Potato dish features spices that reflect region’s history

This request came on Nov. 1, in response to the column of the same date where the dish had been mentioned in passing: “How about the recipe for the bhajee you mentioned in today’s column? Thanks!” – Suellen Mucci

In that column, I actually gave a recipe for enriching a local version of the Indian naan flatbread; we ate the naans with the bhajee that my wife, Kaisari had made earlier. It was a saute of slivered potatoes, sliced green beans and fried onions, cooked lightly with some curry seasoning, but kept on the dry side without any spicy sauce.

Bhajee is a popular Indian dish generally served as a first course in a meal that may include other sauced dishes like curried fish, fowl or beef as well as daal (a soupy lentil dish). All of these are eaten with rice or chapati (a dry griddle-cooked flatbread), naan or paratha, a layered flatbread made with short dough and fried in oil or ghee.

The spices used for these dishes, and sometimes even the way these dishes are cooked and served, can vary widely from region to region on the Indian subcontinent, which is now partitioned into three independent nations – India in the center, Pakistan on the west and Bangladesh on the east.

With a civilization that is thousands of years old, this vast and rich region has drawn invading hordes from all over the world as its many languages, cultures and cuisines prove. It is also a polyglot of races and religions, being the birthplace of Buddhism and Hinduism, as well the region with the largest population of Muslims in the world.

Among the riches that drew the hordes were India’s spice treasures. Consider the fact that even the discovery of the New World had ties to this heady lure; Columbus thought he had found the sea short cut to India, the reason the natives were mistakenly thought to be Indians, an error that has stuck to this day. The wave is now in reverse, though, and Indians and their spicy cuisines are wowing the whole world. Even in West Palm, there are half a dozen Indian grocery stores.

I don’t know, Ms.

Mucci, if this mini history reminder will add any to the taste of the recipe at hand, but it surely won’t hurt. At least when you go to one of these desi (Indian for”native”) stores, you can view their wares from all parts of the subcontinent with greater appreciation. Kitchen Counselor is a weekly column about kitchen and cooking tips written by Gholam Rahman, a former staff writer for The Palm Beach Post. To reach him, email gholam_rahman@ pbpost.com