FOOD SPECIAL ......Culinary comics

Culinary comics   Food in Graphic Detail Culinary comics aren’t about actual recipes. But what happens when the always popular food writing genre meets the hugely new popular world of graphic novels?     Every week a new Indian cookbook seems to thud onto bookshop shelves. They are heavy, high priced and have lavish photographs of the food and, of course, the author. A lot of effort has clearly gone into doing them, yet I sometimes wonder if their focus is really the food and cooking – and all those pictures are one reason for my doubts. Food photography is expensive and hard. You need to have someone to cook and style the food, and even then it can be hard to make it look good. Indian food is particularly tough since, as one stylist once admitted to me, it tends to be “yellow glop and brown glop and green glop.” The usual tactic is to use lot of ethnic accessories (old pots and artfully scattered spices) or extreme close-ups. Either way, the end result rarely helps you understand how to make the dish, or even why you would want to. There is a place for food and cameras and that is on the internet. YouTube videos can be really useful to help you understand tricky tasks like how to clean banana flowers or the deft hand movements essential for the making of Indian breads. But static photos in books are nearly useless and usually add quite a bit to the printing costs. As I turn the pages of these new volumes I find myself muttering: “why didn’t they save the money and use drawings instead?” Of course, good illustrations aren’t, and shouldn’t be, cheap, but would cost much less than most food photography and are a lot more useful in showing you how to cut, knead, shape or do the other intricate actions involved in cooking. Yamuna Devi used them to good effect in her book, Lord Krishna’s Cuisine, and Alan Davidson insisted on only using line drawings in his magisterial Oxford Companion to Food and his three authoritative guides to seafood. SIMPLE FOOD & PICTURES Imight be predisposed towards illustrated recipes because they were how I started cooking. When I was growing up, my mother got a copy of Look! I Can Cook, a cookbook for children created by Angela Burdick and first published in 1972. It was a large book with cheerful cartoons showing three kids making a range of dishes from around the world, including Greek moussaka, Irish soda bread, Jewish pot roast, French croque-monsieur, lots of egg dishes and of course, many desserts. The pictures were simple, but sufficient and, while carefully acknowledging adult concerns by insisting on having them around to light fires and supervise use of knives, still pushed kids to do quite a bit of cooking – and not just kids, my mother says she used the recipes since they were so simple, the results reliably good and the tone of the book just made you want to try. CULINARY COMICS All these are the tests for a good cookbook and it makes me really sad that at some point over the years we lost Look! I Can Cook. It is no longer in print and second-hand copies retail online for startling sums, which suggests that quite a few other people also learned to cook from and to value the book. Recently though I’ve been rediscovering the joys of illustrated food through culinary comics. These aren’t about actual recipes, though some include them, but what happens when the always popular food writing genre meets the hugely new popular world of graphic novels. This is still a relatively new intersection, but there are already recognisable sub-categories like the personal history and the dystopian novel where the hero tries to survive in a world gone crazy, but with a food twist. Lucy Knisley’s Relish is the first kind, a charmingly illustrated story of her growing up told through the food she ate. Her mother was a caterer and involved in the farmer’s market movement while her father was a gourmet who took her travelling so the food was pretty good, like the braised foie gras for which she deployed her cute-kid skills to beg from the plates of family friends when they came to dine. But she doesn’t deny the pleasures of junk food, which she indulges in much to the horror of her parents: “after all, some of the finest gourmet foods are terribly unhealthy,” she says unrepentantly. MORE STORIES The only problem with Relish is that it’s a bit light on story. Chew and Get Jiro! are the opposite: tons of story and no time wasted on charm or recipes. These are firmly in dystopian territory – Chew, for example, involves a world where eating chicken is a crime, leading to a black market in it. People have special food-related powers like the hero, Tony Chu, who can sense what happened to any food he ate, except beetroot, which is what he has to live on to avoid being overwhelmed by sensations. Since he is a detective, he realises he can use this ability if he takes bites of the corpses he has to deal with. Get Jiro! is also set in a food dominated future, but with pointed links to the present. It is written by Anthony Bourdain, the acerbic American food writer and ex-chef, who satirises two major restaurant trends: the global ultra gourmet chain and the hyper-local, food-origin focussed restaurant. Los Angeles in the future is food obsessed and the chefs behind these restaurants – who closely resemble real people, like Alice Waters, the local food guru – are war lords, staking out their turf and fighting ideological food battles. Jiro is a loner sushi chef who just wants to do his own thing, but gets sucked into the war. It is terrific fun in a gory, gourmet way, starting with Jiro decapitating a diner who asks for California rolls, a kind of sushi that is popular but despised by purists. The vivid artwork, by Langdon Foss, takes into account minute food details, like the way all the rice grains in the sushi are lined up the same way. JAPANESE FARE But when it comes to sushi, and anything related to Japanese food, nothing can beat Oishinbo, one of the longest running manga strips, which is devoted to food. Manga, the Japanese comics that are read right to left, are so important in Japan that its not surprising that they include themes like food, and there are others, like Antique Bakery, a madcap series about four cute guys running a patisserie, or The Drops of Gods, a series on wine that has the real life impact of sending sales of any brand it mentions soaring sky high. Oishinbo is devoted to Japanese cuisine and is simply one of the best efforts I have ever seen to explain and chronicle the food of a country. It uses an often silly, but engaging story line of a moody young journalist who has to come up with an “ultimate menu” of Japanese food for his newspaper, helped by a colleague who becomes his girlfriend, but pitted against his estranged father, who is a famous gourmet trying to create a similar menu for a rival paper. This enables them to travel across Japan sampling and promoting traditional local delicacies and techniques. Oishinbo stretches to many volumes in Japanese, but the main stories have been published in English grouped in themes like seafood, vegetables, ramen noodles and pub food. This means the storyline can get a bit confusing, but this doesn’t matter since the focus is firmly on the food. Oishinbo details the extraordinary delicacy of Japanese food, where the faintest of aromas can differentiate dishes and the actual plates on which it is served are as important, but it doesn’t ignore simpler, but very satisfying foods like those in the ramen and pub food books. The drawing is excellent and the only problem is that it leaves you with (a) an acute craving for Japanese food, and (b) a desire to read all the books – I was barely one-third through the first when I went online to order the rest. FOODLES The third problem with Oishinbo is that it really makes you wish someone could do the same for Indian food. Graphic novels are a rapidly growing genre here too, but most of its practitioners seem intent on highly intellectual themes, and I don’t see them getting into the simpler, yet so important world of food. But I hope this will change, and one person who might do it is my friend Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, who was an animator before leaving that to focus on building a new career in food. She now runs her own food teaching studio, but tells me that of late she has been getting the urge to combine her past career with her current one. This urge has been taking the form of what she calls Foodles – recipes in picture form that she has been doodling. They are charming, much in Lucy Knisley’s style, and Rushina plans to take them further, perhaps into a cookbook. I hope this happens, whether with illustrated stories or lucid depictions of how to make food. It could be the start of many more such projects, inspiring more graphic artists to get to work drawing out Indian food in the way it deserves.  Vikram Doctor ET130919