Fervent fusion

Food writer Mehak Kansal tells us about her new cookbook Bindas, and how summers in India combined with a very English childhood shaped her style

- 

Mehak Kansal cannot believe she has just gone and poured her “whole life into a book”.

It sounds rather daunting, filling the pages of a cookbook with your entire world, but Kansal doesn’t seem the hesitant sort. At least, not these days.

The self-taught chef, food writer and founder of Bindas Eatery in West London, grew up in Wiltshire, where she spent her time riding horses and quad bikes and attending boarding school. But her summers were spent with family in India, where she'd pay her grandmother's driver to take her on food-based jaunts. “It used to be: pay the driver, go and eat guavas, go to Haji Ali’s juice centre, get fresh mango juice, complain about stomach pain, go and get something to remedy that. The driver would go to the pharmacy and give us something so my grandma wouldn't know. Then we would go to the bowling alley and afterward have butterscotch ice cream,” remembers Kansal happily. “Then we would say, ‘Yes, yes. We went to the tailor. Yes, yes, we went to the temple.’ Did we do any of those things? No, we just basically ate. That's what we did!”

But Kansal says she always “struggled and battled with trying to fit in, ‘Am I too English, or am I too Indian? And where do I fit in between?’” Her debut cookbook, also called Bindas, is a delicious answer to that - a response to the amalgamation of cultures she has navigated, thanks to Gen X Indian parents, a very English childhood, and plates of masala beans on toast.