Ugly Delicious Discovers Indian Food

We are watching the new season of Ugly Delicious with David Chang, which was released by Netflix last week. In the first episode, he documents his wife's pregnancy and the birth of his new son. Needless to say, they were the first humans ever to experience this amazing process, or at least that would be your impression if you didn't have other ideas of your own. There were some amusing scenes with babies eating Chang's gourmet baby food experiments, otherwise this episode is a bit hard to take.

In the second episode, Chang discovers Indian food, with help from Padma Lakshmi, Madhur Jaffrey, and several food critics, restaurateurs, and others. He visits restaurants and street-food stalls in New York and India, interviews a number of people, and is overall awe-struck by how delicious everything is even if it's sometimes ugly. The contrast between Indian home cooking and restaurant cooking is emphasized with visits to several families in New York and in North Carolina.

Despite my sarcastic view of his ego, I enjoyed the episode pretty much, and I'm including a few screen shots to show you what I liked.

Madhur Jaffrey interviewed for the show. She's now 86 years old, and has
had a stunning career as a film star, cookbook writer, and memoirist.

Just a few seconds showing Madhur Jaffrey on her BBC food show in the 1970s. 

Street food in India is featured in Chang's travel tales.

We see lots of Indian restaurant food in both New York and India.

Lots and lots of exotic dishes and unfamiliar spices.

Reading More about Indian Food

Curry: A Tale of Cooks & Conquerors

If you would like to know more about the global history of Indian food, I would recommend the book Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham, which I have written about before (link). Collingham provides details about a number of places where curry has been adopted into non-Indian cuisines, a topic that Chang touches on very briefly in the episode of Ugly Delicious.

I would also recommend a fascinating article about butter chicken, an Indian restaurant dish that's very popular in both India and the Indian diaspora in the English-speaking world. "Butter Chicken: Even When It’s Bad, It’s Good!" by Sho Spaeth was published in Serious Eats last week, at just about the same time as the new episodes of Ugly Delicious were released.

Spaeth credits the chef, Kundan Lal, at the restaurant Modi Mahal in Delhi, India with the invention of butter chicken. After describing this dish as "tender chunks of chicken meat swimming in a mildly spiced tomato-based sauce, enriched with enough butter and cream to suggest the cook who made it loves you," he continues with some research into its invention:

"Moti Mahal is no longer a single restaurant; rather, it is an international chain, with outposts all over the world. But the original Moti Mahal, located in the Daryaganj neighborhood of Delhi, is still open today, still serving the same murgh makhani—that is, butter chicken—that Gujral created in the late 1940s."

Monish Gujral, Kundan Lal's grandson wrote a book about his grandfather's invention. According to Spaeth, Gujral credits Lal not only with the innovation of cooking chicken in a tandoori oven, but also:

"In the process of creating tandoori chicken, simply by using an oven traditionally used for bread to cook meat, Kundan Lal created the entire category of tandoori cooking, which Gujral suggests is the equivalent of creating an entire cuisine."

Despite my criticisms, and despite my belief that there are much better places to learn about food, I find Ugly Delicious and David Chang to be very enjoyable and will be watching the other episodes soon!

This review is written for maefood dot blog spot dot com, © 2020 mae sander.