I was walking through Crawford Market looking for pasta, when a row of bottles with neat blue labels grabbed my attention. I paused for a closer look.
"What a great collection of specialty Mughlai masalas", I said to myself as my camera went click. "And cuisine from other regions as well!"
The shop was called Tasty Spices, and there masalas for over 50 different dishes, ranging from the widely popular chicken tikka, to regional specialties like yakhni pulao. I saw several masalas for mutton - dabba gosht, dal gosht, bhuna gosht, kheema masala, roghan josh and mutton chop fry. I counted at least 8 different masalas for cooking chicken, each one more tempting than the other. butter chicken, chicken 65, chicken malaiwala, golden fried chicken, chilli chicken, chicken white korma, chicken lollypop...the list went on.
As I read the neat labels, I thought of Mumbai's many tiny Mughlai restaurants, with their faded menus and their standard but popular offerings. Did they all buy masalas from places like this? "Hmm", I said to myself, "Maybe this is why Chicken 65 tastes similar, whether it is eaten in Bhayander or in Masjid!".
Alongside traditional Mughlai masalas, Tasty Spices also had coastal cuisine - Malvani masala, Goan fish curry masala, vindaloo masala, prawns masala fry and so on. A bottle of sambar masala was the sole vegetarian representative from South India, but to add a dash of international flavour to the offerings, there was a bottle of "Pizza Masala". Purists might scoff at the idea of pizza masala, but this is a hugely popular mix these days, thanks to Mumbai's vegetarian Gujaratis.
There are other shops in Crawford Market that sell masalas, but none of them have the neat packaging and display of Tasty Spices. I complimented the owner on his marketing savvy. "It's not just bottled masalas", he said to me. "If you buy the masala, we also give you the perfect recipe for how to make the dish at home. Try it - your home food will taste just as chatkeela as the restaurants!"
A tempting thought, indeed, for harried mothers of finicky children. Mumbai loves to eat out, so often it is restaurant food that defines the standards for what is tasty and what is not. A masala that promises to transform home cooking into something interesting and extraordinary is quite a draw.
If your family is addicted to restaurant food, go to Crawford Market and take a look at Tasty Spices on Lane 1. Maybe you'll re-create that strange restaurant magic at home, and have everyone asking for more!
