The Ultimate Guide to Cooking Rice the Indian Way (11 page)

Saffron (
Kesar
):

Easily the most expensive spice in the world, this comes
from the stamen of the saffron flower. It has thread like strands in dark
orange colour which when dissolved in milk or water gives out its colour along
with its mild, earthy flavour. Not a spice to be used casually, saffron is used
mostly in making desserts and some exotic dishes.

Turmeric (
Haldi
):

This is easily the commonest and the most important
ingredient in any Indian curry dish. Though it does not have much of a flavour,
it has a dark yellow colour and a lot of therapeutic value.

Yoghurt (
Dahi
):

Not really a spice or herb, yoghurt is frequently used in
many Indian dishes.  The variety used in cooking is cultured yoghurt and is
always unflavoured. That way it comes closest to the Greek variety of yoghurt.

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Chapter 4: What Other Strange Things Do You Need To Know
About Indian Cuisine?

India is a land of strange sights, sounds, smells, customs,
traditions, and of course cuisine. But regardless of where you go in India, you
will find some common thread binding its varied culinary traditions together. I
underline a few here.

Eating in Thalis
: Traditionally, Indian food
used to be served in
Thalis
(round platters), that is everything, from
starters to desserts would be served in one go. That is how it is still done on
weddings, or on such special occasions, in many parts of India. The guests
usually sit on the floor, cross legged and are served on a banana leaf or on
plates made of broad leaves.

Food, if not served in one go in a
Thali
, would be
served on your leaf plate in a continuous stream. At the end of it all, the
leaf plates along with the food remnants will be fed to the cows, thus earning
merit for all concerned. No dishwashing, and the most environmentally benign
waste disposal possible, you will have to salute the ancient Indians for
thinking of everything!

If you would like to sample a typical North Indian or South
Indian
Thali
, do look out for a branch of restaurant chains like
Sagar
Ratna
,
Naivedyam
,
Rajdhani
etc. or ask your local hosts for
suggestions, when you are next in India.

 No Soup, Dal a distant substitute
: As you’d
immediately notice, soups don’t precede a normal Indian meal. In a multi-cuisine
restaurant, if you insist, you may be offered a Western or Chinese soup. Some
try to even take out the curry from any yoghurt based Chicken dish and serve
its diluted version as Chicken
Shorba
(soup). The British came up with a
lentil based Mulligatawny soup but it still hasn’t become mainstream.

India being a tropical country, it was probably not
necessary to serve soup in the beginning of a meal to warm you up. It is
surprising, however, that even culinary traditions of the colder areas, for
example in the Himalayan region of India, too don’t serve any soup. Kashmiris
and Garhwalis have all kinds of curries but no soup. The nearest thing to soup
that the Kashmiris and Ladakhis have is their salted tea, but that they have it
all-through-the-day and almost never before a meal!

Indian cuisine also doesn’t involve boiling its meats and
veggies first and then thinking about what to do with the stock thereof. Stock
is part and parcel of the Indian curry. And then you have the formidable
variety of
dals
that Indians cook. So who needs soups?

Carbs are central not meats
: If you see an
Indian eating at a
dhaba
, you will immediately notice that rice and
breads would be forming more than 60% of that meal. The balance 40% would be
distributed over meats, veggies and lentils.

Western cuisine will traditionally reverse this proportion
in favour of the meats. One reason could be that Europe’s prolonged winters,
and consequently shorter cultivating season, meant that they could rely less on
grains.

Most of the Indian sub-continent, and even the South-East
Asian countries had no such constraints. They could easily have two crops, and
sometimes even three. Islands like Bali could sow and reap paddy whenever they
wanted. But the moment you go to the colder areas of China or Central Asia, you
will find meat gaining the upper hand.

Now that the world economies have integrated so much that
you can choose what you can put in your meal platter, what should one do? If
you have too much meat, you may exceed your protein requirement and invite
problems like high cholesterol, renal stones and even Gout. On the other hand,
if you have too much of carbs, you could have more calories than your body
needs, suffer from protein shortage, become overweight and could be prone to
diabetes.

Why not then balance your carbs with proteins and follow, as
Lord Buddha advised some 2600 years back, the MIDDLE PATH?

Curries are compulsory
: This is so obvious
that you just can’t miss it. Anywhere you go and you will find curries
dominating the Indian meal platter.

Why is it so? One reason could be the need to have lots of
water in a tropical country like India. These curries could meet in a very
healthy (you are boiling your water after all, aren’t you) and appetising
manner. The second reason could be that if you are growing so much rice you
would need some curry to “wet” it, to make it less sticky and more palatable.

This could be the reason that you have curries in all rice
growing regions of the world, even in Thailand, Laos or Myanmar. On the other
hand, the non-rice growing and wheat-eating colder areas of China, Afghanistan
and Central Asia rely more on barbeques and didn’t have much need for curries.

Sweets and salty dishes can be eaten together
:
This happens, I suppose, because in the
Thali
style of food service
there is no way of stopping what you eat first and then next.  Certainly in the
perfectly democratic world of the Indian cuisine, when you have access to a
bevy of salty, sweet, bitter, sour and hot dishes, you also have the full
freedom to decide what you want to eat, with what and when. So you will often
see children soothing their taste buds with a spoonful of the sweet dish,
whenever they would have had a taste of something bitter or hot. Then you would
have the somewhat strange spectacle of Gujaratis eating their desserts first
and the main meal later.

In temples, you will often be served
Poori-Kheer
(unleavened Indian fried bread with rice pudding) or
Poori-Halwa
(unleavened Indian fried bread with flour dessert) as
prasadam
(blessings).

Can you think of anyone eating an apple pie with roast
chicken (together and not as a separate course) anywhere in the world? I’d
certainly love to be educated.

Spices not sprinkled on but cooked with
: In
Indian cuisine, you don’t cook something first and then sprinkle some spices on
it to make it somewhat palatable. Spices almost always have to be cooked with
the main meal to unleash their full flavours and magic.

Sauces not prepared separately
: It is again a
very common practice in Western cuisine to boil or bake something first and
then to pour on it a tomato or cheese based sauce or flambé it with some wine
or such other alcoholic beverage.

In India, only restaurants semi cook their meats and
vegetables and prepare some sauces separately; both to be mixed the moment
someone asks for a tomato or onion or yoghurt based dish. This is because for
restaurants, speed is of utmost essence. So they have to keep ingredients ready
in a semi-finished condition for a quick conversion in to whatever dishes the
customers demand.

However, “Home Style” (or even
dhaba
) Indian food is
made in one go with everything cooked together. The only thing to “finish” a
curry dish could be the sprinkling of some Coriander (Cilantro) leaves.
Similarly,
dals
are tempered later with
Ghee
(clarified butter)
and
Jeera
(Cumin seeds) or
Rai
(black mustard seeds).

But these are not exactly sauces that are prepared first and
poured on to a cooked dish.

Taste buds continuously titillated with accompaniments
like pickles, chutneys, raita, papad…:
Foreigners are aghast at the
sheer number of titbits that literally litter a typical Indian
Thali
. So
you will have pickles, made from vegetables, fruits, and even fish. Then you
have all kinds of
Papadums
,
Baris
or
Tilauris
made from
lentils. Added to these would be the home made sauces called Chutneys and sweet
marmalade like preparations made from some fruits called
Murabbas
. And
in North India, how can you forget the yoghurt based
Raitas
?

Once a European friend asked me if these accompaniments
didn’t “confuse” your taste buds unnecessarily.

Well, to be frank, they do. But Indians love that
“confusion”, because as I’ve already mentioned, an ideal Indian meal must have
a balance of all tastes—sour, salty, bitter, hot and sweet.

And the best way to ensure that is by adding accompaniments
which are generally readymade (like jams, marmalades and sauces in the West)
and don’t have to be cooked at the last moment.

Less use of ovens or barbeques
: Except in the
Northern Indian states like Punjab, where buried-in-the-earth ovens called
Tandoor are very popular, there has hardly been any tradition of baking in the
mainstream Indian cuisine. Boiling, frying, steaming-- is all there but
whatever little barbequing and baking is done, appears to have come to India
from Persia, Turkey or the Central Asian regions from where many Muslim rulers
of India had come.

Again, I believe, weather played a part here. Europe and
many other colder areas of the world had to keep some kind of fire going in their
homes all the while to keep them warm. It was a matter of time, therefore, when
someone stumbled upon an appliance that could be attached to the fireplace to
cook or rather bake things without much supervision. Even the smoke that
resulted from such fireplaces was discovered to have the ability to cure, dry
and preserve meats and again mainstream Indian cuisine has no tradition of
having such “smoked” meats.

But don’t worry. Globalisation has ensured that whatever
cakes, pies, breads or pizzas you crave for, you will find it available on the
Indian shop shelves today.

Chopsticks can’t work, cutlery is optional
:
Chopsticks don’t work with Western cuisine either because for that meats or
vegetables have to be cut into chopstick-friendly sizes first. Cutlery too is
hardly used when you eat a Burger or a Pizza, especially while walking to your
office. But can you avoid cutlery in formal dinners?

Well, in India, even in many 5-star hotels, you have to
specifically ask for cutlery in their signature Indian restaurants. In
weddings, your
Thali
may contain just one spoon for the dessert, if you
are lucky.

Many of my European friends can’t imagine how you can pick
up rice with your fingers and take it to your mouth without half of it falling
on the way. To that, I invite them to come and see how expert South Indians can
pick up a curry too from their plates (and not their bowls) with their fingers.
It’s a sight you must not miss while in India.

Till then, just ask for whatever cutlery you need for your
Indian meal. You will at least get a spoon, I promise.

Vegetarian dishes mimic the non-vegetarian taste
:
This happens all the while in the West with soya sausages mimicking the taste
and flavours of pork or chicken sausage, for example.

In India, this mimicking takes place in two ways. First,
where the non-vegetarian portions of a dish would just be dropped.  For
example, the popular mutton
Shami Kebab
would be made exactly with the
same ingredients but without the mutton mince. You can’t do the same with
chicken sausage, after dropping the chicken mince, can you?

In the second, you have totally vegetarian versions which
are sometimes more prolific than their non-vegetarian counterparts. For
example, the normal non-vegetarian
koftas
would be made either with
mutton or chicken mince. But its vegetarian versions, trying to mimic the same
texture, flavour and taste, would be made of bottle gourd (
Lauki ke Kofte
),
jackfruit (
Kathal ke Kofte
), reduced milk (
Khoya ke Kofte
) or one
of the lentils (
Moong dal ke Kofte
).

Anoothi Vishal, a noted food critic, has a “hypothesis that
this intriguing strain of cooking originated especially to cater to (such
matriarchs) who must have surely been interested enough in the relatively more
exotic and intricate non-vegetarian dishes that were being cooked up at home
but did not want to give up on their religious/caste injunctions.” 

Be that as it may, do try these beguiling dishes that try to
taste like meat dishes, when you are next in India.

Cinnamon is not used in desserts but, you guessed it,
in curries
: Do you know that Cinnamon (or the Indian
Dalchini
)
is one spice that is used both in Eastern (including Indian) as well as Western
cuisines?

Indian cuisine is well known to use a mind-numbing variety
of spices (the list is indeed long). I have heard quite a few celebrity chefs
boasting how a particular kebab recipe of theirs uses thirty-six (or
thirty-nine, I don’t remember) spices as ingredients. That would be quite an
overkill, in my opinion, and I’d definitely not recommend that any casual
dabbler in Indian cuisine experiments with more than ten spices in one dish.
But, as I said, that’s just my personal opinion.

Coming back to Cinnamon, however, I can bet that this would
definitely be in that long list of spices that our celebrity chefs use to
create their exotic Indian dishes. I am not sure whether any of their remaining
35 or 38 spices would be so definitely used in Western cuisine. I have always
wondered, therefore, as to why Cinnamon is one of the few exceptions.

There is no doubt that Cinnamon does impart a lovely flavour
to any dish. Who can resist the aroma of a freshly baked Apple Pie, Pumpkin pie
or a Cinnamon roll!

This brings me to the next interesting difference that in
the West Cinnamon is used for preparing sweet things like desserts and pies. In
India, however, it is more used for savoury things like curries, as Indians
prefer Cardamom or Saffron in their desserts more. Cinnamon in fact occupies a
pride of place in the preparation of the Indian
garam masala
, a spice
mixture that is commonly used in chicken curry,
pulaos
, biryanis,
vegetable dishes, or even rajma or kidney beans curry. Kashmiris put Cinnamon
powder in their tea which they call “
Kehwa
” that is usually served after
dinner. Many claim that adding a teaspoon of Cinnamon and honey in your morning
tea would protect you from common cold and stomach worries.