My Parsi mom makes the best avial: John Abraham

John Abraham

Here’s a tidbit: John Abraham can eat 45 appams in one sitting.
“It’s not a problem for someone with my body size,” he explains. He also knows everything you ever wanted to know about iddi-appam, vella-appam, indri-appam and so on.
Then there’s puttu, steamed cylinders of ground rice and coconut in alternate layers. “It’s supposed to be eaten steaming hot, with coconut milk poured on it. It’s the most delicious thing you’ll ever have had,” he says with childlike glee. This is John Abraham’s soul food; his happy place. Give him anything with coconut milk, he says, and he’ll lap it up.
“No place in the world can beat Kerala when it comes to a good, healthy breakfast,” says the Parsi-Malayalee actor. Brought up in Bombay with his mother’s side of the family, John grew up mainly on Parsi food, while his father’s relatives (Syrian Christians from Kerala), were mostly abroad. Dhansak dal, chicken farcha, patrani machhi, salli boti, saas ni machhi were therefore as much a staple for him as appam.
“My mom makes the most amazing avial. Can you believe that? A Parsi makes thequintessential Kerala dish better than most
Mallus I know,” he gushes.
John is obviously quite taken up with his mom’s cooking. “Take karela, or brinjal. These are things most people hate, but I die for them when my mom cooks them. No one can beat the baingan ka bharta she makes,” smiles John, adding that though he lives alone, he rushes to his mom at the first chance he gets so that he can have some of her special dishes.
His everyday diet is as boring as they come, however. His Man Friday Santosh mostly puts together salads for him, and lunch usually consists of jowar or bajre ki roti with rajma, moong, masur or tuvar dal. “You would think a guy with a name like John Abraham lives on pizzas and burgers,” he grins, adding that almost all his food choices are driven by the health factor, which sometimes goes overboard. “I have always been fussy about food, and it seems to be getting worse with age. Even from the health point of view, you’d rather eat crappy food than not eat at all. But I only want the right kind of food, and if I don’t get it, I eat nothing. The body suffers in the bargain,” says the muscular actor. When he’s shooting, his co-stars tend to run away from him at lunch time. “I start talking of the nutritional value, or the lack of it, of each item that people around me eat. They don’t like that,” he rues.
John, known for his love for fast cars and bikes, then says,“An expensive car needs Octane 97 to run smoothly, whereas a regular car can run on unleaded petrol too. My body needs nothing less than Octane 97. Or rocket petrol.” Right.