Ready for a flashback foodventure?

In the Mt Everest chapter, co-authors wanted kids to understand that Sir Edmund Hillary & Co needed power-packed foods. Thus was born the sattu laddoos, energy-rich and delicious, and great for those who are physically active

For many chefs and food writers, watching their mothers in the kitchen and eventually cooking alongside them formed the foundations of a lifelong culinary passion. It's the same with Ranjini Rao and Ruchira Ramanujan. Rao, a Kannadiga, born and raised in Bengaluru, who grew up having South Indian vegetarian food, influenced heavily by her mother's Malnad roots. "We'd have the occasional North Indian meal, biscuits baked in a makeshift oven [a bed of sand on a coal stove, with a tin tray fashioned out of old Dalda dabbas, to bake the stuff in], or exotic delicacies mom cooked from her cooking club diary, with her own touch, like filter coffee pudding and custard with fruits and cream wafers. I think I spent all my childhood years watching her create magic in the kitchen," she tells us.

Ranjini Rao

Ramanujan, on the other hand, is a Punjabi who grew up in the South. It was her mother who taught her to bake. "Later on, I remember being in charge of dessert and appetisers for dinners at home. This has come a full circle now, with my teenage daughter taking over the oven. I have been relegated to lining the baking pans and helping clean up," she laughs.

But it was in 2007 that the two South Indian food lovers first met in Chicago. They were both on their way to a community potluck, and have been best friends since. "We attended cooking and baking classes together. A few years later, this common ground paved the way for a food blog, Tadka Pasta, which has been a steady platform to showcase our culinary experiments, from Chicago to Bengaluru, where we both returned, a few years ago," Rao explains.

In their most recent project together, the pair has written a fourth book, titled, History Dishtory: Adventures and Recipes from the Past (Hachette India). Ramanujan says, "We were part of a book club back when we were in Chicago, and we read everything from horrifying accounts of life in the Gulag [a system of forced labour camps] with scarce food rations, to the gilded sugar sculptures adorning banquets in Rome during the Renaissance. We wanted to create a fun reading and learning experience for children, with our book. One way to do that was to build stories around chapters in world history, unlike how textbooks highlight dates and names. But we wanted to go a step further. So, we added recipes inspired by historical events."

With an adventurous storyline, involving a brother-sister team - Siya and Samar - a gaming app good for buckling up and time-travelling, and lots of twists and turns, the book takes the reader on a flashback "foodventure" to 15 historic events. It's here that you discover old recipes. For instance, a secret ingredient in Sir Edmund Hillary's Camp IX tent just before he reached the summit of Mt Everest, or a peek into the royal court at Calicut as explorer Vasco da Gama spices up the proceedings.

Ruchira Ramanujan

Ramanujan's favourite recipe in the book is the toasted sandwich jars from the First World War. "While on one hand, it was limiting to work with few ingredients, on the other, it was fun to put myself in Samar, the budding chef's shoes, and come up with an idea by rummaging around in a trench while guns blazed all around. It was like a puzzle… what could he make with almost-stale bread, butter, jam, a can of condensed milk and a wrinkled apple? And I - or rather Samar - came up with these tea-time jars that are so simple to make that he could rustle them up in the middle of a skirmish, and impress the soldiers with innovation." For Rao, the First Greek Olympiad is a clear winner. "Ruchira and I love Greek cuisine, so we naturally wove several bits of food references into the story, and the recipe practically wrote itself from there. We wanted to keep it light, yet filling and full of flavour, just how a Greek meal should be."

Research was a crucial aspect of their work on this book. Rao adds, "We turned to research papers, TED talks, novels, and anything we could lay our hands on, in order to get the meat we needed. The challenge was to weave the facts into the fictionalised accounts that dot each chapter, to turn the complex bits into simpler terms, for children to understand. For example, how do we condense the empty feeling of the peasants during the French Revolution into a single recipe? Can we fit in the lesser known part about the Wright Brothers' culinary experiments with their courageous aviation efforts, into a seamless narrative?"

There are a few dishes that are actually mentioned in historical archives, like the Waldorf pudding that was served in the first class dining rooms on the Titanic, or the gur cake, popular during the Irish Easter Rising. So, are all those recipes forgotten today? Ramanujan shares, "Recipes from the Great Depression are making big waves even today. Like the dandelion salad [these edible greens grew wild in backyards and fields], given that home gardens and foraging are hot topics today. Perhaps things like garbage plate and porcupine meatballs won't be on must-have lists today. Also, several recipes from the Renaissance Era are too elaborate for today's cooks, and are, therefore, relegated to historical archives. We do see a trend of people reviving forgotten recipes, especially with movements nudging us towards slow-food, farm-to-table and back to nature."

Apollo tomato soup mix
PREPARATION TIME: 30 minutes | FREEZING TIME: 1 hour

When the first men went on the Moon, the astronauts could only eat certain types of foods, for instance: nothing that would generate debris or crumbs. The co-authors came up with a recipe for a tomato soup mix: involving scientific concepts, such as dehydration and rehydration. Hybrid (farm) tomatoes are used in this recipe because their water content is lower than native varieties and, therefore, they will dry faster

INGREDIENTS
8 hybrid (farm) tomatoes (the fleshier variety)
1 large onion
8 garlic cloves
2 tsp salt
1/2 cup dry milk powder
1 tbsp brown sugar
4 tsp dried basil
1 tsp pepper

Method

Prepare the vegetables
Wash and dry the tomatoes. Cut each tomato vertically into half. Remove the seeds and the liquid inside using a small spoon. Set the tomatoes, cut side down, on a plate to drain. Peel and then cut the onions into thick slices. Peel the garlic cloves. Cut each tomato half into 3-4 wedges.

Dry the vegetables
To make the tomato soup mix, you need to dry the vegetables completely until they collapse and shrivel up, and no moisture remains. The fastest way to do this is by using the microwave. Lay the vegetables on a plate in a single layer. Cook on high power for 5 minutes. Then cook on 50 per cent power for 6-10 minutes, checking to see that nothing is burning. Once the vegetables start drying up, cook them on 25 per cent power until they are dry and brittle, checking on them every minute. Put the dried vegetables in a box or ziplock bag and place them in the freezer for an hour.

Prepare the Soup Mix
Now place the dried vegetables in a mixer jar and add salt. Grind to a powder. Add the dry milk powder, brown sugar, basil and pepper and grind again briefly. Transfer the powder to an airtight storage jar.

For serving
Put a tablespoon of the soup mix in a cup and stir in boiling water. Garnish with a drizzle of cream and serve with breadsticks or croutons.