Book Review: Once Upon A Plate – The Recipes and Memories of an Unhurried Cook, by Radhika Ramachandran

Do you know how Chicken 65 originated? Radhika Ramchandran’s cookbook Once Upon A Plate tells me that in 1965, when hostilities between India and Pakistan were on, Chennai’s famous chef A. M. Buhari came up with this delicious non-vegetarian dish that could be prepared instantly and served to soldiers. The resulting dish draws its name from the year in which it was invented. Or is it called Chicken 65 because it is made by cutting chicken into 65 pieces? Or did its name come about because a 65 day old chicken was used to prepare it? Once Upon A Plate is not conclusive on this point, but it doesn’t really matter. The eye-watering photo of a plate of chicken 65 and the accompanying recipe ensure that one is focused more on preparing a plate of Chicken 65 than resolve the mystery behind its name.

A cookbook they say, is made not just of paper, but carries with it the author’s sweat, grime from her kitchen, fragrant aromas wafting from her oven, the burnt smell of experiments that went wrong and sounds of grateful lips smacking in appreciation.

In the case of Radhika Ramachandran, Once Upon A Plate – The Recipes and Memories of an Unhurried Cook also has buried in it generations of inherited kitchen wisdom and culinary dust gathered from across the world. Ramachandran, a lawyer cum cook, has poured her heart and soul into this coffee table cookbook, which has been many years in the baking. Once Upon A Plate is more than just a collection of recipes. Rather, ‘it stands conveniently at the beautiful intersection of a cookbook and a food memoir’. It lovingly describes how Ramachandran inherited a passion for cooking, how the time spent with her grandmother laid the seeds for her motivation to write Once Upon A Plate for which she spent years accumulating recipes in meticulous detail. Ramachandran’s English is simple and unadorned and her instructions straightforward.

Ramachandran has her roots in Andhra, spent her childhood in various cantonments across India, went to law school in Bengaluru, married a Bengali man who too has a military background and much later moved to Nigeria where she lives even now. Once Upon A Plate draws on the culinary traditions of all these places.

There are recipes for chutneys, pickles, dips, sauces, salads, dozens of south Indian vegetarian dishes, many chicken, fish, mutton dishes from across the world, including Iran, Pakistan and Nigeria, breads and biriyanis and other rice dishes and more than enough desserts to satisfy any sweet tooth anywhere in the world.

One of the best bits about Once Upon A Plate is that it is almost autobiographical and Ramachandran’s background is truly fascinating. Ramachandran’s maternal grandfather BDP Rao was a military doctor in the British Indian army who was awarded an MBE for his exemplary service in World War II. Her maternal grandmother Anasuya Rao hailed from a Zamindari family. All four of their children became doctors.  Ramachandran received from her ammamma lessons in mythology, cookery, proper demeanour and Sai Bhajans. Ramachandran’s mother and her two sisters, all doctors at one time, formed a close-knit group of strong opinionated women and there is little doubt that Ramachandran is cut from the same cloth.

As the daughter of two army officers and granddaughter of an army general, Ramachandran who grew up in ‘magical cantonments’ where many evenings were spent at the Officer’s Mess and Army Clubs such as the Defence Services Officers’ Institute and various Rajendra Sinji Institutes.

 Isn’t the proof of the pudding in the eating? Well, I made Bhuna Gosht using the recipe from Once Upon A Plate and it’s lip smacking good, though I ended up deviating a bit from Ramachandran's toolkit - mainly in that the mutton I used was chopped into small pieces. Here’s a photo:

Once Upon A Plate is beautiful coffee table book which can adorn any drawing room. It runs to over 550 odd pages, has hundreds of photographs of the finished dishes and a painstakingly prepared index at the end which will be very useful to any reader.

I do encourage all my readers to acquire a copy of this beautiful book which will not only be useful in cooking tasty dishes, but can be passed on lovingly to future generations.

Once upon A Plate is available on Amazon and at Notion Press.