It’s possible that I will die in Bangalore from overeating. Though most of the food we’re served at Mr. Das’s house is vegetarian, guests are also offered meat and fish dishes, and at least four different desserts, which are my weakness. Moreover, this happens three times a day: at 8:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 8:30 p.m. Here’s last night’s (Monday’s) dinner, served after we arrived. This is a “light” meal, as the largest meal is served at midday. Starting at 12 o’clock and going clockwise, the “drumstick vegetable” (aloo datta curry: Moringa oleifera), rice, ghee (clarified butter to be put on the rice), aloo dum (potatoes and other vegetables), daal (lentils) and (middle) chicken stew. This was accompanied by mango chutney.
As an appetizer, we had puffed bread (lucchi) and fried eggplant, which when plated looked like a smiley face.
Each dish is served to you by cooks, who repeatedly press you to take refills. Can you imagine?
The selection of desserts (I had at least a bit of each). From top: rosagoola (invented by Mr. Das’s great grandfather and now a pan-Indian sweet), gulab jamun, prabhu bhog (a cottage cheese sweet), and rasmalai (sweetened cheese balls sunk in a rich, cardamon-flavored milk sauce). Go here to see the full selection of sweets. As Mr. Das assures me, “each day something new will appear.”
I can assure you that these are the highest-quality Indian sweets I’ve ever had. You may think you’ve had a gulab jamun, but unless you’ve had the one made by K. C. Das, you’ve had an inferior version.
Labanga latika (sweet flour coating around a condensed milk filling, held together with cloves):
A close up of K. C. Das’s famous rossogolla:
Lunch today was a copious affair. Top row left to right: daal, unidentified vegetable, fish stew, shrimp, unidentified vegetable, spiced paneer (Indian cheese made from yogurt). Bottom row, right to left: fried onions with poppy seeds, unidentified vegetable, chicken, and rice. There were also chappatis (flattened circular bread), as I am north Indian in my choice of starch.
My post-dinner, pre-dessert sweet, a container of K. C. Das’s famous sweetened yogurt, with a thick creamy crust on top.
A plate of assorted sweets from the Das shop, with a rossogolla at top left. They tried to make me sample all of them, but I tried about four, and only a small bit of each:
For after that, there were more jamun, rossogolla., and prabhu bhugh. The only thing that can follow this is a nap. It’s said that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but in this case what doesn’t kill me will make me fatter!
The cats are fed equally well. They get fish and chicken with rice (I’m dubious about the rice) at 7:30 a.m., along with milk that has been boiled and cooled, and then chicken again at 4 p.m. Here’s Mr. Das cooking the fish (tilapia) in the morning:
The housecat Goonda (“rowdy”), who has but one functioning eye, awaits his breakfast:
The fish, chicken, and rice are distributed among plates. Each cat gets a separate plate to prevent intercat warfare:
One of the several feeding stations on the roof. Note that there are litterboxes as well; all the cats appear to be box-trained. Many more cats appeared in the afternoon feeding.
There are about 30 cats here, both feral and residential, but most live on the roofs or outside. (At one time there were 85 cats!) About a third of the present cats have names. I persuaded Mr. Das to call one of the unnamed ones “Jerry”. He objected that that cat, a lovely black one with white paws, was a female, but I told him that “Jerry” could be a woman’s name, and showed him a photo of Jerry Hall. That did the trick.
We think Jerry Coyne may be female, and serendipitously, have the variation “Gerri” waiting in the wings. As for the noms: I’m hungry now.
Amazing food, again. The latika also looks as if it has a face.
To me it looks like an unhappy cat.
I need to head over to my local Indian restaurant now. I’m so jealous.
Ditto.
A great cook and a zoo-etarian, by the looks of things. (What’s the generalization of “humanitarian” to all animals?)
So many mouths to feed. A very fine man.
If you are to die in Bangalore at least it will be a pleasant death.
Even the cat food made me hungry.
Thanks for pics!
I have been a resident of BENGALURU/BANGALORE for more than 5 decades, & i am glad the professor is visiting this town. However, it is disappointing that none of the colleges here invited him to give a talk on ‘Science vs Faith’.
My home town too. Will be surprised if he isn’t giving a talk at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) or the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS). Also, the thriving rationalist and popular science scene in Bangalore would have benefited from him.
But all this is predicated on the fact that Jerry isn’t vacationing in India to relax and intends to not have any academic/pop.sci commitments! 🙂
I should have announced that I was coming here a while back, but I didn’t, so now (and I have gotten last minute invitations), I don’t have much time to meet rationalists and scientists. I’ll do better next time!
The cats appear to have their own Adventure Playground on the roof, with all kinds of climbing surfaces and hiding places.
That yogurt looks especially delicious.
Having grown up in the UK, I was used to curry houses on every corner, and as a student used to cycle miles to get to my favourite samosas and jalebi. Now I’m in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, I have to make my own curries, and have even figured out a decent naan in a cast iron skillet. All the same, I am terminally jealous of PCC. Do keep the nom photos coming, and pay no attention to any questions of avoirdupois. It’s your duty to your readers…
The best Indian curry I’ve had was in a restaurant in Japan*. Though my Indian friend’s mother’s curry, and pretty much everything else she made, was delicious too. And often incredibly hot. And I like hot.
*I learned on that trip that India is a major vacation destination for many Japanese and that Indian cuisine is likewise popular there.
The cats’ dinner plates remind me of the brief time I spent slaving at one of the weirdest places on earth, especially for an atheist — a place called Isis Oasis, a run by a group of modern day Isis worshipers, where the people who ran the place dressed most of the time as if they’d been in the film Cleopatra and never took off their costumes. I hired on to feed and tend their menagerie of ocelots, servals, several other kinds of medium sized wild cats, emus, a large aviary of exotic birds, and a couple of goats and a llama; but rather quickly I became more of a temple slave because they had me slaving from sun up to sundown doing all kinds of labor not in my job description. The grand dame of the place insisted that the meals for her wild cats arrive at their cages plated as if they were being featured in Gourmet, so we prepared these large pans filled with hunks of raw and bloody meat, arranged just so, which were then artfully garnished with parsley sprigs or other herbs. Of course, once we brought the plates to the animals — and we had to directly enter most of the cages to put the food down — we’d be nearly mauled by the hungry felids who were just as likely to take a bite out of our hands or arms or legs before the pans hit the floor and we could escape. Some other workers did suffer injuries; luckily, I didn’t. The absurdity of her pretension was infuriating at the time; looking back, I find much humor in it. But the whole place was absolutely nuts. Wacky New Age groups would have retreats, each one nuttier than the next; then a convocation of Isis worshipers from near and far, including a completely dotty English Lady Something-or-Other, who was the international leader of the group and who, during one session, threw a large scarf over her head, went into a trance and became oracle, some collective delusory bullshit, though it definitely has time-honored roots. During this convocation, they also paid homage to Selket, the ancient Egyptian Scorpion goddess, and for the occasion, they’d obtained an absolutely magnificent, large, black, live African scorpion(which I could not identify). I decided to attend the ceremony because I was insatiably curious to see what was going down, so I ate some hashish — the only way I could endure this without bursting out laughing — and went, yet the hash only made it that much more difficult to suppress laughter and certainly did nothing to induce a situational suspension of disbelief. For the ceremony they put a glass pyramid (of course! Pyramid Magic) over the scorpion, placed it on the altar flanked with flowers and images of Egyptian deities, and most everyone in attendance strode up to the pyramid-enclosed scorpion and paid homage to the goddess. Working at this place and especially the Scorpion Ceremony constitute one of the craziest and most memorable experiences I’ve had, and I’ve had many.
That’s wild! And quite entertaining. 😉
Yum!
And can you believe that Jerry Hall ( human) has married that creep Rupert Murdoch!!?
The things people will do for money…
Isis worshippers, Bangladeshi food, Indian restaurants, science lectures, and a man who once sheltered 85 cats.
You never know what you will encounter on the blog “Why Evolution is True.”
🙂
Carl Kruse
You are going to the state of Orissa, right? Don’t ever say that Rossogolla was invented in Bengal, you may start a riot 😉
Writing from NCBS, Bangalore. Was in JNU, Delhi on Sunday. Was hoping to ‘accidently’ run into you.
There are worse ways than that of dying… 😀
Rice for cats prevents and/or treats diarrhea – otherwise, it is something of a filler with little nutritious value for cats.
Here Mr Das and his company are wading into very troubled <political waters. We Indians take our food seriously, but we take the sweets even more seriously. 🙂
Also, K. C. Das is hardly the last word on the gulab jamun. Granted, their version is better than the fare one can expect in the USA, but it can hardly compete with what local confectioners in the northern states (UP, Bihar, Delhi, etc.) produce. Which is understandable: Bengal may have some claim to having invented the “roshogulla”, but it has none on the gulab jamun.