Word: baltie
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Ziauddin Sardar has written extensively on Islam, science (he used to be Middle East correspondent for Nature and the New Scientist), postmodernism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism and the complex reconciliation between Muslim belief and modernity. True to form, his latest book, Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience, is a simmering pot of topics that start off as an investigation into the origins of the dish that began life in the curry restaurants of Birmingham, England. It then moves into a historicized and dizzyingly wide-ranging enquiry into the origins, settlement, assimilation and cultures of the subcontinental diaspora...
...Like the endless blending of culinary traditions - a subject Sardar uses as a point of entry into how and why a term-defying group lazily called South Asians ended up in the U.K. - Balti Britain too is a garam masala of styles. It is part autobiography, part family history, part history, part journalism, part polemical essay. His favored method is to use an often mundane morsel of information and then launch into an erudite analysis of the surprisingly complex ingredients of which it is composed. For example, the unorthodox orthography of the name of his friend, AbdoolKarim Vakil...
...nature of Islamic fanaticism that has sprung up in the West. It is a shame that the book is let down by a plethora spelling errors and inconsistencies, the lack of endnotes and bibliography, and numerous mistakes in the English transliteration of Urdu and Punjabi words. But then balti itself is something of a hash, and that doesn't stop it from being rather moreish...
...writes, most Indian restaurants in Britain are run by highly enterprising immigrants from just one province in Bangladesh?Sylhet. Another odd feature of these Indian restaurants, says Collingham, is that "the food ... took on a life of its own, independent from the food of the Indian subcontinent." So the balti, a staple of British-Indian restaurants, is another dish not found in India; it was invented by Pakistani chefs in Birmingham in the 1980s...
...lamb chops (a mouth-watering $7.50 for four) and a succulent seekh kebab, a grilled sausage of marinated lamb and herbs (just $1.30), and you'll soon be weeping?and sweating?with delight. For the main course, match up a fiery karahi curry (a close relation of the spicy balti, served in a metal pot and loaded with chilies) with a cooler chana gosht, a stew of lamb and chickpeas (both around $8), and mop it all up with ghee-soaked nan bread. You'll leave Tayyabs with your stomach, and wallet, beautifully full. Just don't expect them...