Ingredients enhanced Indian cuisine
Chilis, potatoes and tomatoes are indispensable components of Indian cuisine - North and South. Chilis are the most pervasive of condiments, while potatoes are an integral component of at least one main dish each in North, South and East Indian cuisine.
It would be a gross understatement to say that Bengalis use potato in every course of their meal. It finds a place in almost every dish.
Be it gravies of mutton, chicken, fish, any seasonal vegetables and curries, potatoes are a must. Then there is a special kind of savory potato curry preparation that is a staple Bengali breakfast. Some people even prefer the piece of potato inside mutton or chicken curry more than the actual pieces of meat.
When Nawab Wajid Ali, Shah of Oudh, was deposed and evicted by the British and exiled to Kolkata with a meager stipend, he was forced to re-adapt his lavish biryani, excising all precious condiments and garnish, relinquishing nuts, and most importantly replacing mutton with potato. Similarly, the great famines of Bengal, partly induced by drought and partly by mismanagement, misdirection and wartime diversion by the colonial rulers, gave rise to aaloo-poshto (potato and poppy seeds), today a cherished classic delicacy, but once a desperate innovation to avert starvation.
The British regime forced the cultivation of poppy, a convenient and handy cash crop, in place of the usual food crops, which contributed or perhaps even led to the famines - one of the worst crises of the century. At least 3 million perished. Three-fourths of the rural populace of the giant state were near-starved. The scarcity of usual food items compelled households to resort to what was abundant - poppy seeds. Potato was relatively easy to grow - it proliferated from eyecuttings and was a subterranean tuber that could be grown in concealed places.
Potatoes have little to no taste of their own and hence are ideal for taking in the myriad spices of Indian cooking. Bengali cuisine's affinity for potato is second to none, save perhaps the Irish Potatoes have little to no taste of their own and hence are ideal for taking in the myriad spices of Indian cooking. Bengali cuisine's affinity for potato is second to none, save perhaps the Irish.
Moving on, tender-crisp stir-fried potato sticks (bhujia) and mashed potatoes (chokha) are North India's standard breakfast and lunch accompaniment respectively. Down south, potatoes are the filling that makes the region's most popular delicacy, dosas. India's most famous street snack, samosa, is filled with mashed potatoes. Fried potatoes and potato cutlets are ubiquitous too.
Few Indians are aware that their convenient and multifarious dietary staple is only 450 years old in the subcontinent. Potato originated in South America and for a long time was primarily cultivated in Peru. The Portuguese colonialists introduced potatoes, which they called batata, to India in the early 17th century, cultivating it along the west coast. The Portuguese had found it in Latin America via their Spanish neighbors, and thus potato is another of the vestiges of the Maritime Great Exploration Age.
British traders introduced it to Bengal as a root crop, alu. It subsequently spread to the northern hill areas of India, where it thrived. As part of their "missionary white man's burden" doctrine, genuinely convicted or otherwise, potato in effect became an expansionist and propaganda tool. The British equated it with "happiness," and proposed it as an ideal means to alleviate the misery borne out of frequent rice-paddy failures, which required backbreaking investment in its lengthy, complicated and prone cultivation process.
Paddy rice was as difficult to process and cook as to cultivate. Potato, on the other hand, was pliable, flexible and readily consumable, and was prescribed as a dietary staple, envisaged on Irish lines. However, India, being the great assimilator that it is, simply augmented its cuisine with the new addition but didn't displace the existent fare, just as it did with foreign religions, tongues, apparel and fragrances.
India, the great, slow-melting pot replaces, it harmonizes and syncretizes.
The absence of potato in the full-course food offering to Lord Jagannatha in Odisha also testifies to its foreign identity. The offering ritual, just as that in most Indian temples, has been carried down for five centuries pristinely unchanged. While the layman or commoner's dietary staple of the region is rice, lentil and potato, the last is absent from the deity's luncheon.
The foreign identity of the tomato is still retained in its Marathi name bilayati or vilayati, meaning "foreigner." Interestingly, that's where we get the English word "Blighty" from, originally used to refer to Englishmen, particularly colonialists in India, and later for British or overseas goods and products not known to India. The word is commonly used as a term of endearment by the expatriate British community or those on holiday to refer to home. Vilayati, an Urdu word, comes from Persian and ultimately Arabic vilayah meaning "state."
Its names in Indian languages bear testimony to its extraterrestrial origins - Assamese bilahi bengena, Bengali bilati beguna or tamyato, Gujarati tamato, Hindi tamatar or vilayati-baingan, Kannada tomaato, Konkani tomato, Marathi belavangi or vilayati vangi, Punjabi wilaití bengan, and Urdu wilayati baigan. Most languages call it a "foreign brinjal" (baingan meaning brinjal, aubergine, or eggplant), which is scientifically correct given that both fruits are closely related, with very similar shoot and leaf structures.
Take a moment to appreciate the fact that the Aztec (Nahuatl) word tomatl, the original name for the fruit, went through three languages and yet remained largely unchanged, and a Mesoamerican word is today a very popular word in most Indo-European and IndoDravidian tongues.
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