Airline Food: Indian Cuisine A Surprise Vegetarian Option

Tasty, nutritious airplane food? In coach? When pigs fly!

So imagine my shock, on a recent Continental flight from Houston to Paris, when I was served a delicious, healthful Indian meal.

It was the aroma that caught my attention. The flight attendants were several rows away with their carts and trays when, in place of the usual stale plane air, the unmistakable scent of basmati rice and vibrant spices wafted by.

The meal was the vegetarian option. The crew had extras, and I snapped one up. Beans, potatoes, Indian basmati rice, black-eyed peas and spices. No preservatives or artificial flavors. No ingredients that a 10-year-old would have trouble pronouncing or identifying.

I dug in and savored the bright, unanticipated flavors. The rice was fragrant and the grains distinct, the green beans nicely spiced, the black-eyed peas a tad dry but perfectly palatable. "Miles better than anything I've ever eaten on a plane," I scribbled in my journal. (I know, I know, some of you are thinking that I'm lucky to get fed on an airplane at all.)

Travelers on Continental (coast-to-coast and international flights), British Airways and some American, U.S. Airways and Delta flights may experience the same pleasant shock. Jyoti Indian Cuisine, which catered the meal I enjoyed, does business with all of them.

Back on the ground in Texas, I asked Anita Jaisinghani, chef-owner of Indika restaurant, to rate several sample meals. Had the fatigue of travel clouded my judgment, to say nothing of my palate? We sat in her airy Montrose restaurant, with some pretty captivating smells of its own, and nibbled from airline trays.

"For airline food, it's above average. There are spices and actual flavor. You never have flavor in airline food," she said, giving a chickpea entree and a samosa the thumbs up. "If you compare this (on scale of 1 to 10) to what they usually give you on flights, it's an 8."

Nutritionist Jyoti Gupta founded Jyoti Indian Cuisine in 1979 under the name Gourmail. At the time, she lived in Crosby and was finishing up her master's at Texas Woman's University. As she neared graduation, she looked for work that would let her stay home to raise her children. She started her own business, canning Indian food - then a rarity in Houston and much of the United States. She contracted with a factory in New Orleans, developed recipes aimed at the American market and made headquarters for the "company" (she was its sole employee) in her house. An article in the Houston Chronicle described the new business as a "fancy curry-by-mail company."

"We were very naive! Oh, my God," Gupta says about its launch.

Almost 30 years later, Jyoti Indian Cuisine employs about 30 people and operates a factory in Philadelphia near that city's airport. The company's much-expanded product line - canned soups, dals, dumplings, sauces, beans - sells at Whole Foods and other natural-foods markets, while its airline business is soaring. At an age when others would be thinking about retirement, Gupta, 59, and her husband and partner, chemical engineer Vijai Gupta, 68, are developing new culinary products, from mango pickles and Indian vinegars to spice mixes and an Indian-style mouth freshener, a mix of fennel, coriander, sesame and tamarind.

The airplane-food business was a lucky break. One day in the late 1990s, an airplane catering company asked the Guptas for advice on how to improve the vegetarian meals on British Airways flights out of Philadelphia. Passengers, Vijai says, had complained of "boiled broccoli" - his shorthand for savorless vegetarian options. (The Guptas avoid broccoli and other members of the odoriferous cabbage family in their airplane meals.)

Soon the catering company signed on to use Jyoti sauces and spices. Several months later, Jyoti inked a contract with British Airways to manufacture the meals itself - some 50 to 100 a week, depending on the travel season. To meet exacting specifications, the Guptas tinkered with the weight of the meals, the ratio of vegetables to rice, the slosh factor of the sauces and the size and shape of the bread to ensure it would fit precisely onto meal trays.

Today Jyoti Indian Cuisine supplies thousands of vegetarian meals each week to flights originating in the United States, including more than 2,000 to Continental, according to the airline's Tammy Briggs. Continental menu items range from pumpkin poori (bread) and paneer (Indian cheese) with curry to chickpeas masala.

The increased volume will soon necessitate a move to a much larger factory, which Vijai, a born tinkerer with 24 U.S. patents to his name, is designing. He resembles an excited boy with a new train set as he describes the innovations he plans and leads a tour of the current factory, happily showing off the equipment he's retrofitted or invented to remove pebbles from beans, prevent labels from getting smudged and dictate the timing of cooking processes.

It's an unexpectedly homey place, neither sleek nor sterile, and the tempting smell conjures India: garlic, onions, turmeric, ginger, cumin. A line of women who are garnishing beds of rice with golden raisins looks like school-lunch ladies. Two men peel onions by hand. A vat holding 2,000 portions of dal bubbles away, and farina roasts, adding a toasty note to the air.

The Guptas, a bright, kindly couple, know every last bolt on the factory floor and every bean and spice on the airplane tray table in the meals they produce. Gupta, who is dressed in a soft pastel pullover spotted with turmeric, calls her recipes "formulas." Happily for hungry passengers, they taste like recipes.

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