Peta Mathias and Julie Le Clerc met at Le Clerc's first book launch in 1998. Photo / Emma Bass
"Oh gorgeous!"
"Oooh, it's decorated at the top!"
"Isn't it beautiful!"
Three mango lassis have been delivered to our table at Sandringham's Satya restaurant, and Peta Mathias and Julie Le Clerc are fussing over them as one might over a small child dressed as a fairy or a tiny dancing dog.
"I might have to take a little photo," Mathias enthuses. "We take photos of everything!"
Plates of dahi puri - the crispy crackers topped with a potato and chickpea mix, yoghurt and tamarind chutney that Satya is famous for - Hyderbadi lamb and a dosa and various dips and a dhal arrived soon after, causing further excitement. This is just as well. These fellow cooks, much-published authors and old friends have chosen Satya, one of Auckland's more praised eating places, not only because they love its food but because they have just made a book together, singing the praises of India and its fare.
Hot Pink Spice Saga isn't just a cookbook. It's a travelogue (written mostly by Mathias) and a collection of excellent photographs taken by Le Clerc as well as recipes the pair collected from those they met while travelling together through India last year. Over three months the duo ate their way from Delhi to Jaipur, Ahilya Fort, Goa, Kolkata, Darjeeling and finally to Fort Cochin.
The result is (yes) a colourful, rollicking and idio-syncratic memoir with recipes of an odyssey around a country Le Clerc fell in love with back in 1984 as a 20-year-old beginning her OE. Travelling overland from Kathmandu to London, she went through Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Greece and central Europe. However, it was India that most captured her imagination.
"There's nothing like India, it's so wild," Le Clerc says. "What I love is that it just makes you feel alive. Even if you're feeling shock and horror at some of the things you see, there's fascination and delight and wonderment too; you definitely know you're alive. You're feeling these things in a very strong way. It's not just like 'oh that's pretty', because the extremes are so extreme and I love that feeling of the pulse racing. It's really ... it's extraordinary."
Mathias first travelled to India in 2005 to make a television programme on tea and has visited every year since, now leading culinary tours for "gastro-nomads" to the country (she does similar gastronomic tours to Morocco, Italy, Basque country and around New Zealand). She writes, in Hot Pink Spice Saga, that India is a land of colour, noise, laughter, poverty, fabulous food and beautiful clothes.
"Indians are very likeable and charming and funny," she says, dipping her spoon in her mango lassi. "So you have relationships with all sorts of people, from the tuk-tuk driver to the Prince, and they're all equally open and generous and they're all incredibly knowledgeable about food in a way that we can't imagine in New Zealand. They're taught from birth to be knowledgeable about food."
"And," says Le Clerc, "they're very proud of their cuisine and they want to share it."
"Nobody ever says 'no you can't come to my house'," Mathias adds. "That just doesn't exist. Nobody ever says 'no I'm not going to cook for you'."
"It's almost the opposite," Le Clerc says. "They just want to overfeed you and you can't say no: you just eat and eat and eat."
Photos / Julie Le Clerc
It comes as no surprise that these old friends, and now old India hands, met at a book launch. Le Clerc has published 14 cookbooks, while Mathias has published eight, a mix of tomes on food, philosophy and travel. So for them to have met at a publishing industry do was probably inevitable. But, as Le Clerc tells it, the friendship had a slightly, well, impulsive beginning.
"How did we meet? Peta gatecrashed my book launch back in 1998, the launch party for my first book!" says Le Clerc hooting. "But I was honoured. She's been gatecrashing my book launches ever since."
On the face of it, theirs makes for a slightly unexpected friendship. True they have much in common: both are cooks, authors, have had their own television food shows and are travellers. But Mathias, with her wild red hair, colourful wardrobe and "preposterous" (her word) chandelier earrings, is famously flamboyant. Le Clerc, who wears her hair in a neat black bob and is perhaps best known for her delicious baking, has always seemed less outre, shall we say.
But these differences are complementary. "Julie managed to put up with me," Mathias says of the Indian odyssey, "with my tantrums. Julie is very easy to get on with so I try to let that influence me!" She laughs wildly. "We've known each other for 20 years," Le Clerc adds. "We were very compatible, it was very easy. And fun."
It is probably just as well that their sort-of opposites attract. Although their love of India is evident on on every page and in every image of their book, and as Mathias writes, they share their "view of the country - friends, recipes, interiors, special places close to our hearts and stories of our adventures", the trip wasn't without its rigours and frustrations, including visa troubles.
The duo's journey for the book incorporated two back-to-back culinary tours run by Mathias. She's done them every year since 2008 after friends who now manage the The Lodhi, a luxury hotel in Delhi, suggested it.
However, her plans for preparing the book with Le Clerc, combining their travel and the tours (which Le Clerc joined) almost ended in a terrible tangle of Indian red tape.
Mathias had applied for a visa for the trip while in France where she lives in the summer, meaning that she was applying at the Indian embassy in Paris as a foreigner living in France. This, she writes, was one complication too many for the embassy. As it turned out, she was able to get a month-long visa on arriving in India, but this wasn't long enough and, as the book reveals, a farce as epic as the vast country of India played out when she tried to have it extended.
In the end the solution to the visa problem was completely bonkers: she had to come home to get one.
After telling Le Clerc to buy a red wig in case she had to take the culinary tours herself, Mathias flew back to New Zealand to try to have her visa renewed here. One of the people she rang once she had touched down in Auckland was the owner of Satya, Swamy Akuthota. She also called her MP, who apparently arranged for a good word to put in by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Three days later the accursed visa finally turned up and the following day she got back on a plane to India.
Photos / Julie Le Clerc
The journey from Darjeeling in the very north of India to Kolkata - Calcutta as the British called it - is just over 600km and takes just an hour by air.
By train it takes much, much longer. In one of the last adventures in the book, Le Clerc and Mathias decided to do this journey and, as it reads in Hot Pink Spice Saga, it was a laugh-out-loud disaster.
There were two major problems. The first was that by this stage of the trip Le Clerc had terrible back problems and was in agony. The second was the train itself. They had been advised to go sleeper rather than first class. However, when they got on the train they discovered it wasn't a sleeper for two but for four and they had room mates, two Indian men. Le Clerc took valium for her back, which made the passage somewhat easier for her. Mathias, who passed up the offer of valium from Le Clerc, did it unaided.
"So I suffered badly," Mathias groans. "It was disgusting. We had flatmates! We paid top dollar for a sleeper. They told us that sleeper was even better than first class, that's why we should get sleeper.
"So there were bunks," continues Le Clerc. "And there were two men who'd paid for the top bunks. But it was daytime, so they didn't need to be sleeping, so they sat on our bunks!
They both laugh. "We actually didn't know that we were supposed to turn our bunks into seats," continues Mathias. "We were so shocked we just lay down for 12 hours. So they had to stay on their bunks upstairs.
But Julie would go to sleep and wake to find one of them sitting on her feet."
There is much more about the train trip in the book, a section that Mathias wrote as it happened; this certainly helps the reader get a real sense of the experience.
"That's the great thing about not getting any funding from any tourism boards: you can say what you like," Mathias says.
Despite these experiences, Le Clerc says travelling in India isn't really that difficult. "It's not arduous, it's just completely different to what you could ever imagine. Like the toilets on the train," - Mathias hoots loudly as Le Clerc says this - "you just can't imagine that it's going to be that bad."
By now, Le Clerc will be back in India. After last year's adventures with Mathias, she worked for four months at The Lodhi, the Delhi hotel run by those friends of Mathias, Robyn Bickford and Manav Garewal. Le Clerc loved it and she begins a second four-month stint at The Lodhi this month.
Le Clerc has a long food CV: she has owned and run two successful cafes and a boutique catering company, has been a private chef in Europe and New York, a television presenter and, of course, has written 15 cookbooks, some of which have won awards.
However, at The Lodhi, where her main focus was on the bakery (though with some cheffing), she was working with 60 male chefs and there was a "tiny bit of apprehension" about being fully accepted. In the end she enjoy the experience immensely.
"I'm going back to a wedding," she tells me. "One of the chefs at the hotel has invited me to his wedding. He got a promotion and he thinks it's because of what I taught him, which it partly is.
"So he just decided that I am the VIP. [The wedding] goes on for about five or six days, it's very over-the-top and I'm the guest of honour. When he met his bride-to-be for the first time - because it was all arranged - the first thing he did was take a photo and send it to me for me approval, even before his own parents!"
For the book, Le Clerc and Mathias certainly ate flash food prepared in flash hotel kitchens like the one Le Clerc is working in. However, one of the most astonishing places they ate was at a restaurant called 1135AD, situated in the Amber Fort (or palace) on the outskirts of Jaipur. 1135AD (it's named for the year the dynasty that built the fort was founded) offers diners an experience that is beyond lavish: depending on your budget you can have one or two elephants greet you when you arrive, you can choose between silver and gold cutlery and there are chairs made from solid - not plated - silver. "You can't move fast if you need to get away from a gropey waiter," Mathias laughs. There is a choice of two menus, one with 200 dishes, the other with 300. The food is apparently amazing.
However, some of the simplest but best meals were prepared in the most primitive of kitchens and served in humble surroundings, they say.
"Our tuk-tuk driver's wife was one of the best cooks we came across and she cooked on a mud floor on her haunches. She cooked the most beautiful, beautiful food."
Mathias believes food, which is "the shortcut to love", will tell you everything you need to know about a country.
"Food is the best way to access a country if you can't speak the language, you don't look like them, you don't dress like them, you don't have the same customs. But a fast way of finding out what they're like and what their history is, is by eating their food. We think the first thing you should do when you get to a foreign country is to start eating their food. Don't go into the hotel and eat the continental breakfast, eat what they eat because it tells a story.
"It speaks of history," adds Le Clerc, "It speaks of culture, it speaks of what grows locally."
"And it makes people talk to each other," Mathias concludes. "If you have nothing else in common, you talk about food."
Serves 4
For the pakoras
(makes about 16 little ones):
100g chickpea flour
25g rice flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
½ tsp garam masala
¼ tsp red chilli powder
1 Tbsp lemon juice
2 cups vegetable oil for deep-frying
For the yoghurt curry:
2 Tbsp ghee
8 whole cloves
1 tsp cumin seeds
Pinch of hing*
½ tsp fennel seeds
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp turmeric powder
1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped
Handful of fresh curry leaves
2 cups thick yoghurt
Red chilli powder to serve (optional)
* hing is also called asafoetida
For the pakoras, sift the dry ingredients together in a bowl, then stir in the lemon juice and ½ cup of water. Leave to sit for 15-30 minutes.
For the curry, heat the ghee in a kadhai or heavy-based pan and saute the spices over a medium heat for a few minutes, then add the chilli and curry leaves and continue cooking for another minute.
Add the yoghurt, stir in well and simmer gently for 5 minutes. If you have regular yoghurt you can thicken it with 1 Tbsp of chickpea flour.
Heat the vegetable oil to approximately 150C. Test the temperature by adding a cube of bread - it should turn golden brown in 60 seconds. Plop teaspoonfuls of pakora mixture into the hot oil. Cook for about 3 minutes and drain on paper towels.
Reheat the yoghurt curry, put in the cooked pakoras and serve. Add chilli powder if you like.
Recipe: Garima and Saroj Paliwal
From Hot Pink Spice Saga by Peta Mathias and Julie Le Clerc
Hot Pink Spice Saga: An Indian Culinary Travelogue With Recipes (Random House $49.99) is in bookstores now.
She never told them the five-course meal was vegan. So a cousin decided to act.