Bikram Vaidya grew up in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, and ran a pub there for years before coming to the U.S. to get a culinary arts degree at Western Culinary Institute/Le Cordon Bleu in Portland, Oregon. Vaidya later went on to teach at Le Cordon Bleu and was a founding member and lead instructor at the Oregon Culinary Institute. For the last 15 years he has been dedicated to cataloguing the cuisines of his homeland. Vaidya has trekked across Nepal and spent time staying with families to learn their recipes and the cultural traditions behind their ingredients. Vaidya’s new cookbook, “The Mystic Kitchens of Nepal,” came out a few months ago. He joins us to discuss the work.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Bikram Vaidya grew up in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, in a family of Royal Ayurvedic physicians. But he didn’t go into healing, at least not directly. He is a chef, a teacher, a researcher, a traveler. In 1989, he opened a pub in Kathmandu, then he moved to Portland where he got a culinary arts degree at the Western Culinary Institute/Le Cordon Bleu. He worked in fine dining restaurants in the U.S., before returning to Portland to become a founding member and lead instructor of the Oregon Culinary Institute.
But he never forgot his culinary roots. And in fact, it seems that being away from Nepal gave him a deeper appreciation of the rich traditions of his homeland. He spent 15 years cataloging its cuisines. He trekked across Nepal, spending time with families to learn their recipes and their traditions behind what they ate. He’s collected all of this in his book, “The Mystic Kitchens of Nepal.” And he joins us now to talk about it. It’s great to have you on the show.
Bikram Vaidya: Well, thank you, Dave, for having me here. It’s an honor.
Miller: What are some of your earliest food memories?
Vaidya: Food memories, there’s a lot in the Newari culture – yeah, I’m from Kathmandu – especially malpua swari growing up. It’s a sweet, right? As a kid you love that stuff. Besides that …
Miller: What kind of sweet is that?
Vaidya: Malpua is basically a Nepalese-style doughnut, and a swari is a fried bread that you mix together and eat.
Miller: And would that have been a breakfast?
Vaidya: Breakfast, yeah. That’s very common in Nepal in the old days.
Miller: Would you make that at home or get that out?
Vaidya: Sometimes I make it at home because of deep frying. It’s easy to get it in the market. I lived in downtown Kathmandu. I grew up in downtown, one of the oldest city areas. So because of that, it’s really easy to access the market.
Miller: You wrote, in your introduction, that your family basically thought that the food they were making was better than what they could get outside. But then you go on and list a huge list of … I mean, you remember all the names of all of the people who would make all the dishes all around you. So it seemed like you did get out and go to these stalls or food markets yourself, even if your family thought you should be eating home food.
Vaidya: That’s correct, because actually when you’re trapped, more you want to explore. That’s what happened to me. And because across the street from my house, there were alleyways, there were all the pubs and all the climbers came from all different places. They used to go inside and I’m always curious, what are they doing inside?
Miller: What did you get at those pubs?
Vaidya: Mostly at these pubs, they made a lot of barbecue meat. Then you can smell those, and then the chicken kebab, roasted chicken and curries, a lot of curries.
Miller: When did you start cooking yourself?
Vaidya: So growing up with my mom was the greatest thing, because I used to go hang out with grandma and my mother. I didn’t have sisters. So I started learning since my childhood, but that really encouraged me. And also watching other people cooking – that really has helped me.
Miller: I mentioned that you grew up in this family of physicians, going back many generations. Was there a pressure for you to follow in those footsteps to become a healer?
Vaidya: Absolutely. When I went to school here, culinary arts, and when I went back to Nepal, they said, “Why do you become a chef or a cook?” So my answer was, “This is a part of giving back to the community, feeding good food, food as a medicine.” Which is what my grandfather used to say, that food is the healing property for our body.
Miller: Did your family buy that? Did they like that answer?
Vaidya: Not really. But in the end, yes, when I was doing all the programs, they started liking it.
Miller: You ended up opening a bar, as I mentioned, in Kathmandu, with a partner in 1989. What did you serve there?
Vaidya: Different kinds of cocktails we modified because Nepal is a very isolated hometown. We didn’t have a lot of access for international liquors, but we modified it and we made very unique names … beer, rum. Nepal have a good rum, vodkas and whiskeys. And we made cocktails and we served that.
Miller: Food, too, or was it just mostly…
Vaidya: That’s why I came to America because I wanted to study about a restaurant and food.
Miller: Why the U.S.?
Vaidya: Yes, because I spoke English. And also, we had a lot of friends and Portland is another place where I had a lot of friends and my girlfriend at that time. Now, she’s my wife. I chose to come here at that time.
Miller: From there, as I mentioned, you went on to work in some fine dining restaurants and luxury hotels, based on this Western training or French training.
Vaidya: Yes.
Miller: If I’d asked you back then, 30 years ago, say, just how much Nepali culinary traditions meant to you after you had all this French training, what would you have said?
Vaidya: So it meant a lot to me back then, too. That’s why I wanted to preserve my culture’s cuisine. I was studying Western food, but at the same time, what happened is I was realizing it’s related so much with my culture and my cuisine. And I said, oh my God, when I was in the school, I was realizing it’s a lot to do with our culture.
Miller: What was an example of one of the connections you realized when you dug deeper into a Western culinary tradition and realized that there was significant overlap?
Vaidya: A classical example is aspic.
Miller: Aspic – salty jello.
Vaidya: The ancient, one of the oldest foods we have learned to eat. It’s driven from China to Nepal, to the Silk Road, went to Turkey, the Middle East and to Europe.
Miller: Where the basic idea is there’s some kind of collagen, normally from animals, and you use it … is the idea preserving?
Vaidya: Preserving, especially for winter. You know, they have to come up with some ideas, right? [Laughter] And you cannot keep on cooking. So they made jello and started eating jello food to give the protein.
Miller: When did you realize you wanted to embark officially on this project of really cataloging, in a serious way, Nepali cuisine?
Vaidya: About 15 years ago. But I started right after school, because during school we didn’t have any kind of documentations. So I started doing, back then, a little bit. But 15 years ago, I really decided to do it. I was teaching at school, a lot of students were asking me and I thought a lot of Nepalese were asking. That’s why I decided, OK, I really need to preserve and give. More and more immigrants were migrating overseas and if we don’t give something, then modernization is taking over and more old foods are dying.
Miller: Well, that was something that really struck me. And there is an intro in the book by a Nepali professor of art history who’s now at the University of Wisconsin. He wrote that the younger generation has an “unprecedented fascination with Western lifestyles.” And the sense I got from his introduction is that a lot of these traditional banquet-style meals [are] disappearing.
How much do you see that, just the disappearance of some of these traditions?
Vaidya: It is significant and that’s why we are reviving and we are doing a lot. I am an adviser for the old community. And then also, around Nepal, I’m trying to give awareness, like bringing back the ethnic foods.
Miller: This is an important point that I think I hadn’t quite realized when I first picked up the cookbook. It’s not like your project is just to introduce Nepali cuisine to non-Nepali people, you also want to preserve this for people from Nepal.
Vaidya: That’s correct.
Miller: Are there not any existing Nepali cookbooks in Nepalese?
Vaidya: There are, but not that in depth like this. That’s why I went in this depth because I almost published just like other cookbook a long time ago when the earthquake happened. You remember that time in Nepal. That time I almost published the spiral-bound Nepali cookbook to do a fundraising. But I stopped and I said, “hey, we need to do it bigger and better than that.”
Miller: Can you give us a sense for just the extent of the culinary diversity in this country – a country which has some of the highest mountains in the world but also has tropics?
Vaidya: That’s correct. So there are over 150 ethnic groups of people [who] live in Nepal. So it is very difficult, because from the south there are more Indian influences, north more Tibetan influence, the far west is a different influence. So it’s very unique – diverse climate, various different climates, tropical to arctic basically, and also microclimates. That is what is difficult for us to pick and choose of that country. It’s very unique.
Miller: How did you go about getting some of these recipes? I mentioned that you trekked around the country and often would spend time with home cooks. What kind of conversations did you have with people?
Vaidya: Going to culinary school really helped me, actually. I had a good foundation on how to start a conversation with the people and it’s not easy. You just go to some people’s house and start asking. I had a networking connection. I trekked and went to villages. I started establishing a network from Kathmandu to other villages, went to their houses and stayed with the family. And start from beginning, like breakfast to dinner, what they cook, what they eat during festivals.
We started making ourselves those dishes. And we paid money to have all the stuff. Sometimes you can see in the pictures that I was collecting the ghonghi, which are snails. A lot of people say, “what?” And I’ve seen collecting freshwater fish, shrimps and stuff. A lot of people have no knowledge of this stuff, even Nepali people.
Miller: I mean, is it fair to say that, in a sense, you were collecting these recipes, talking to people and then having big parties?
Vaidya: Yeah. [Laughter] I did have parties with the people, but it was like a sense of bringing the community together.
Miller: If someone has never cooked a Nepali dish before and then they want to get started, what are some examples of dishes that you’d recommend as a good starting point?
Vaidya: So I will recommend simply dal bhat tarkari. It is a staple of the Nepali diet, which is rice and dal … lentils …
Miller: I know there are a million kinds of dal, and there are a million kinds of lentils.
Vaidya: Yes, that’s why I’ve written all the stuff in here to categorize it from very easy to hard. How much it takes and also calories in each of those recipes. Then tarkari curry is basically a vegetable and also some sort of meat. I have written some things like a five-minute cooking of chicken curry and stuff like that.
Miller: You say that tsampa – I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that correctly – is a superfood.
Vaidya: Yes.
Miller: This is when you were in the mountains. What is tsampa?
Vaidya: Tsampa is a roasted barley flour. Also, tsampa, they have been using for many, many, many, many years, for thousands of years crossing the Tibetan Silk Road. Because that’s a staple food and that can be used for many different things. You can survive without anything. Nowadays, you can call a sattu, which is they mix many other different varieties of grains and then make it into powder. You just carry that powder, melt the snow, mix it up, put in salt and butter, good to go.
Miller: Is there a dish that you cannot quite reproduce, even as a trained chef, outside of Nepal?
Vaidya: Not really.
Miller: Everything you can do there, you can do here?
Vaidya: Yes.
Miller: What about getting ingredients? There are a number of ingredients that are recognizable to people who have cooked Indian or Chinese food in the U.S., and that I know you can get either in any grocery store or in, say, a large Asian supermarket. There were some I’d never heard of, a kind of chive that I’d never seen before. It seems that there are some spices and herbs that might be harder to find.
Vaidya: That’s a good question. A lot of those stuff were hard to find before. Last five years, young Nepalese business entrepreneurs are bringing a massive quantity of everything available in Nepal, introducing to the United States. We’re very lucky now. You can buy it online or we have some stores here, Nepalese stores. You can buy it there, too.
Miller: How much are you interested in combining Nepali cuisine … I mean, you talked earlier about aspic, this jello which crosses culinary borders. Are you interested in introducing other aspects of Nepali flavors or techniques into Western traditions, combining them?
Vaidya: Yes, there is a lot of stuff, such as a dumpling, momo. That is becoming really popular right now. Another one is I like to really introduce to the public some very healthy food called wo. It is gluten free and it’s like urud dal and pancake. Not many people know about it. And there is rice crispy, called chatamari and it is gluten free. It’s very easy to make it. So certain things like that I wanna introduce.
Miller: Why do you call your book, “The Mystic Kitchens of Nepal”?
Vaidya: Because Nepal is a very spiritual country and it’s always mysterious things from soil to soul. And the kitchen is a secret part of our life in Nepal. Secret people are not allowed, whoever. That’s why I was talking about that. You have to have a connection to go inside the people’s houses.
Miller: Specifically, to go inside their kitchens?
Vaidya: Yes, very, very strict.
Miller: You have to know somebody and be invited.
Vaidya: Yeah, and I have some pictures in there. I’m sitting with a kitchen family in the kitchen.
That is like they have to invite inside their kitchen.
Miller: Do you feel that way about your own kitchens, or that you’ve worked in restaurants or in your home, that it’s a sacred place?
Vaidya: Absolutely. And I think the reason they make it sacred is because of the hygiene reason. So this is another thing I studied. When I came to America, was studying sanitation, and I said, “oh my God, we practice this every day back home.”
Miller: Washing hands.
Vaidya: Washing hands, removing shoes, socks, and washing feet and stuff. Then going into your kitchen.
Miller: That’s a very practical reason and I like it. Nobody wants to get food poisoning. But do you take it to be more spiritual than that? I mean, not necessarily religious, but do you see a kitchen and food making as separate from not passing salmonella on to people – do you think of it as a kind of spiritual exercise?
Vaidya: Absolutely. Whatever we eat is who we are, simply. So that’s why we believe that and we were taught in my family that it is very sacred. And also, spiritually if we eat a proper diet and proper kitchen, we’ll nurture our body.
Miller: Who do you most want to pick up this book and to make dishes from it? Who do you see as the audience for your book?
Vaidya: I have a target for a lot of those who are Americans interested in food, enthusiastic people, and also Nepali people who are new generation. I want them to learn about this culture, our culture. And other people who are culinary students.
Miller: Bikram Vaidya, thank you very much.
Vaidya: Thank you, Dave, for having me here.
Miller: Bikram Vaidya is a chef, teacher, a researcher, a traveler. His new book is called, “The Mystic Kitchens of Nepal.”
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.