THE MASALA REPUBLIC
If the limitless variety of food doesn’t talk of the diversity in India, we don’t know what else does. Here’s our journey across the country through its cuisines.
From the Bengali shukto to the Gujarati thali, the vadis of Amritsar, and the galmo in Goa—the behemoth that is Indian cuisine cannot be defined in a single article, let alone a line or two.
It was in Coorg that I had my epiphany about the souring agents that are used in that vast, unfathomable entity called Indian food. I was eating a dish of fried aubergines at the homestead of a friend, Kavita Muthappa, and a rich, sweet-sour flavour took me by surprise. It was almost like the reduction of an aged red wine. It suffused the dish of a humble vegetable that I am not even particularly fond of and made it taste ambrosial. Outside, the rain drummed steadily on the tin rooftop, as it had been doing relentlessly all day and most of the previous night, making the slopes of Kavita’s coffee estate too slippery to walk on.
Coorg, in the southernmost part of Karnataka, just inside the coastal region, is home to a small community, the Kodavas, who are believed to have descended from the army of Alexander the Great. Their cuisine contains a good deal of red meat, particularly pork, but it was the delicacy of kachampuli—the vinegar made from garcinia, the fruit of a tree that grows along the western coast—that fascinated me. In Goa, garcinia is used in a sun-dried form. And the related species that is found further south, in Kerala, is dried in a contraption made of coconut husks set afire, to give it a slightly smoky taste. The other state where garcinia grows is Assam. There, it is called thekera and is used in a cold drink, among other things. Kachampuli exemplifies the sheer breadth of Indian food to me. It is an ingredient that is at once dynamic—changing form with the way it is processed and used, and yet unknown to the majority of India.
If one were to characterise Indian food in a single word, it would probably be ‘thali’. That steel platter with its six or seven katoris contains what Ayurveda deems are the six tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent, and astringent. Wherever in India you travel, a thali restaurant will offer Often served in spiced curries, mangodis are a healthy and popular snack in Rajasthan
If one were to characterise Indian food in a single word, it would probably be thali.
you endless regional variations of these tastes. West Bengal may have a dry vegetable preparation called shukto (bitter) and Gujarat may have several katoris with various preparations with an identical degree of sweetness, but analyse the ingredients keenly and you will see that each taste is repre- sented in a thali.
Of course, ingredients and preferences differ from one part of the country to another, but there are a few commonalities—lentils and vegetables are eaten by almost everyone.
In the seventh largest country in the world that hosts the second biggest population, the food is far beyond what a single definition can encap- sulate. The wonder is that while each of the 29 states and seven union territories has its own set of cuisines based on geography, faith and ethnicity, a first-time visitor to the country would identify each one as Indian, though the ingredients and methods of cooking in one region may not be familiar to one person from another. Certainly, the Namboodri from Kerala and the Pandit from Kashmir have hardly any similarity in their food habits, even though both are Hindu-Brahmins. One eschews any form of meat, the other eats mutton regularly; though neither community uses onion or garlic in the preparation and both make extensive use of asafoetida. A Muslim from Kerala would have more commonalities with a person of another religious faith in Kerala than a Muslim from, say, Bhopal. And a Christian family living anywhere in coastal Andhra Pradesh would not find the fish curry, rice and vegetable meal of a co-religionist from coastal Kerala palatable, leave
alone familiar. Andhra Pradesh uses tamarind in their fish curry but no coconut, and a high level of red chillies; in Kerala, fish tamarind is used, the base of a fish curry is always coconut and the spice level is far lower.
“I have a surprise for you,” Chef Rahul Gomes Pereira of Jamun, Delhi’s hip regional Indian restaurant, tells me on the phone, almost incoherent with delight. When I visit his restaurant in a leafy neighbourhood of South Delhi, I am greeted with a ‘cake’ made up of tiny shrimps. The cake is called galmo, and because it requires a lot of care to make, hardly anybody in Goa bothers with it anymore. However, Chef Gomes Pereira has made a portion of prawn balchao for me. Rich in Goan chillies and toddy vinegar, it has the depth of flavour that I remember from my childhood holidays in the family village.
Galmo, and dried fish and prawns in general, came about in the tiny state because of a consensus that there was to be no sea-fishing during the monsoon months. That was the period when the fish used to spawn. So, while shark, mackerel and pomfret are aplenty in the markets around the year; during the June to September period, it is dried fish, pickled brined fish and dried shrimp that are eaten. Galmo requires expertise, but the rest just sunshine.
The sweep of the Indian subcontinent includes mountains, foothills, alluvial plains, sandy deserts, plateaus, coastal belts and river deltas. Yet, it is not only geography that affects regional cuisines, but culture, climate and tradition too. One example is the drying of ingredients that takes place in many parts.
Like fish, vegetables are dried in the Kashmir Valley. It started back in the days when heavy snowfall was a certainty, which closed the highway that connects Kashmir to the rest of the country in winters. In autumn, every household would dry mushrooms, turnips, tomatoes, bottle gourd and aubergines by stringing them up in garlands that would be hung out on walls till the water content had dried, thereby increasing the shelf life. Global warming and an efficient maintenance of the highway has done away with the need for drying vegetables, but they are still considered a delicacy by people of a certain age.
While vegetables are dried in Kashmir, lentils are ground, mixed with a spice or two and dried in the sun after moulding them in meticulous shapes in two states—Rajasthan and Punjab. In western Rajasthan, it started due to sheer need. The sandy Thar desert is where even the most hardy vegetable needs to be coaxed out of the ground, so lentil mangodis made from moong dal make a healthy meal, especially when clubbed with hardy desert beans like ker sangri or the dairy products for which western Rajasthan is famous. Punjab is called the land of the five rivers and the wheat bowl of India because of its fertile soil, so an emergency measure like urad dal vadis makes little
sense. However, the market around the Golden Temple in Amritsar is crammed with shops selling vadis with black pepper spicing. Why the verdant West Bengal needs to have rations like boris is even less clear, but the dainty urad dal dumplings are eaten here as a fried morsel in a meal or in a fish curry. You would find a gayna bori only in the state of West Bengal, where boris are piped from a nozzle in the shape of jewellery, combining form and function.
Mangodis, vadis, and boris apart, lentils are perhaps the most frequently occurring ingredients across the country. Whole and husked moong dal deep-fried and slathered over with powdered spices, the soupy lentil in our katori at dinner time, paneer pakoras covered with besan (made from chickpeas), the sweet moong dal halwa and besan barfi. I challenge you to stay completely away from all lentils, in all forms, for a whole week. It cannot be done.
However, if there is one set of ingredients that is vital to the entire panoply of Indian cuisine, it is spice. India is the largest aggregate producer and consumer of spice in the world, notwithstanding that individual spices may be produced in larger quantities elsewhere (Canada is the world’s largest grower of mustard.) Cumin, coriander, turmeric and red chilli are used in combination with each other in many other parts of Asia. However, no other country in the world uses spice with as much flair as we do, whether for culinary purposes or religious (bathing idols in saffron and writing the Om symbol with turmeric on vehicles and door-posts). Most spices have medicinal benefits, apart from their culinary advantages. Ayurveda has spelled out the health benefits of turmeric, black pepper, carom seeds (all native to India), as well as cumin, green cardamom and fenugreek. In addition to cooking with them, many patients of diabetes and high blood pressure use them to aid their vitals.
While it would probably be correct to say that no Indian stays free of spice, using a matrix of spices has become the hallmark of one cuisine—that of Lucknow. Lucknavi cuisine was the post-Mughal empire preserve of nobles who set up court in the city. Their preoccupation with the good life resulted in a remarkable attention to the arts, where architecture, culture and cuisine prospered. Old families in the city still keep a meticulous table, and one of the hallmarks of their cuisine is the unparalleled use of spice.
Charles de Gaulle once asked rhetorically, “How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?” I think he would have been rendered speechless had he visited India.