Pass the secret sauce

Chefs used to guard their recipes closely. Now, they gladly share their techniques with the world. Read between the lines when you cook, not every recipe is easy

- By VIR SANGHVI

Do you use cookbooks? I don't; which may explain why I am such a bad cook. I lack the patience to follow a recipe. And all my cooking is pretty last-minute, which means that by the time I decide to cook and start looking at a recipe I discover that I don't have half the ingredients, decide to improvise and end up making an entirely different dish.

You only realise how important recipes are when you see chefs fight over them. They hide their recipes (even from each other), and a line cook who has worked in a Michelin three-star restaurant will always get another job in a fancy place because he will know the secrets of the chef at the three-star restaurant and will be able to reveal the recipe.

That's as true of Indian food. For instance ITC, unlike most hotel chains, will not let its chefs publish the recipes of its most iconic dishes, because it regards them as proprietary information.

The Taj, in contrast, has published cookbooks on the grounds that culinary knowledge is meant to be shared. The Indian Accent cookbook contains recipes of the restaurant's most famous dishes.

The Taj's approach to recipes always reminds me of Camellia Panjabi, who spent decades with the group, tracking down every recipe worth knowing and explored many Indian cuisines that were unknown outside of private homes.