade was enough to bring back memories of delicate Old Delhi kebabs – some of my friends had the pleasure (or misfortune) of witnessing the process via photos. When I was done going over the steps, printed on paper this time instead of being dictated to me from a phone, I had ten mouth-watering kebabs in front of me – and five hungry individuals on the other end of the phone in possession of several enticing photos, but no kebabs to eat.
I, on the other hand, was exhilarated.
The fried onion – sweet, nutty and impossibly delicious – added volumes of flavour to an otherwise well-known combination of ingredients for a humble green chutney. And that is what this book teaches you. “The beauty of our spice blends is that, in most dishes in Indian cuisine, a single whole spice is never the star – it is the combination that shines,” Hussain writes.
Masalamandi is, more than anything else, a manifesto of spices. It tells you that at the heart of every dish, from butter chicken to qorma and from vindaloo to chaat, it is the same handful of spices that form the backbone of flavour, each rendered unique with some additions and omissions. It makes sense then that Hussain has listed 12 recipes of chaat masala alone in a book of 450+ spice blends.
Also read: A Feast Through Time and the Essence of Delhi’s Cuisine
This is not his first book. Three years after making it to the top eight contestants on Masterchef India in 2016, Hussain published Daastan-e-Dastarkhan, which focussed on Indian Muslim food. He chose 30 recipes commonly found in Muslim households to broaden the vantage point from which the food from his community is seen.
Often pigeonholed into biryanis and kebabs, Hussain, in Daastan-e-Dastarkhan, wrote, “No doubt, these dishes are the brand ambassadors of Muslim cuisine, and one will most definitely be served at least one of these two dishes at a Muslim house, but there is a range of vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes with complex backgrounds and interesting origins that most people know little of…My aim is to broaden the horizon of what we know about Muslim cooking.” While his first book did not have a single recipe for biryani, Masalamandi, which feels like its natural extension, has 37.
What I love about Masalamandi is that it doesn’t suffer from the one-clove-of garlic-and-half-tsp-of-chilli syndrome that many new age recipes and cookery shows exhibit. How are those quantities going to meaningfully flavour anything? What exactly are these amounts supposed to achieve? A whisper of spice? A gentle nod towards flavour? Masalamandi teaches you to use spices like they should be used – generously.
My only gripe with the book is that it doesn’t list whole recipes for each dish, for some you only get the spice mix it should be made with. But Hussain explains why he made this choice. “In that way, the book isn’t mukkamal (complete), it is adhoora (half). The idea is to leave room for your creativity,” he writes.
Also read: Curry on Regardless: Culinary Conflicts That Take the Cake
Hussain dedicates a few pages to how spices can be treated in different ways. He talks about a ‘layered’ approach where whole spices, added directly to oil in the beginning, form the foundational flavour profile of the dish, while toasted and powdered spices are added later to introduce top notes of fragrance and complexity. This is what adds depth to any dish. Obvious, yet revelatory.
Sadaf Hussain. Photo: Facebook/Sadaf Hussain
Masalamandi is not apologetic in attempting to document the history of ‘Indian’ food. In fact, Hussain ventures to settle an age-old debate: Is vegetarian biryani simply pulao? No. He writes that many historians have pointed out references to a recipe for ‘Zer Biryani Noormahali’ or paneer biryani. “This puts a stop to the age-old argument that vegetarian biryani is not biryani,” Hussain says categorically. In more earth-shattering news for biryani purists, who think that without meat it is something lesser, pulao was considered the superior rice dish in that era.
In the introduction to the book, Hussain writes that his parents always knew he would grow up to do something in the culinary world. “They also rightly predicted that I would one day write a book on spices and give them the respect they deserve. And here we are.” It is only fitting then, that in a book dedicated to his mother, grandmother and the family sil batta (mortar and pestle), the first recipe is called ‘Ammi’s Biryani’. And like his recipe for seekh kebab, it changes everything.
