table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Indian summer (No curry powder was harmed while writing this column.)

(Aug. 16, 2007)  I arrived in New York in the late summer of 1960. John Cage, theavant gardecomposer with whom I’d come to study, was already a legendary presence, attracting not just musicians but a dedicated following of painters, poets and what would come to be called “performance artists” (although none of us called ourselves that). Cage’s philosophical blend of chance, Zen Buddhism, irreverence and noise was like electricity in the air, and we had a sense we were shaping history.

So whatever John Cage did, we all did. And that summer, Cage was eating Indian food.

Ginger Beer

GALLERY >

Indian cuisine had established a toehold in Harlem, and there was one block on 125th Street with half a dozen tiny restaurants. They offered excellent, cheap meals, and when I could afford to eat out, $1.25 bought a curry (lamb keema, chicken khorma, beef koftas or shrimp vindaloo, for instance), a dish of dhal (spicy lentil porridge), mixed vegetable bhurta and rice, with hot and sweet pickles (including a fresh liquid chutney of coriander or mint). For a quarter more, there was alu paratha, a pan-fried bread with spiced potato filling.

Another element unique to those meals was A&J Jamaica Ginger Beer . It was the least sugary soft drink I’ve ever tasted, profoundly gingery and unfiltered — cloudy , not transparent! Long after I left New York I searched for something comparable. Most “ginger beers” are a syrupy joke. While there are good ginger ales, like Blenheim and Outrageous , nothing has ever come close to the intensity of that brew — until now. In the British section at Murphy’s Sunnybrae Market (odd bottles with amateurish labels) — Reggae Country Style Brand Ginger Beer , $1.39 a bottle. It’s the real thing : profoundly ginger, minimal sugar (no corn syrup I can detect), non-filtered and cloudy, it has enough character to stand up to an intensely spicy meal, and thus is the ultimate accompaniment to Indian food.

It was an unspoken requirement for membership in John Cage’s circle that we cook Indian food as well. So we invited each other over to taste our concoctions, and reciprocity meant there was no way I could avoid learning to cook.

I had never cooked anything. I went to a “remainders” bookstore on 42nd Street and found, for 50 cents, a small yellow book, Savitri Chowdhary’s Indian Cooking , which became a lifelong companion.

I was lucky. There is no cuisine on earth so adaptable, so versatile or so forgiving. I learned from Shri Chowdhary three important things:

1. Forget curry powder. It is not authentic. It is an all-purpose concoction the British used because they were too lazy to prepare a proper garam masala , or to use the variety of spices that make each dish individual and special.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 NEXT PAGE >SHARE