Indian food is a topic worthy of an essay all unto itself. More than one essay, really. But I will try to give an overview rather than a dissertation. The caveat, of course, is that this is all based on my direct observation. For real authorities on Indian cooking, try Swasthi or Cooking at Home with Pedatha. (Loath as I am to link to Amazon, I did not find another online store that carries the book. Please try your local bookstore in preference.) There is also Julie Sahni whose work was my own introduction to the craft. Before I even met Anuja.
This will not be a systematic article. My hope is that if I give you the information in the way that I think of it, laden with stories and meanings, that you too will learn about the food in the context of its history, both personal and national. Deprived of such context, it’s just so many calories and vitamins, no?
Indian Food in the United States, or: What I Experienced before Anuja
Indian food in the United States tends to be from the north. The biryani, flatbreads, and thick stews are all staples of Punjabi and Lacknawi cooking, as well as other northern regions. Indeed, such foods are often called “Mughlai,” to give credit to the influence of the Persian Mughals. (The reason for the popularity of Northern food actually goes back to the British having a larger presence in those northern cities, resulting in more cultural diffusion.) A lot of the focus of Indian food in the United States is on things that are readily available.
So you’ll get plenty of stews surrounding staples we (Americans) already eat. Thick stews of eggplant, tomatoes, chickpeas, that sort of thing. And of course chicken and lamb. The focus on basmati rice (the stress is on the first syllable) is also a northern thing. I’ve been in India for a month now and I have yet to eat basmati rice. I have eaten roti maybe twice. But both times it was cooked at home by a Southern Indian woman. Just like how my (Eastern European Jewish) mother occasionally makes lasagne.
South Indian Food
Of course, here in the south of the subcontinent you’ll find a completely different flavor-palette than in the north. Okay. It’s a modern country. People borrow from each other’s cuisines quite extensively. So you can go to a northern-style restaurant here in Bangalore. But the majority of restaurants here are Southern-Indian, and likewise the majority of home-cooked meals. Not a lot of Americans are intimately familiar with Southern Indian cooking so I’ll take a moment to explain. Worth it. Especially worth it if, as a result of reading this, you find out that there is such fare to be had in your town (or nearby) but you didn’t realize you were missing out.
It’s a truism of sorts that the southern half of a region will have a rice-based economy while the northern half of a region will have a wheat-based economy. There’s some truth to that here, as well. As you travel north through India, you’ll encounter more breads. You’ll still encounter plenty of rice up there and plenty of bread down here.
But every South Indian household I’ve encountered eats rice every day. Often more than once. The key difference compared to other parts of the world is that it’s usually fermented.
Idli/Dosa Batter: The Southern Staple
South Indian starches are fermented before they are cooked. It’s supposed to aid digestion. But it also serves the same role fermentation has served for thousands of years: making food go bad in a controlled way makes it less likely for the food to go bad in an uncontrolled way. It’s very hot here.
There’s a basic batter that’s used for most things, composed of rice and dal. They are soaked for a few hours, then ground to a wet batter, then left out. Usually overnight. When you open the lid, a slightly sour aroma will greet you, and there will be bubbles on the surface. (Both the process and the smell itself are not so different from the smell of sourdough bread. In the broad strokes, at least.) You then add salt and either fry or steam the batter. The active time is maybe half an hour. But the passive time is several hours. The results are delicious.
Chutney/Sambar
This starch is usually served with two things: chutney and sambar. Chutney can be a puree of anything but the most common ingredients are mint, coriander leaves (cilantro), and coconut. Peanuts, tomato, onion, and garlic also show up pretty regularly. Sambar is a dal-and-vegetable soup, most often poured on rice or served in a cup for dipping idli, dosa, etc. There are as many ways to make sambar as there are South Indian households. But all of them involve a preliminary step of dry-roasting spices, herbs, and dal, then grinding the resulting mixture into a powder. The powder is then kept in a jar for a few months.
You can buy such powders from the store but of course they are better fresh. Typically, even the greatest home-chef in India will have a combination of store-bought powders and home-cooked powders: perhaps they make their sambar-mixture from scratch but they buy their biryani-mixture from a store. That sort of thing.
Presentation
The results are quite beautiful, both the flavors and the colors. A typical Indian dinner-plate is made of stainless steel. Now imagine half of that space filled with a crisp brown pancake (or a pair of white, fluffy steamed buns). On the remainder of the plate will be three small bowls. One will contain the sambar, ranging in color from bright orange to deep red, depending on the recipe. Its surface will be broken by curry-leaves, bits of carrot, slices of drumstick. The other two bowls will be full of chutney, one the white of coconut milk, perhaps tinged green with coriander leaves, and the other a bright orange from the tomatoes. Both will be dotted with tiny black mustard seeds. A side salad consisting of tomatoes and cucumbers drizzled with a bit of lemon will round out the painting.
I recognize I’m starting to sound like a guidebook. It’s hard not to. The food and the presentation are stunning. But I don’t want to lose how much work it is to prepare such things. In the moment, it seems to take no time at all. But that is a matter of training. When something looks effortless, what you are often seeing is not an easy task but rather fifty years of training going into making a difficult task seem easy.
Kitchens and Restaurants
Many of the restaurants and food-carts serve the same fare as the kitchens:
-Idli (steamed buns usually made from the first day’s fermented rice-and-dal batter)
-Dosa (fried pancakes, usually made from the second day’s batter. By this time it’s a bit more sour.)
-Uttapam (usually batter that is a few days old, made into thicker dosa and covered with chopped onions, tomatoes, fresh green chillies, then flipped so that the vegetables cook a bit)
-Vada (these are made from dal with no rice, and are deep-fried instead of being either pan-fried or steamed. In appearance they resemble small donuts right down to the hole in the middle. But in taste of course they are similar to their above-mentioned culinary siblings)
Of course all of these are typically served with sides of sambar and chutney.
Any one of the above combinations, a practiced South Indian cook will be able to make at home. And yet people go to restaurants or breakfast-canteens and order the same thing. Well not exactly the same thing. One consideration is time. Traffic is atrocious in most every Indian city. It’s undeniably faster to drive to work early (when the traffic is less) and eat breakfast near the office. Another reason, I suspect, to go to a restaurant for idli, dosa, sambar, and other home-style meals is: it gives the diners plausible deniability as to how much butter is used. Usually.
Mmm… Butter…
I ordered butter masala dosa from one restaurant. Masala, in this case, means that after the dosa-batter is poured onto the griddle in its characteristic pancake shape; after it is crisped, flipped, and put on a plate, a large dollop of curried potatoes is added. Then the pancake is folded over. Butter masala dosa is what I just described but when it arrives at the table, a large pat of butter is sitting on top, slowly melting into the dosa. No denying the amount then. Though I suspect more butter was used in the frying. It’s way too much butter. It’s also delicious. Seriously delicious. Even as I am writing this I have to take a moment to let the pleasure of memory wash over me before I can continue.
Indian Food as Art
Food as pleasure is an art that is alive and well in the parts of India I have been to. As I am writing these words, I broke this morning’s fast at a canteen of the kind described above. Most of their offerings were plain South Indian fare: idli, dosa, etc., with sambar and chutney. The place was packed and the only reason it wasn’t more packed was because we went later in the morning, after the office crowd had cleared out. Breakfast for two people, including delicious filter-coffee, cost some 200 INR. About 3 dollars in American currency. Anuja pointed out that, at such rates and such levels of quality, this kind of restaurant serves as a societal leveler, albeit a modest one. We saw tech workers literally rubbing elbows with laborers. It was nice. Things can be nice.
Food is a paradox. You eat it and then it’s gone. But some meals you remember years, even decades later. Sometimes you remember the companionship. Sometimes the food. Or both.
Once Upon a Time in Kerala
I want to describe to you something that happened to me a while ago. Frequent readers of this column know that I love Wordsworth. Particularly influential on me have been his writings on memory. It’s no mistake that “Tintern Abbey” is the emblem of this entire website. So I try to be very precise about how experience turns into memory. And how memory in turn shapes experience.
My first time in India, I had the privilege of staying on a farm in Kerala. Even for India, Kerala is lush and fertile. The house we were staying in was halfway down a hill. Above us, black pepper vines curled around rubber trees. Around us, beans, tomatoes, coconuts, and one cow thrived. Below us, betel-trees shaded coffee bushes. And in the bottom-lands were the stubble of recently harvested rice.
Indian Food is Already Good. From Kerala, it was Something Else…
The food was next-level. I mean that quite literally. I’ve had good food. And then I’ve had Indian food. The best Indian food I’ve had tends to be one level better than the best western food I’ve eaten. Yes, I have a fondness for the cuisine, imparted to me by Anuja. But it’s also that the food is closer to the ground from which it is grown. The tomatoes are redder. The milk is sweeter. The yogurt is richer. Right now I’m here in mango season. And even here, in the heart of the city, where a stiff breeze can relieve the heat, yes, but also bring the smell of car exhaust or raw sewage, there are times when the air just… smells like mango. It’s intoxicating.
It’s difficult to walk more than a few blocks in Bangalore without seeing a coconut palm or a papaya tree. Or a mango tree. Depending on the season, you do have to watch where you step. You might split open a ripe mango and have to clean it off the bottom of your shoe. Or a coconut might split you open. It’s rare; but it has happened. But my experiences in Kerala took me one step closer to the earth. The food was harvested next to where I was sitting. Some meals brought tears to my eyes, and not just because Auntie dispensed the hot pepper with a stern hand.
We only spent a few days there. Then we went to Bombay, where I met Anuja’s parents. Then we went back to Bangalore to see Anuja’s nephew one last time. Her brother and sister-in-law were also there. But they weren’t one year old and adorable beyond the power of words to describe. So it goes. We mostly get less cute every year of our lives, and can but hope that there are compensations.
System Overload
And then we went home to New York. A month passed. Then another. One day, Anuja felt inspired to make sambar using the powders that her mother had given her. I’d like to say I helped her slice the tomatoes and onions and carrots and pumpkin; that I helped her reconstitute the dried tamarind in warm water; that I watched as she dropped in that precious powder. But I don’t think I did. More likely, I sat in front of my computer and thought depressed thoughts about how I was not progressing in my dissertation as fast as I would have liked.
And then she approached me with a bowl of sambar and I put the spoon to my lips. I don’t know how to describe what happened next. Except to say that, standing there in my New York apartment, with a rug beneath my feet and the cracked paint of a ceiling overhead, I saw the palm tree I was sitting under. And I felt the wooden bench where Auntie used to serve us tea as we looked out over the coffee bushes to where the one cow was ruminating on dry rice-stalks. I have never had my senses so completely overthrown by a sense-memory with the force of a hallucination. I think I began to lose my balance.
Okay, but All I’m Saying is: If you Grew up in a Tropical Country, your Grass was BY DEFINITION Greener
Anuja and I make fun of each other because I grew up eating cereal for breakfast (eggs on the weekends) and not knowing there existed such magic as she had available to her nearly every day of her life. (Her mother is one of the best cooks I’ve ever interacted with, in or out of a restaurant.) And she was sitting in her parents’ Bombay apartment, wishing she could be eating eggs or cereal. I suppose one of the main things I’ve learned about Anuja is the rather corny ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same.’ I wish it were more interesting than that. But it’s true. Kids take for granted what they know. So the thing that sent me into religious ecstasies as an adult? Anuja had to be patient with as a child.
Indian Food and Economics
A last thought on this matter. I understand (if from a distance) that there are people for whom slow food is a burden. The situation is exacerbated according to gender and class. Wives, in particular, are often expected to wake before dawn to cook breakfast and lunch for the whole family. Typically before going to work themselves. Or spending the day organizing the household. Or both. I feel joyful when I cook Indian food; or even when I help someone clear the table afterwards.
But part of the joy comes from the fact that I come to this cuisine without baggage. Baggage I am inadequate to the task of explaining. Fortunately, the issue has come up several times in Bollywood films. I don’t think it’s an accident that these are some of Anuja’s favorite movies and thus among the movies she made sure I would see. They have since become my favorites as well.
Indian Food in Bollywood
Thappad
A woman initiates divorce proceedings after her husband slaps her. In public, no less. None of the characters in the film can seem to understand why she is making such a big deal over such a little thing. Some of the early scenes show her grace and even brilliance in the kitchen. It is held against her that she does not know her way around the kitchen like her Mother-in-Law. But she is learning. And no one makes a cup of chai quite like she does. But these skills are taken for granted by her workaholic husband, and worse, by the women on his side of the family.
The Lunchbox
This one takes a bit more explaining for a non-Indian reader. Essentially, big cities in India have a courier service for lunchboxes (also called tiffin or dabba, with a heavy emphasis on the double-consonant in both words). These couriers provide the means for the cook (usually a restaurant or housewife) to send a hot, fresh lunch to the person who is at work, often on the other side of the city. They employ mass transit, bicycles… you name it. These courier services are famous for their timeliness and for the accuracy of their delivery. This movie begins with the (laughably fantastic) premise that a strange man receives a lunch box that a housewife meant for her husband. She is a really good cook. They start leaving each other notes alongside the containers. Is it friendship? Or something more?
Stanley ka Dabba
(trans: Stanley’s Lunchbox): This is from the kid’s perspective. Every kid comes to school with a lunchbox every day. Except Stanley. Why? It’s written as a mystery so I won’t say more. But it’s a gorgeous, funny, heartbreaking movie. It emphasizes that every culture, however beneficial, is in some ways a standard to live up to. And if you don’t live up to that standard…
Ok, Fine. Here is a Recipe
Ok. It wouldn’t be a food article without a recipe, would it? So here’s how I learned to make dal-with-rice. I’ll give it to you in levels.
Dal + Tadka, Level 1
Ingredients
Dal (any kind; half cup per person at least)
Salt (a pinch)
Turmeric (a pinch)
Oil
Black mustard seeds (2 pinches)
Cumin seeds (2 pinches)
Garlic (to taste… I might use a whole head; you might use a few teeth)
Coriander leaves (maybe ten separate leaves).
Green chillies (preferably the little kind that you get in a South Asian grocery. But in a pinch you can use Jalapeños. Just increase the quantity)
Rice (any kind; half cup per person)
Serve with: yogurt, cucumber, tomato, lemon or lime to taste
I know that the quantities are very vague. That’s by design. If you really like salt, put more in. If you want the freshness of cilantro, put extra cilantro. Dal should not be spicy but if you want it a bit spicier, add more chillies. You get it.
Step 1
Check the dal for pebbles. Rinse it. Put it in a pot with a lot of water and some salt and turmeric. I use at least a 3:1 ratio of water to dal. I like half a cup of dal per person at least. The more the better, honestly, because I like leftovers.
Step 2
Bring the dal-turmeric-salt mixture to a boil, then lower the flame to a simmer. Cover and set aside. The dal should be done in about 20 minutes, but it depends what kind of dal you’re using. Skinned moong dal is the fastest. Toor or masoor or whole moong dal take longer. All are tasty. Try different ones. Just not skinned urad, because that’s the dal that’s used for making idli/dosa batter, not for eating by itself.
Step 3
Bring a pot of white rice to boil. If you’re using brown rice, make this the first step. In India, they always rinse the rice before cooking. Until the water runs clean. But if you’re in the States, you might be rinsing off nutrients that they’ve added to the rice. So. Your choice. I use a 2:1 ratio of water to rice. Sometimes a bit more water. You can always strain the extra water. White rice is done in about 12 minutes; brown rice takes about 40.
Step 4
Once you get good at this, you can start using this time to make a vegetable of some sort. But for now, use these 10 or so minutes to make sure everything else is in readiness. You should have your spices next to you. You should have some yogurt. Some garlic. Some coriander leaves (optional). And some lemon or lime. And maybe a fresh green vegetable like cucumbers and tomatoes. Some of these need preparation, so do that now. Peel the garlic, rinse and chop the coriander/cilantro leaves. Remove the stems from the green chili. Slit lengthwise with a sharp knife.
Step 5
The rice is done. Take it off the flame. Now prepare the tadka by gathering:
-black mustard seeds (if you don’t have these at the local grocery, you can do without.)
-cumin seeds
-peeled garlic, chopped.
-rinsed, chopped coriander leaves.
-A green chili of some kind, if available. Remove the stem and slit lengthwise.
Step 6
Wait until dal is done or nearly done (when the individual beans have fallen apart). In a separate frying pan, add a neutral oil or some butter. When hot, add the mustard seeds. These will start to splutter.That’s your cue to add the cumin. These will start to turn brown. That’s your cue to add the garlic. This all happens quickly, so don’t be afraid to burn a batch of cumin and then start over. The trick is to add the garlic before the cumin turns too brown. The moisture from the garlic will keep the cumin from turning too dark and imparting a bitter flavor to the dish.
Step 7
when the garlic begins to turn brown, add the green chillies. Let them cook for thirty seconds or so. Then add the coriander leaves. They should cook for only a few seconds. Then you can tip the spice mixture into the dal. Fold it in. And you’re done.
Step 8
Serve with yogurt, sliced cucumbers, sliced tomatoes. Squeeze lemon ontop.
Level 2
Add a sauteed vegetable to the dal. Finely cut eggplant or tomato… spinach leaves… finely chopped cauliflower. Just add it to the spice mixture well enough in advance, and then add it to the dal when you’re done.
Level 3
Add another dish. A curried vegetable, for example. Look around. See what you find.
Read Adam’s whole series of Bangalore Letters
Bangalore Letter #1
Tell One Story (Bangalore Letter #2)
India is… too Big for One Article (Bangalore Letter #3)
