You, most beloved…on the Erlangen campus there’s a big canteen, but outsiders — even employees — can’t eat there: you can only pay with a special card you have to apply for. I applied. No answer; the online form landed in a virtual no man’s land. Fixing it would have meant logging a ticket, and I decided it wasn’t worth the wait — there are other options on campus. Last time a local colleague had got hold of lunch vouchers for the project, but this time he was on holiday. On Monday another one took the whole group to the canteen and paid. On Tuesday: no vouchers, no invitation.
Sooo, on Tuesday at lunchtime I stepped out of the office determined to explore every restaurant on the campus — and as I stepped out I saw a food booth, apparently Indian, right in front of the door. I’m not fond of Indian food, mainly because of the cilantro, which I strongly dislike and only eat because it’s supposed to be one of the strongest heavy-metal detoxifiers. But I was hungry. I went over and found an Indian woman among her pots, checked the photos stuck to the front and saw chicken dumplings — chicken momo… I smiled and asked for them.
The woman said: ‘Chicken Momo am Mittwoch.’
With the fixed vision of dumplings in my head I didn’t even try to decode it: WWWas Mittwoch? A few seconds later, while she was showing me a weekly menu card, I decoded the “Mittwoch”. Still sunk in my dumpling vision, I asked her automatically: And what day is today? ‘Dienstag.’ Ach soooo…then please gimme butter chicken, I said, pointing at the photo. — ‘No butter chicken.’ — Then what chicken do you have? — ‘Vindaloo chicken…’ Seeing my suspicious look at the word, she showed me the vindaloo in the pot. It was a chicken stew with potatoes. Okaaay, I said, please gimme the vindaloo…. Then I spotted the photo with chickpeas and pointed at it — wanting to change — but she didn’t let me speak: ‘Ok, I’ll add some chickpea masala too….’
At that point I woke up from my momo vision, and the image of my mother saying ‘Whatever masala!’ flashed before the eyes of my mind. Infinite laughs…
It happened years ago, one summer when my brother came over from England and we met in Cluj. Paul loves cooking and wanted to show me how to make a vegetable curry with basmati rice — no cilantro, he promised. Indians, he explained, don’t thicken food with flour or starch but with finely chopped vegetables. So he bought a considerable amount of vegetables, the result being a pot of six or seven kilos of curry.
I ate once. It was good, but I didn’t faint with pleasure… He begged me to take a second portion. I said okaaaay…. and after that I was full and told him he could do whatever he wanted with the rest — I can’t eat that anymore — not that day, not any day….
Then he tried to sell it to my mother. My mother was a fierce culinary patriot, her patriotism covering East European cuisines and eventually South-Central Europe, but that was the maximum tolerance level. Asian food was admitted only within the limits of Turkish and Russian influence on Romanian gastronomy. The curry, with the very specific smell of its very specific spices, was way out of range — not to mention the basmati rice, which she said was dry and tasteless….
Her answer was that he could invite his friends to eat it, because that “whatever masala” made no sense to her.
The curry disappeared the same day. I assume Paul took her advice and tortured his friends with it.