As if we needed to know what was being fed to hte guests at Liz Hurley's wedding:
Actress Elizabeth Hurley is feeding her wedding guests obscure regional Indian cuisine adapted to the scarcity of the desert and rarely found in curry houses in the West.
Hurley is celebrating her wedding to Indian businessman Arun Nayar in Jodhpur, the main city of the arid Marwar region bordering India's Great Thar Desert, where people have mastered ekeing hearty meals out of a parched land.
"You have to develop a taste for it," said Kiran Arora, executive chef at Jodhpur's Taj Hari Mahal hotel, where some of Hurley's guests are staying. "They are all very simple dishes."
Most items on the menu will be unfamiliar to people used to eating tandoori fare at Western curry houses. Marwari food is traditionally vegetarian, though it has been broadened in recent times to include meat dishes.
The cuisine developed in one of the hottest corners of India, the Rajasthan province, in an age when cows were plentiful but refrigerators not yet invented, so milk and its products had to be used up quickly.
Lashings of sweet buttermilk are used instead of water, which is scarce, to make gravies and sauces in many of the dishes that will be served to Hurley's guests on Friday at the Meherangarh Fort, said Arora, whose colleagues have been planning the meals.
Dal bhati churma is perhaps the quintessential Marwari dish, in which tough, wheat dumplings are bashed into crumbs and mixed into a soup of savory lentils.
Whear dumplings and lentil soup. Oooooh, yum yum I don't think.
No comments:
Post a Comment