Mirchi &Mirabelle

Jodhpur's pantry was designed for a place where nothing fresh survives the journey. Ker berries and sangri beans arrive dried and stay dried, and they are no use to anybody until they have sat in water overnight and then in a pot for most of a morning.

Twenty-odd years later I was in a kitchen in Toulouse watching a friend put haricots in to soak the night before a cassoulet, and I recognised the gesture before I recognised the dish. The Thar desert and the Lauragais have never had a conversation. They arrived at the same answer anyway: take the driest thing you own, give it time, and put a crust on it.

Filter coffee is a machine made of two steel cups and no moving parts. The decoction drips overnight. In the morning it goes into hot milk and then between tumbler and dabarah, back and forth, arm out, until it froths and drops to a temperature a human can survive. Nobody in a Tamil kitchen has ever been in a hurry about this.

A canelé batter also rests overnight, also cannot be rushed, and also hides something soft and pale under something very close to burnt. So the rum comes out and the decoction goes in. The chicory turns out to do everything the rum was doing, and slightly more.

Five cities and ten years, which is long enough to stop being a visitor and not quite long enough to stop being asked where you are from. What France taught me, over and over, in five different accents, was to leave things alone. The cream. The potatoes. The oven. The hour.

What France never taught me is the sound mustard seeds make when they hit hot fat. So the gratin goes in exactly as it should, unhurried, and thirty seconds of tadka goes over the top of it on the way out — curry leaf, a broken dried chilli, and Grenoble walnuts standing in for the breadcrumbs.

Bordeaux

where the canelé problem started

Metz

mirabelles, in crates, every August

Poitiers

butter with the salt still in it

Toulouse

beans again, and a longer fire

Grenoble

walnuts, cream, and mountains for scale

Rugbrød is a brick. It is sour, dense, packed with seeds, cut in slices the thickness of a coaster, and it will comfortably outlive the week. The first time I broke one open in a Copenhagen kitchen I thought about baati: the wheat ball my family bakes until it is hard, cracks with both hands, and drowns in ghee before anybody is allowed to touch it.

A desert and a dark northern winter are not the same problem. They have the same answer. Make a bread that survives the climate, then add enough fat to forgive it. Served here cracked open, with dal, brown butter, and something pickled and Danish on the side.

I do not live in Kolkata. I arrive in it. My brother's city gets about a week of me a year and it spends the whole week on the street. Phuchka is a crisp hollow shell, a hole punched in the top with a thumb, and a man who fills and hands them over faster than you can physically swallow. The water is tamarind, green chilli, black salt, mint, and a decision made about you in advance regarding how much heat you can take.

In Metz, every August, mirabelles turn up in crates and go sour-sweet in exactly the same direction as tamarind. Same argument, different fruit. This one is the closest thing on the menu to an argument I would defend at a table.

Bengal sets sweet yoghurt in an unglazed clay pot so the water can leave through the walls while you are not looking. Denmark strains it. Both end up thick enough to stand a spoon in, both stay faintly sour under the sweetness, and both are only properly good cold.

Mawa and cardamom over the top, because that is where the whole thing started — six courses, four countries and one fairly long detour ago.