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Ravinder Bhogal

lines on the record: 32
first: 2023-09-03
most recent: 2023-09-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Was working at self widges. I was a weekend beauty counter girl. And Nigela Lawson's How to Eat had just come out. And I remember buying a copy of it and reading it on the long train journeys home. And it really did feel like someone had opened a window in light and air had suddenly come in. And I just remember being compelled not only by recipes and how delicious they were, but also how gorgeous and voluptuous her writing was. And I think that's kind of where inspiration first struck, but it still was very subconscious because I had no formal training as a chef. So I just sort of put it to the back of my mind. But I think subconsciously I dreamt about a career in food. I just didn't know how I was going to do it. And then it sort of the opportunity turned up and here we are.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think I had always cooked. So I think for me, the kitchen, when you hear about Virginia Woolf, you know, talking about a room of Haroon, because life was so chaotic as an immigrant and that settling in, for me, the kitchen was that room for me. You know, it's where I felt most comfortable. It's where I felt safe. It's where I felt that I had quiet and time to sort of think. So I'd always cooked. I'd always returned to the kitchen, no matter what I was doing, it's what connected me to home and made me feel safe. So I continued cooking and I went into journalism and I'd never been told that I could be a chef. And, you know, my mother had told me, you know, very distinctly that I would cook for my husband and children. And that would be it. But I remember being 18 years old.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think things are beginning to change, but I see more boys cooking now, but I think boys still cook in a very different way. They cook because it's a hobby or they cook because they want to show off or they want to play around. But women sort of, it's kind of the everyday nurturing, nourishing, you know, feeding people. It's a very different thing. So yeah, I think ultimately it's still the women who do the feeding.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you learn almost through osmosis. It was like an inheritance that at the time I couldn't see, but now I'm very grateful for. And, you know,”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I learned to cook from women. And I think that I've really been very interested in maternal cookery and representing maternal cookery on the London restaurant scene. I just don't think it was done up until very recently. So I learned to cook just from all these incredible women in kitchens, their sort of wisdom. And I remember being sort of very reluctant at the beginning because I just, I was a kid. I just wanted to be playing outside. But actually, I quickly learned that firstly, the kitchen was full of treats. You kind of got the cook's treats. The kitchen was also a place for gossip. So you heard, you know, snippets of things that maybe you shouldn't be hearing as a kid, but it was just incredible because these women cooked in such an intuitive way. They knew exactly which pod or which spice to put into a giant pot next.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do actually, and I think it was two things. So I think like many people, my first foray into cookery was baking. And she used to make these non-Kathais, which we have a lot in India, but actually they have their origins in Iran. And they're like a little shortbred, you know, cookie. And my job was to take the tip of a knife and put a cross in the middle of each one and then go around with a little matchstick that was dipped in red dye and put a little dot between in the center of each cross. And it always used to remind me of a bindi caught up in a frown. I think it must have been 10 kilos of peas and I just used to have to sit there on a red plastic stool podding. Them into a little bucket to be ground down to be made into kuftas.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not really. And I think he'd come from Punjab. So, you know, Punjab was like the kind of bread basket of India, farming was something people just did. And I think for him, it was like the kitchen was for me, this kind of place of quiet luxury and peace and tranquility. The allotment was that for him.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I think even now we work with a biodynamic farm called Wolfen Place, which is just about 50 minutes down the road from the restaurant. And every time I go there, it's idenic and it really reminds me of that lovely time being in nature with my grandfather.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did, there was a guava tree. There was a guava tree and there was a Java plum tree, which I've never seen them here. They're called Jamans. And I just remember climbing the tree. And these things are like, they're almost like a plum or like a cross between a plum and a grape. They're so sweet and saturated with sugar that the tree would be covered in ants and these ants would sort of perish, you know, covered in sugary solution on the branches of the trees that were just drunk and dead, eating these Java plums. Absolutely delicious.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Toil that goes into produce and the sacrifice people make. And I think, and I say this to my team all the time, that we all have to remember that every time we sit down to a meal, yes, there's a food chain, but there is a chain of humanity behind everything we eat and there is an invisible humanity present at our table every time we eat. And if we're wasting and if we're, you know, not appreciating what's on our plate, we're sort of disrespecting the humanity behind the food.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh gosh, so many things. So everything from beautiful tomatoes that were, you know, the Italians say the tomatoes are really good. These are like sort of buxom and delicious. And then green chickpeas, passion fruits, all types of spinach, herbs. You know, he just always seemed to be knee-deep in, you know, sort of almost like a prayer position in soil and greenery. It was just such a joy to know this kind of humanity behind the food that was being grown that the person who had planted the seed and who'd worked on it. And I think that's something that I've become very conscious of, particularly having traveled and sort of been on a lot of farms all around the world, you forget, I think we've become so disassociated in our kind of grand urbanization of”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In love with food, and also that act of sort of sharing and then being a religious, a fairly religious Sikh, one of the tenets of Sikhism is to do savour, which is community service. So I remember my grandfather telling me very early on that, you know, we all have to do save our community service. And the easiest way to do it is simply by feeding people. And I think something about that really spoke to my soul. I think that's where my love of cooking and hospitality comes from.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Peas and all sorts of things. But actually, it was my grandfather who really made me fall in love with And this time on his own because his brother refused to go with him, and he ended up in Mombasa. And this is Kenya in the 1940s when it was still a British colony, so there were racial divides. They were language barriers, all sorts of difficulties, alienation. He didn't have very much money. And yet he still found time to fall really deeply in love with this incredible alluvial red soil, this very volcanic soil that is so benevolent. And he just completely fell in love with the land and the soil and had almost a sort of religious, you know, relationship with the soil. And everything that came out of it, he was so grateful for. And I think I spent so much time on his allotment with him that it sort of made me forget.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was. So I grew up in Kenya, like I said, I was born in Nairobi and we lived in an extended family. So there was never, you know, less than 15 people for lunch or dinner, maybe 25 on most days. And it was like growing up in a Jane Austen novel. We're four girls and my mother had this very Victorian attitude that her girls must learn to, you know, well, must learn this sort of cult of domesticity, join it. And, you know, I'd seen all the women sort of cook, so all these things. And that's what we were told that we should do. And so I remember being aged five and being kind of hiked off my tricycle and dragged kicking and swimming into the kitchen. And at that time, I felt it was, really unfair because all the boys were outside playing and the girls were stuck in the kitchen, you know, peeling potatoes and potatoes.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think it irritates me when things aren't properly named or credit isn't given to the communities that they come from or there's sort of whitewashing over that, you know, where things have come from. But I think food is one of those things actually that shouldn't be hoarded. You know, it's like Christmas, you know, Christmas, no matter what your religious persuasion, you all take days off, you might have your own version of Christmas dinner. You will have feel slightly sort of festive and get friends and family around a table. But that doesn't mean you're Christian. And I think in the same way, I think, in fact, all festivals and food should not be hoarded. They're there to be shared. And also, you know, where do you draw the line? Because you have to really understand the history of food and how it travels and where it came from before you can claim it as yours.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I think people get very precious about who food belongs to, I've seen that where things come from, you know, people sort of say, like when you look at something like biryani, like people get into fisty cuffs about who makes the best biryani. Is it from Hyderabad or is it from Kutch or is it from people get very possessive about food and who it belongs to and who cooks it best? I've seen that. Yeah, how do you mean divisive?”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do. I think food is a great healer. I think food is what brings people around the table and opens up conversations. I think it's really important that people break bread together. Yeah, I just, I've seen it happen. Many, many things. someone I really admire and I forget his name now but he's Lebanese and he runs these sort of markets, food markets where he gets women who are Muslim and Christian to and Jewish to come and cook together and their food is like almost identical but it's just women cooking together and people from all over no matter what their religious persuasion come and buy the food and enjoy it and I think that is a really really positive thing just bringing people together through food it's a great medium”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I met someone the other day who said to me that he lives in Britain now, but he went back to his father's farm, which is in Pakistan. And when the border came down, when Patitiona happened, they were then in India, but their farm is right on the border. And he said he could not get his head around it because he said, I just saw this fence. And beyond the fence, he said, I saw men on tractors wearing turbans. And I was like, what's that? He's, you know, the person he was with said, oh, well, that's India. And it was right there, a stone through. And, you know, he's looked at these people and were like, they look the same as us. They're eating the same food. They have the same language, yet there's this border and it just feels wrong.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something my grandmother used to cook, or my mother used to cook. And for me, I feel a great sense of achievement when people can taste a flavor of In the food that I'm cooking.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so, and I think that as people, it's human nature, we're very good at othering people, we're very good at seeing the stranger in other people or fear. And I think actually when you sit down and you're eating someone's food, someone's cuisine, it kind of breaks down that barrier. You suddenly understand a part of who they are. And it's very difficult then to fear them or think of them as the other. And I think food is a great medium for bringing people around the table and opening conversations. And, you know, I think that's the beauty, especially when we see it at our restaurant, because we cook so much across borders, it gives me so much joy when people from where Maribon, so it's very international and people will come in from Lebanon or, you know, Paris or Egypt and everyone tends to say, oh, this tastes like.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was our Turkish neighbors or our sort of Chinese supermarket, all those little mini economies of supermarkets like Chinese and Turkish and Korean. And, you know, they'd all sort of help bring me up in a way and had all influenced how I cooked, how I ate, all those things. And yet I was, you know, the brown girl, the Indian girl, I was put into that box. And I think subconsciously when I came up with the idea of jaconi, my restaurant, I think subconsciously I was answering to that. I was saying, you can be a multitude of identities and you can be, you know, you can be, you can, yeah, they should be places that speak to everybody, no matter where you're from. And I think Jaconi does that. And I think my cooking does that. We say we cook without borders. And I think that, you know, borders are for politicians.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think in a way I was living a double life because at home I wanted all those things because I felt that they connected me to home, but at school or through my sort of young teenage life, I wanted to be very British and have British traditions. So it's difficult. But I think it was really in my 20s that I suddenly became very proud of where I had come from and my culture and my history. And I think actually I realized then looking back that a lot of my experience as an immigrant had been cauterized, you know, because I was born in Kenya. I'm British. I have Indian heritage. I'm a Londoner and I'm also a product of, you know, growing up in a very densely immigrant area and all those people who gave me that hospitality.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh god, yeah. Yeah, and I think I remember that. I remember feeling the absolute sort of shame of opening up my lunchbox and, you know, the waft of garlic and cumin from the things that my mom would have packed me and just sort of closing my eyes and praying to God that I'd have a jam sandwich and a packet of hoops or something instead. But I think that's beginning to change as people are traveling and sort of more sort of adventurous with what they eat. I think that's changing. But certainly in my day, you know, it was kind of a lot of, oh my God, the stench of your lunch box and the shame that was attached to it. But yeah, thankfully things are changing.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think definitely, but I think you will find a lot of immigrants that sort of turn to the kitchen. And I think part of that is that when you are trying to do something as huge as, you know, find sort of disentangle yourself from your old connections and find home in a new country. There is so many obstacles and so many difficulties that you face that actually meal times become very important. And I certainly think that was true for me. That steady tick of mealtimes, you know, one meal after the other in a very chaotic time is a very reassuring thing. So I think the kitchen becomes a very safe place.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely adapting survival, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was telling you earlier that, for example, we would have mango achar, you know, they were raw mangoes everywhere in Kenya and India, I imagine, and they'd be sort of dried out and then pickled. And of course they were very difficult to get here, but Bramley apples, British Bramley apples, so plentiful and they have the same sharpness as a raw mango. And actually, if you salt them, they have a similar texture too. So my mom would make Bramleapola char rather than mango a char.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, I mean, we used to have to go all the way to, say, South Hall or Wembley to find those shops where we could get spices and things.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was just, it just felt reassuring. It felt like joy, you know, full of joy, just that flavor of home, you know, I remember longing for many things and I remember, you know, my grandmother on the phone, she was still in Kenya saying, oh, there are so many guavas. And maybe that's what set me off for this longing for guavas, but it suddenly felt like I was at home.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better. So I think it was just homesickness that I was suffering from more than anything else. So food really does connect you to the sense of home.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being quite sickly because it was cold, it was November, I wasn't used to the weather and I was finding it difficult to settle in. And my mother tells me that one night I had seemed to be having a nightmare and being ill for quite a while. And when she came into my bedroom, I was sort of delirious with a fever and I kept telling her that I wanted to eat a guava and I was convinced I could smell guavas in the house. And, you know, she was like, this is England. You don't get guavas. And I was like, no, because when you have a guava in the house, you can smell them. And we had a guava tree in my house in Kenya. And, you know, it's just a lovely thing. And anyway, a few days later, and I'd been sort of ill for two to three weeks, my father went out and got some, you know, out of season, very expensive, under ripe guavas from somewhere. And as soon as they ripened, I ate one and I was suddenly”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is that I think food evokes memory, it connects you to places and people. And when I think about the pining people have, immigrants, particularly for home, it's food that helps them feel settled. You know, you can be far away from home. And then if you eat something that feels like it evokes home, you suddenly feel lifted or uplifted. And that's it. And I remember, and I know I talked to you about this, but in my last book, Jikoni, the Jiaconi cookbook, I wrote a story about guavas and having this memory of being a little girl. And when I'd first come here, you know, I come from this very lush tropical background, you know, backdrop of Kenya, these blue, ever-blue skies and colossal trees to suddenly being in a very kind of haggard, very urban London.”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Food and cooking in kitchens have been for a long time my safe space and I remember particularly when I came to this country when I was seven years old the kitchen you know in all the kind of mania of trying to settle into a new country and all that kind of all the change that that brought with it the kitchen seemed to be the place that felt safe that felt like a place of quiet tranquility calm and some sort of rootedness and it was it was also a portal where you felt you could kind of be in touch with hope”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“La Cerie de Houlu Original Furiers Arives, Avoc Amy Rossum, Furieus Suilagent du FBI, Alice Black, a la Portie, Mysterious, Ecalculatris, Vera Justice Mesa Musur colour ventrome la frontier entroposes,”
2023-09-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ravinder Bhogal and Kavita Puri on Taste, Tradition and Turmoil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT