An Adventurous Palate

By Leo Racicot

When I was a kid, I wouldn’t have anything much to do with food. I wasn’t an eater and found most meal items our mother presented alien and strange. I remember a slab of cheese looked and tasted like a piece of plastic, and said so. A hamburger (it had to be plain — no mustard, mayo or ketchup) on a plain bun or a peanut butter sandwich on Wonder bread were all I tolerated. Back then, Diane was the big eater in our family; she’d dig into double portions on everything. Our mother would say, “Leo, you’re going to turn into a peanut butter sandwich one of these days!”  So, it was a shock to family members and longtime friends when I developed an adventurous palate, began branching out on what I’d eat, or even sample. Looking back, I credit Lowell’s rich ethnic diaspora of cuisines from other lands with freeing me from my peanut butter prison. Lowell Technological Institute drew and continues to draw a large Indian student population with its renowned engineering program. In the 1970s, the catastrophic wars in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam brought an influx of Southeast Asian refugees, and their food and traditions to Lowell. Over the years, Mexicans, Hispanics, Africans, Cubans, Dominicans all settled in Lowell where they hoped to make new beginnings, fresh starts. In 2025, a walker in the city can’t go far without passing by restaurants featuring tasty delights from these many cultures.

Indian Food

It was one of my work study students, Samir, who introduced me to Indian food. An engineering student who hailed from RIshikesh, Samir had an interesting background; his father had been a disciple of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1960s and had actually met and gotten to know The Beatles during their time at the Maharishi’s ashram when they were studying Transcendental Meditation. To earn money to attend college in America, Samir worked shining shoes for tourists from the time he was 8 or 9, saved up his earnings and said he polished so many shoes, his hands turned black from the polish. One evening, when I found him in the staff lounge where he’d taken his meal, my nostrils were filled with a savory fragrance of triangular-sized pastries. I asked him what they were and he told me “These are potato pea samosas. Try one”. The look and smell of them were too hard to resist. Samir was delighted to find I liked them and explained that they’re usually served with a chutney sauce. He was such a mannered boy, he apologized for not having any chutney to go with them. Years later, when I was working and cooking for the Sheas in Cambridge, Ms. Shea requested I learn how to make chutney for the table. I found the very idea daunting but soon learned that chutney was so easy to fix and I came to enjoy making it so much, I’d whip it up without being asked, just for the heck of it. It, and jambalaya, became my favorite dishes to make. I sang the praises of Indian food so vociferously, Samir put me wise to an Indian eatery downtown on Middle Street, Bombay Mahal (which later changed its name to Spice House) and I went and found its offerings so very tasty: Aloo Gobi, Palak Paneer, Butter Chicken, Masala Dosa, Dal Makhani, Naan. it made me a fan such that every Friday, I’d pick up my paycheck, head down and have my lunch there. I did come to love the place and the people who ran it.

This somewhat related story comes to mind — any member of the public can come into a state facility and utilize its services. Visitors to O’Leary Library didn’t have to be university-affiliated, One such visitor was a fellow named Richard Sjogren. Richard was a very tall, very lean gentleman. He had the whitest, most spidery fingers and hands I’d ever seen. He was special needs and spoke in a high-pitched voice that reminded us of Billie Burke, the actress who plays Glinda the Good Witch in the original WIzard of Oz. Richard sported a Swiss Alps hat and lederhosen (even in winter) and looked as if he was about to head for the mountains for a yodeling contest. The poor soul needed a hand tying his shoelaces but was a form of idiot savant because he was capable of speaking and reading Sanskrit and other complex Indian dialects. He and Samir would have long exchanges, and Samir confirmed for me that Richard, indeed, was able not only to converse but converse ably and fluently in these ancient tongues. Samir would say a lot of native Indians couldn’t grammatically manage what Richard managed. Fascinating.

Whenever I visited my dear friend, Priscilla, in Arlington, Mass., we’d hit either Haveli or Punjab in The Center. An absolute love for Indian food was among our common interests. Priscilla and I became good friends when we worked together for Cambridge Public Libraries. In the late ’90s or so, when the aging Main Library building was closed for major renovations and the staff had to be housed in a makeshift library in The Longfellow School up the street in East Cambridge for a long period of time,  she and I set out exploring various restaurants in nearby Inman Square and discovered Punjabi Dhaba on Hampshire Street, an utterly charming place where the food was served on silver military tins and trays (You’d swear you’d been plunked down in Tooting or Wembley, London, or in an outpost in a Rudyard Kipling story. The food was delicious; we very many times had to scramble to finish our meal and scurry back to Longfellow lest we be late from our break. But the rush was well worth it.

And I’ve written before about the sumptuous feast laid out for me and another guest in their home by ULowell PhD candidate, Susheel Deshmukh and his pretty wife, Manisha. Nicer people you’d be hard-pressed to meet. They cooked up a storm that would have been enough to feed an army of people and I sampled everything they set before me, a culinary banquet and an evening never-to-be-forgotten. I bent their ear so often about the wonders of Northern California that, last I heard, they’d decided to make their home there…

In Cambridge, on the steps leading down to The Red Line subway, there was a hole-in-the-wall store. It sold lottery tickets, candy bars, chewing gum, stuff like that. Over to the right of the shop was a hot case containing fresh samosas, curry pies. I could never resist stopping for a samosa which I liked taking down to the area where the trains came in, munching on it hungrily on cold winter days. The warmth of the pastry combined with the condensate emanating from my mouth made for a quick, appealing eating sensation, just as in those days when I used to grab a cone of salty hot French fries at Elliott’s on Elliott Street in Lowell on snowy cold  days, popping one tantalizing fry after another in my mouth as I made my way home up Appleton Street as evening came on…

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Samir

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi with the Beatles

Bombay-Mahal Restaurant, Middle Street in Lowell

My dear friend Priscilla

Susheel Deshmukh

Alewife Quick Bite store

Samosas with tamarind date chutney

Indian food spread