Transcript: Scott Chaskey, SOIL AND SPIRIT & Ravinder Bhogal, COMFORT AND JOY
Interview transcript for Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon
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Host Intro
Farmer-Poet Scott Chaskey
As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that attention to the soil and the life, microbial and otherwise that inhabit it offers valuable lessons for building healthy human communities.
We last spoke with him in 2014 about his book, Seedtime. Now Chaskey’s come out with a collection of essays, wherein he explores the evolution of his perspective, both as a farmer and as a poet. The reader travels with him on a journey accompanied by his beautiful poetry as he shares the people and projects that have inspired him.
Scott Chaskey, welcome back to Writer's Voice.
So this was just a wonderful book, Soil and Spirit, Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life.
Trees figure prominently in this book.
You write that the thread that finds a story you have to tell is linked to an aspect of the mythic tale of the Golden Bough.
What is that tale?
And why do trees form the foundation of this book?
Well, as I say, Sir George Frazer wrote the famous book, The Golden Bough, and it's about a 700-page book.
So it's a long tale.
But the essence that I wanted to get to for this book was that a traveler will pluck a golden bough from the tree and then continue on his or her journey.
And the bough will spring up again so that another traveler on the journey of life can also pluck that golden bough and hopefully have some luck from that gift of the tree and to carry he or she forward on their journey.
So that's really why I was referring to that myth.
But throughout the book, I think it probably began with my just reading about trees after living so closely with them.
I mean, the first chapter refers to a beech tree that guards the entrance to the farm shop at Quail Hill and is now wedded to the building.
And so it began with that one tree when I discovered that the word beech in German and other Scandinavian languages means book, and that it's a synonym for literature.
And so there I was all these years reading and writing under the canopy of this massive beech tree.
And so that was the beginning with trees.
And then on my travels, which the book is concerned with, I had other meetings, like meetings with remarkable people.
I had meetings with remarkable trees.
And so that's the thread that follows through.
So besides that beech, there's a baobab tree that Peter Matheson wrote beautifully about in his book, The Tree Where Man Was Born.
And then of course, there's the influence of all my reading, amazing books about trees.
And Richard Powers wrote that most wonderful book, The Overstory.
And after being fascinated by that book, I found that he gave a reading list of all the books that had influenced him in that.
And so I started going through that literature.
And so it's a combination of trees and literature and trees that I actually hugged.
That's wonderful.
And trees, well, of course, in the title, it's soil and spirit.
So tell us about trees and soil.
Well, you know, so farming for over 30 years, or you know, most of my life, one has to learn as much as possible about how to build soil and how to rebuild soil.
And the classic statement that a farmer will make is to leave the land and the soil in a better condition than when he or she accepted it and took it on.
So there's that aspect of working with soil as matter.
But the other aspect is how much do we really know about soil?
I mean, and all the invisible, supposedly, in every teaspoon of soil, there's a billion microorganisms that we can't see.
So it's the unseen, which we normally might refer to as spirit, which also inhabits the soil.
So it's not as though these two are far apart from one another at all.
The spirit lives in the soil and the soil lives in the spirit.
And I also thought of that spirit as, I mean, this book being about the spirit of poetry, because you're not only a farmer, you're also a poet, and your poems figure in this book.
But back to trees, because I was also just thinking about how you talk about the community that is underneath the soil.
SFYVG Yeah.
So the roots, the root and mycelium, life underground equals the canopy that we see above.
And it's just something we don't think about.
And so that becomes a metaphor for what we see in life and what we encounter as matter and what we don't see, the unseen that we don't see as well.
So in that way, the trees are metaphorical, but they are also living beings that have so much to teach us.
And I love what Richard Powers said about the overstory.
He said, in this book, it's the trees that dominate, it's not the human beings, actually.
And so, you know, in a way, I was exploring and trying to learn from what the trees have to give us.
MARTHA You know, I just read an article very recently about how trees have different songs.
Did you see that?
SFYVG No, I haven't.
I did not see that.
But there's a word, there's a beautiful word that I used in this book, scythericism, and it's the sound of the wind through the trees.
Yeah.
MARTHA That is, in fact, what they're talking about.
But the implication is that there is a consciousness that's there.
SFYVG A consciousness, yeah.
So there is a song, yeah.
Of course there is.
MARTHA So now back to the poetry.
I felt that the spirit of the title also referred to the spirit of poetry.
You quote a Chinese poet, Lu Qi, who says, the poet stands at the center of the universe contemplating the enigma and seeing the interconnectedness of things.
Say more about that.
SFYVG So at the same time that I was reading, you know, through the literature of trees, I'm always reading poetry.
And I become very fascinated by the mountains and rivers school of Chinese poetry who wrote 1500 years ago or more.
And I guess the essence is that the expression of their poems was part of that interconnectedness.
So there's no separation.
It seems obvious to me, but we have to keep repeating it.
So other people see it that way of how interconnected we are with the natural world.
And those poets could express it in a way that there's a need for us to learn from that and to get back to that so that there is no separation at all.
And in Lu Qi, his expression has to do not just with the beauty of the natural world, but of being immersed within every aspect of wind and stone and wood and water.
Beautiful poems.
Yeah.
You know, it seems to me that poetry is also almost by its nature involved with spirit and the unseen because it doesn't spell things out, it evokes.
Say something about how you have developed this awareness.
You talk a lot of in the book, Scott Chaskey, in Soil and Spirit about traveling in the British Isles and developing the awareness of the natural world alongside with developing your poetic sense and your poetic skill and also being involved with farming.
So this kind of tripod here, I think is really at the heart of your book.
And tell us about your own evolution in coming to this place.
So this book is my third book of prose, and I was more focused on telling very specific stories about seeds with the last book, the book called Seed Time.
And before that, it was really the story of my involvement with community supported agriculture.
And although seeds and CSA also occur in this book, I wanted to weave in my maturation as a poet and who had taught me and how I had learned.
So, for instance, there's a chapter about Basil Bunting, who was my teacher, a Northumbrian poet, one of the great poets of the 20th century, not well known until fairly recently.
And now there's a wonderful biography of him and his big book of annotated book of his complete poems has come out.
But I met him when I was 19, 20 years old on the campus of Binghamton, University of Binghamton in New York.
And it was the most amazing meeting.
And so now to write a chapter about Bunting, I've been writing it my whole life.
He's been with me for 50 years.
He has a great line in his great long poem, Brig Flats, where he's thinking back about his first love.
And he says, she has been with me for 50 years.
And Bunting's been with me for 50 years, you know.
And as a matter of fact, oh, you can't see him now.
And the listeners won't see him.
But there's a sculpture of Basil Bunting that just right over my shoulder.
And I say this in the chapter about Bunting.
So but before that, in an early chapter, I write about this time in Maine, where I was actually, as a child of suburbia, I was really being introduced to deep woods into a beautiful Socko River, that I would take a walk every day and swim in the summer season as well.
At the same time that I was developing my poetic voice, and through readings and writing every day, etc.
And so that's how they go together.
That's how they intermesh is that I was actually, I was actually learning about the natural world in a real way, at the same time that I had, I, you know, I graduated from school, and I'd studied literature, etc.
But now this was, okay, entering a different world of literature.
And I tried to make story, tried to tell those stories in this book, basically.
And literature poetry is also very connected with what you call caregiving the land.
So say a little bit about how you got into caregiving the land?
Yeah, well, it all happened in England, really, I, I went over to study literature.
And I needed a job to pay my rent, my seven pounds a week for my bedsit.
And I got a job as a gardener.
And once I was digging in the soil, you know, with these great English gardeners, it's so deep in their consciousness and bodies, that I just, you know, it sort of captured me.
Then when we moved to Cornwall, the southwest tip of England, I heard that the land that I was looking down at, we were perched up on this cliff side, these cliff meadows were down below, and they it was called the earliest ground in Britain.
And when I heard about that, I thought, well, I would like to be involved in that, whatever that is, whatever that means, their earliest ground in Britain.
And I had a great mentor, Edgar Wallace, who was in his 70s.
And finally, into his into his 80s, still working in these meadows.
And so he gifted me a cliff shovel, and I learned how to garden there.
And at the same time, of course, I was, you know, retreating to my study to write poetry as well.
So before I became a farmer, here, and before I'd ever climbed on a tractor, I mean, here on this side of the ocean, I mean, you know, we lived for a decade in England.
And it was all work that was done with a spade and a shovel.
And I learned a lot about what it's like to work with the soil there, and to work with plants, which is a true gift of the earthen environment to us.
So I know you, because you were the head of Quail Hill Farm for 30 years, and I was a member of it.
This is a CSA.
I would think most of our listeners probably know what a CSA is, but for those who don't, tell us about that.
And then tell us about agroecology, because that is also something you speak about in this book, and it's connected.
You went to China for a conference about CSAs.
Yeah.
So when we started at Quail Hill, we were actually one of the first CSAs in the country, the first in New York State.
And no one had heard of CSAs before.
Of course, it was brand new in this country.
And within a couple of years, there were CSAs popping up all over the country, but no one would have anticipated that some of us would be attending an international meeting of CSA advocates and farmers in China, of all places, whatever that was, 25 years after those very beginnings.
Our particular CSA was unusual in that you, you members, would come to harvest in the field and actually go out and dig your own potatoes and cut your own greens and all that sort of thing.
And so it was the sort of closest immersion in learning about the land and learning from the land that any CSA could give.
And now it's estimated there are 7,000 or 8,000 CSAs around the country.
And as I said, this meeting in China, it was remarkable to be with people from 40 different countries who were basically practicing the same style of agriculture.
And that word agroecology describes the methodology of working with the environment, of working with the whole ecological environment, rather than bringing in inputs and trying to combat what would be termed problems.
But agroecology is making use of well, traditional techniques to improve the soil and produce good food and feed people.
And there was a certain point in that conference, which really struck me.
You were taken aside and you were asked to meet with somebody.
And your first reaction was to be afraid.
Oh no, did I do something wrong?
Was it something that I wrote?
It turned out to be benign, but it did set me to thinking about whether agroecology, real agroecology is possible in a repressive and authoritarian system with the kind of inevitable corruption that that can bring.
Because agroecology, CSAs, that seems to be radical democracy to me.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, you're right.
That's a good word for it.
Well, maybe radical democracy is something we need right now more than ever, right?
And maybe this is the most natural way to go about it.
I mean, it's one way to go about it.
And, you know, it was remarkable being there in China and witnessing the growth of the CSA movement in China in a very short time.
There were 500 CSAs within the first five years in China.
And sure, it's a small portion of the overall agricultural output of the country.
But at the same time, each one of those is developing community while focusing on the community of the soil.
And maybe that's radical.
Another way, maybe it's as natural as you can get.
So you're right.
You know, system.
What was I worried about?
Yeah, because I'd written in my last book in seed time about the oppression, because I was talking about Ai Weiwei, because I'd been to see his seeds exhibit in the Tate Gallery in London.
And I wrote about this.
And I thought, oh, no, someone has read this at this conference in China.
What are they going to think about me?
Anyhow, it turned out to be quite the opposite.
Mills They wanted you to read a poem.
Kehlmann Yeah, yeah.
They wanted me to translate.
There was a beautiful poem that would be opening this sort of closing ceremony for the conference, and they wanted to have the Chinese language on one side and the English on the other side.
It was a real privilege to work on that, actually.
Yeah.
Mills So talking about response to an authoritarian regime with agriculture, there is a wonderful project you write about in this book, Gardens Edge, and their work in Guatemala.
I went online to read about them.
It's quite a remarkable story that came out of the, you know, really horrific murders and repression that went on in Guatemala of indigenous communities for so many years.
So tell us about Gardens Edge and their work, and the work in Guatemala that they support.
Kehlmann Yes.
I actually had been invited to a seed conference.
It was in Albuquerque, and I had not heard of Gardens Edge, but there was a beautiful kind of ceremony going on.
The Guatemalans had come to plant amaranth, which was the most nutritious, one of the most nutritious grains that the people of Middle America have, you know, in the Guatemalans had been fed on for, you know, for centuries.
So the Guatemalans had come up in a program that was developed by Gardens Edge by a wonderful woman, Sarah Montgomery, who lives in Albuquerque and had gone, you know, and done some work in Guatemala and had some success and then kept going back and developed this program to bring the Guatemalans to teach people here in California, New Mexico, all over the Southwest about planting this magical grain.
And so we actually took part in the harvest of the amaranth because they had come to do the planting in the spring.
And the ceremonial aspect of it was quite beautiful, but at the same time, this is a really nutritious food.
And so they were reviving the growth of amaranth as a staple crop in Guatemala while they were also coming and teaching people here.
And Gardens Edge was the one coordinating all that.
And they also have a wonderful program where they're saving seeds and dispersing seeds to people, et cetera.
And that's led into sort of, you know, reclamation projects in Guatemala as well.
So it's very expansive what they've done.
Really wonderful organization.
And it actually came out of the work of a survivor, a Guatemalan Mayan man who survived, you know, most of his family were killed.
His village was obliterated for the building of a dam and so many traditional ways of farming and even traditional seeds were lost during the 30 years of the, you know, genocidal actions on the part of the Guatemalan dictatorship.
And this was, he called it a campesino a campesino, a farmer to farmer, and they've been able to revive those seeds.
But what's so interesting as I was reading this, because your book inspired me to do so, is that amaranth was also, well, I think you referenced it in your book, was suppressed and forbidden by the Spanish conquistadores.
Not very smart of them, given that they could have fed their horses on it.
And the horses loved it.
Not very wise.
Exactly.
Now, I wanted to ask you about regenerative agriculture, because that's something you also talk about in the book, and it's very linked here.
First of all, just tell us about an incredible story of regeneration that happened with the Eden Project in England.
Yeah, I hope people who haven't heard of Eden look into it, because it's a magnificent project.
And it's regenerative, you know, as basically defined as you can get, because the idea was to sort of highlight the plants, you know, the connection between the interconnection between plants and humans.
And instead of doing it on, you know, prime soils or farmland or anything, the place that these biomes, they're called, were created were in these dump pits, clay pits in northern Cornwall.
So it was a waste, a wasteland, really.
And now it's teeming with life.
These are actually the biomes are amazing structures in themselves.
They're the largest greenhouses in the world, if you look at it in those terms, and each one has a different heritage that it's focusing on.
So there's a Mediterranean biome, there's a rainforest biome, and you walk into them, and it's like walking into a rainforest, you know, it's really extraordinary.
So they've had great success with the one in Cornwall, in those abandoned clay pits, but now Eden is actually working in China, and maybe Costa Rica.
There's a project, I think, going on in this country as well.
And it's really teaching people about our interconnectedness with the natural world through the stories of plants and how humans have connected with plants throughout our time on Earth, really.
And you yourself are involved in a project. You are one of the farmers who produce for Zai Sheng herbs, Chinese medicinal herbs.
Yeah, regenerative, yeah.
Yeah, tell us about that.
Well, that started, it was a project we got involved in 2003 through a woman named Jean Jablatt, who had studied Chinese medicinal herbs and learned that there were 20,000 or more practitioners in this country who were importing their herbs from China.
And it just doesn't make sense because they're not terribly difficult to grow.
They don't need prime soils, actually.
They can be grown almost anywhere.
But we were involved because this was a New York State project and we were the only site in New York that was in Zone 7, which means we have a very long growing season, right?
And we kept it going and we saved seeds and every year Jean would bring us more plants.
But this was at the time where our main focus had to be growing lettuce and carrots and potatoes and tomatoes for you, for all of you in the CSA.
So this was sort of at the bottom of the list.
But after I graduated after 30 years of running Quail Hill Farm, I now have the time to focus on these herbs.
And so it's really a research garden, but we've begun digging, the plants have to mature for many years before you can dig them.
And my main occupation now, you know, with the garden is to save the seeds and redistribute the seeds to other farmers.
And this has been catching on.
So it took some years for Jean to get to the point of creating an actual organization for distribution, but now she has that and more people are learning about both growing and using these herbs.
So yeah, it's a wonderful project.
And then there's another project you talk about, which is actually just about a mile from my house that I never knew about.
It's called Folly Tree?
Yeah, that's Folly Tree Arboretum.
I've seen this little sign saying, Marder Pollinator Garden.
I've never gone in there.
I haven't any idea what they do.
But tell us about the Folly Tree Arboretum in East Hampton, New York.
Yeah, so the Marder family is, you know, they run, well, I probably was the first large-scale organic garden center.
And the father, Charlie Marder, is a tree man, you know, and his son, Tucker, one of his sons, Tucker, got very interested in the aspect of telling stories through these remarkable trees.
And so he's sort of taken that on and created this arboretum with, I think he has 250 or so species, and each one has an amazing story.
So you have to take the tour with Tucker.
And so again, the reason it's in my book is because this is another way of introducing people about the interconnection, our interconnection with the natural world, and this time through some remarkable stories of trees.
So there's one, he has a cutting and, you know, now growing into a tree of the last remaining Johnny Appleseed apple tree, right?
So he has that.
He has some sycamore trees.
Most of them were taken from cuttings rather than from seed.
But he has some sycamore trees that were part of the seeds that were taken up in one of the flights, one of the flights into space to see how they would react once they were taken to space, and what would happen when, you know, were they still viable when they came back?
And indeed, they are.
So he has some sycamore trees from those.
He has a ginkgo that is a scion of one of the ginkgos that survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima.
There were a number of ginkgos, what an amazing tree.
So ginkgos, ginkgos are called living fossils because they've been around for 200 million years.
So even that fact is an amazing part of the story.
But he actually has one of those ginkgos there too.
So it's just a few of the amazing trees that he has there.
And what a name, that's the perfect name for it, the Folly Tree Arboretum.
We're coming to the end of our conversation here, and I wonder if there is a poem of yours from the book that you would like to read to us.
So happily, I really love working with Milkweed Editions, the publisher, and first of all, they put together a really beautiful book, but they're a wonderful not-for-profit publisher who are now publishing many more books because of the great success of Braiding Sweetgrass, of Robin Wall Kimmerer's book published by Milkweed.
And it was a suggestion of Daniel Slager, who's the CEO of Milkweed, that I begin my book with a poem and end with a poem.
So they would be the kind of bookend.
So this is the one that begins the book, and it's called A Breath.
Meadowman, house scholar, from field to chair, I hear the deep choir of the anvil, iron and rust, irony, dust.
Then Nordic beat breaks to summer, willows wave, elderberry beads gift the cloud, dog rose shades the shore.
In a measure of rage, I know the weightlessness of innocence.
At dawn, silken nursery tents spin the field to song.
Sea air, violet, betony stare, shake the man to make of breath a mortal joy.
What a beautiful way to end.
Thank you so much, Scott Chasky.
Your book is Soil and Spirit, Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life.
It's just been such a delight to talk with you.
Host Intro
Food, Community, Celebration
The holiday season has begun, a time for celebrating food, family and community. While meat-based dishes are traditional, more people are deciding to go lightly on the planet and their own health with vegetarian fare.
But too often, giving up meat and poultry is tied to a narratives of sacrifice. Award-winning chef Ravinder Bhogal knows better. In her new cookbook, Comfort and Joy, she reclaims vegan and vegetarian cooking in all its abundance.
Ravinder Bhogal is a food journalist, chef and restauraneur of the London restaurant, Jikoni.
You were brought up in a culture where vegetarianism is the norm.
Tell us about your grandfather's farm in Nairobi.
Oh, well, it was magical.
Probably the most of my, you know, most magical memory I have of growing up was the time I spent on his shamba or the allotment.
So my grandfather was, for me, an exemplary man.
So he had left India in the 1940s.
He was from northern Indian Punjab and he went basically looking for better opportunities, landed in Bombay, got on a migrant ship, sailed for 26 days.
And the story is that something went wrong with the ship and he ended up back in Bombay.
Yet still about a month later, he took a journey like a voyage in the dark to the unknown and landed up in Kenya.
And, you know, this was a time of sort of racial divides because Kenya then was still a British colony.
Alienation, you know, poverty, all those challenges.
And yet he still found time to fall really deeply in love with this beautiful alluvial red soil in Kenya, this volcanic soil that just makes everything that comes out of it taste incredible.
So he bought a plot of land and he started cultivating it and it was growing all sorts of things.
And he had a really spiritual relationship with the land.
And I think the gratitude that he had could only come from someone who'd known hard times.
And I just remember him being on that sort of Shambha just several times a day saying, Vaheguru, he was a Sikh.
So, you know, wonderful God.
Thank you.
Several times a day.
And that was really beautiful to watch.
And he also used to tell you that the easiest way to be helpful was simply by feeding people, which I have to say is something you took quite to heart considering you are a chef.
I did.
And, you know, I never meant to become a chef, really.
It sort of happened to me.
But like I said, for me, he was the exemplary man.
He just was a very good human being who lived very lightly, who shared, who gave everything that he had to others.
And that really inspired me.
But what he said to me when I was so young, you know, we call it Seva.
In Sikhism, Seva is community service.
And it is one of the most important tenets.
And for him, he just said, the easiest way to do community service is just by feeding people.
And I think that stuck.
And in fact, even when I started looking for a restaurant site, it was important to me that it was in a community where I could really engage with the neighborhood, with the people, with the characters in the neighborhood and be of help and of service.
So say a little bit more about your restaurant and the community it's in.
So the restaurant is called Jikoni.
And Jikoni is a Swahili word, which means kitchen.
And so that obviously comes from my background as a Kenyan, British, Asian.
And I opened it seven years ago.
We've just celebrated our seventh birthday.
It's in Marylebone, which is a really lovely neighborhood.
It's very central in London, but it's one of the true old neighborhoods of London.
And it feels like a village.
It is a village, in fact, Marylebone Village.
And you're not far from things like Oxford Street.
Oxford Street is about a seven minute walk from where we are.
Yet you're sort of tucked away.
And the thing that I love about it the most is the people, actually.
Real characters, people who've lived there for many, many years.
People who are discerning, who understand food, who are engaging.
People who've been writers, artists, theater directors.
And the lovely, lovely thing about it is it isn't a transient area.
It's a neighborhood.
So you have the same people coming in over and over again, and you really get to know them.
You get to know their kind of little quirks, where they like to sit in the restaurant, how they like their gin and tonic fix, the name of their dogs.
All that was important to me, and it's exactly what I've got in Marylebone.
And you mentioned the Sikh tradition of seva, of service to a community.
You put this into action also during the COVID lockdown in the UK.
How did you do that?
For me, it was a no-brainer because in hospitality, we are doers.
We were on our feet.
We're constantly doing.
And the pandemic was really the first time we'd really stopped.
And I think we were, my husband and I were at home for two weeks.
And then we just thought, like so many other people in our incredible industry, that we have perfectly good kitchen and it should be put to use.
And so we went in and we started cooking for King's College Hospital, frontline workers, and people who were vulnerable in the area.
And I remember at the time thinking that hospitals are just such international places, yet you go to the canteen and you kind of get fish and chips or you get a sandwich.
And I wanted to make sure that the meals were nourishing, nurturing, globally inspired, so that those people who were working, who were away from home, who were barely seeing their families, got a sense of home in the food that we were providing them.
And I remember saying at the time to my husband, you know, all people need at the moment is comfort and joy.
And that sort of stuck.
So a few, a couple of months after that, we launched a vegetarian delivery service called Comfort and Joy.
Now, let's talk a little bit now about the food.
Many of these recipes are quite unusual with inspiration from really many different cuisines, almost a kind of, well, fusion in some of them.
So talk about cooking traditionally and then cooking in a fusion manner.
Well, yeah, I wouldn't call my food fusion.
I think what we do both at the restaurant and both just the way how I cook, we call it immigrant food.
And it happens when you have left a country and you have the ache for what you've left behind, but yet you have a wonder for your new landscape.
And for me, as a child coming from Kenya, I felt very alienated.
I felt very sad.
All the things that I loved were back in Kenya.
And you become very precious about preserving your traditions, your heritage, your language, your culture, your food culture.
But then as you begin to settle into a new country, you take on the influences around you and you weave those into what you know.
So you may not, for example, get mangoes in November in London.
So you find something that's similar, maybe a Bramley apple that has the sharpness of a mango to make pickle or whatever it is.
And for me, I grew up in a very densely immigrant community.
And so, of course, all those people who looked after me, who helped bring me up, who gave me hospitality, had a huge influence on my food and the way I cook.
So I think immigrant food is the old, you know, your old traditions woven in with the new.
And actually, it's true.
It's not really the dishes themselves are traditional, but they're really inspired from many different, as you say, immigrant cuisines.
And actually, that points to one of the big questions that I had in looking over these delicious looking recipes that I want to try.
And that is that there are often parts in a recipe that call for ingredients that are maybe unknown, unfamiliar or difficult to obtain for someone living in a Western country.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about substitutions.
Yeah, I mean, I think actually comfort and joy, most of the ingredients are available, particularly, I mean, I live in London, metropolitan city, and I think you can find most things nowadays, either in a supermarket or if not on the Internet.
But I think recipes are always suggestions.
And unless it's baking and it's requiring the ingredient and it's going to fall apart, you know, patisserie is a very different way of cooking.
I just think it takes a sort of common sense, logic and intuition to go, well, OK, this recipe requires carom seed.
You know, you look it up and it'll tell you that the flavour of those is aniseed.
So you might replace that with something like star anise, which has, or fennel seeds, which has another note of aniseed.
So there are always substitutions to be made.
I mean, for me, recipes, yeah, they've always been suggestions.
Like, for example, I was thinking I'd like to make the bread recipe saffron shirmal, which sounds absolutely delectable, but I don't have caster sugar.
So could I use regular sugar or?
Absolutely.
Granulated.
It's just to feed the yeast.
So you can use whatever sugar you like.
You could even use honey.
And then quail eggs.
Yeah, quail eggs.
Again, you can use a regular egg.
You'll get, you know, fewer scotch eggs, but you'll still have something delicious.
OK, so are there principles one should use?
You mentioned, you know, the star anise, something that is like it.
So are there some principles and substitutions or are there some principles about things you definitely should not substitute for something else?
I'm, for example, obsessed with the curry leaves or lime leaves, for example.
I just think that their flavor is so unique.
They can't really be substituted.
So that is something you'd find.
But then what I tend to do, like, for example, when I I find curry leaves, they're normally found in South Asian stores.
You buy them and you buy a bulk of them and you put them in your freezer and they keep really, really well.
You know, they can keep for years in your freezer and still have that lovely sort of citrusy flavor that nothing else has.
Same with lime leaves.
I mean, if you go to any kind of Asian supermarket, I think you find them often in the freezer section.
So they've been sort of freeze, you know, picked and frozen immediately.
So the flavor is really intense and you just keep them in your freezer and you just add them as you need them.
So actually, let's go back to the foundation of this book, vegetarianism, vegetables.
You say you were brought up in a culture where vegetarianism is the norm.
Say a little bit more about that.
Yeah, I mean, I think there are lots of cultures around the world where meat is eaten very rarely.
So for me, you know, I grew up with this wonderful backdrop of incredible soil and farming and the vegetables that came out.
I just think it comes from knowing how to cook vegetables, understanding the textures of vegetables, understanding how to bring flavor to them using spices and condiments, grains, nuts, seeds, sort of almost treating or lavishing vegetables with the same care, love and attention that you would on a chop or a steak.
You know, why shouldn't we make such an effort with vegetables?
And I just grew up watching these incredibly wise women cooking and knowing how to put flavor into vegetables.
And I think that is whether it's India or Thailand or the Middle East, people just have a knack for knowing how to make vegetables taste really, really great.
And I think there is a versatility in vegetables as well.
You take something like a turnip, you know, it can be pickled.
There's a great recipe in the book for like a turnip polenta with chili brown butter.
It can be stewed until it's falling apart and eaten almost like a mashed potato.
It can be fried.
There's so much you can do with vegetables.
And I think that, again, I wanted to write this because my grandfather had this philosophy that we go around looking for miracles.
And yet, you know, he'd hold up an onion and he'd say, this is a miracle because this has withstood pest, blight, bad weather.
And yet it comes to our kitchen.
We can cook with it and we can share what we cook with it.
And that is a miracle.
And I think we've become so disassociated from our food and the food system that it really is wonderful to kind of go back to my childhood and celebrate vegetarian food and the influence of all these incredible women who taught me how to cook.
That is such a wonderful answer.
So in a world where meat eating, frankly, poses a serious threat to habitat, it exacerbates the climate crisis.
Tell us about how vegetables can supplant the hardiness of what many people expect from eating meat.
I just think that when I think about comfort and joy, you know, a lot of people think about comfort food and they think about food that is, you know, kind of sticks to your ribs and, you know, things like mac and cheese and, you know, which are all lovely.
But for me, I've always thought of food that gives me comfort as being food that really nourishes you, that nurtures you, that makes you feel well, that makes you feel happy.
And I think that plants have this magical quality to be able to do that, but it comes down to how you cook with those plants.
So, you know, there are wonderful things that you that kind of umami that you get from, say, a steak.
You can get that from a mushroom, but it depends on how you season it, how you might marinate it.
You know, when you cook a mushroom, just like a steak, it has its own juices, which kind of don't need much encouragement to come out.
Maybe a bit of butter and garlic and some thyme and you get this wonderful umami flavor.
And of course, you can use things like cheeses, nuts, all sorts of things that just make you feel really, really full.
Last year, for example, we hosted our first ever pop up at Freeze, which is a huge art fair that happens all over the world.
London is one of the places it pops up.
It happens in Regent's Park, which isn't far from the restaurant.
And we ran a 150 cover restaurant within Freeze.
And my proviso to the organizers of Freeze was that I would want to create a completely vegetarian menu for the restaurant.
And they allowed me to go ahead with that.
And I think we must have fed roughly 400 people a day and not a single person said, where's the fish?
Where's the meat?
I think, you know, eating meat or fish, I'm not I'm not a vegetarian.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm not saying cut it out.
But I'm just saying that it would be sensible to eat less of it.
Look for the quality when you are eating it.
And also understand that vegetables can give you just as much satisfaction as meat.
But you just need to know how to kind of cook them with the same care and attention and love that you would if you bought a roast, you know, a chicken or a steak.
Revender Bogall, we are going here in the US, we're going to be celebrating Thanksgiving and I'm actually going to air this interview.
We'll be airing this on in Thanksgiving week.
I wonder if you could suggest a few recipes from your book Comfort and Joy that could create a holiday meal like Thanksgiving.
Well, I would definitely start with the breads and the dips.
So the shirmal that you just mentioned is this wonderfully lavish bread that has the texture of almost like a cake, like brioche.
It's sort of dense with ghee.
And then because it has saffron in it, it feels really opulent.
And there's there's a recipe for a courgette dip, for example, which is really smoky and it has cardamom in it.
And then it's topped with capers and that the two of them go really, really very well together.
There is there are so many things.
There's a there's a curry, for example, which is almost like a buttermilk broth that has pakoras, which are like little fritters made out of pumpkin.
And of course, pumpkins are going to be in season.
Well, now the season has started.
So something like that.
And you'd make some rice with that, perhaps the beiruti rice in the book.
And then, of course, there are all the puddings.
And at the moment, I'm obsessed with the apple and blackberry roulade, because, again, I tend to think of, you know, when I cook, I cook very seasonally.
And this is the season for apples and blackberries.
So this beautiful meringue roulade with spiced apple kind of compote filling with blackberries is just a real treat.
Oh, well, those sound absolutely scrumptious.
Yeah.
And finally, are there any some guiding principles for home cooks in making vegetarian meals?
Yes, I think it's about stocking your pantry.
So, you know, you want to sort of start thinking about how do I add flavor to vegetables?
And that often comes from spices.
So buying good, fresh spices, buying them in small quantities.
I prefer to buy my spices whole and grind them myself as and when I need them.
Condiments, you know, whether it's a chili oil or tahini or, you know, gochujang, all those global flavors.
You know, you want to add umami, which is what you get from when you eat meat.
You get this sense of umami, which is what gives you this satisfaction when you're eating it.
You want to think about those flavors that are going to add, you know, soy sauces, gochujang, the Korean chili paste, tamarind for sharpness.
So really, really stock up your pantry with influences from across the globe.
Taste those condiments, taste the spices, get to know them.
And I think there are a lot of suggestions in Comfort & Joy of how you can use all these things.
Well, that is terrific advice.
Chef Ravinder Bhogal, I want to thank you so much for talking with us here about Comfort & Joy, Irresistible Pleasures from a Vegetarian Kitchen.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Francesca.
Lovely speaking to you.