Indian Week!

This week I'm posting a series of recipes from India or inspired by Anglo-Indian cuisine. Several Indian friends have provided me these wonderful recipes from their own collections.  I'm also adding some recipes I've found and adapted from cookbooks.

I came late to enjoying Indian food.  I first tried Indian food at a rather mediocre Indian restaurant in North Carolina in the 1980s.  The food -or at least what I chose- was not very good, and for over a decade I decided I didn't like Indian food. It was not until the 1990s when I moved to Lexington and had delicious home-cooked food by my Sri Lankan classmate, Lavi, that I learned Indian food is like all other foods:  good when prepared well and not so good when badly prepared.  My friend Sharmi and friend/former graduate student Roshni also educated me greatly about Indian cooking.  I am thankful to have met such three wonderful cooks!


Anglo-Indian Cooking

I am certainly no expert on Indian cooking.  Most of what I know about Indian food is really more knowledge of the Anglo-Indian cuisine developed for British tastes and now popularized in American Indian restaurants.  Still, I'm going to give you my limited understanding of Indian regional specialties and how they have influenced the delicious foods we find in Indian restaurants in the US.

First of all, more human beings live in south Asia (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka) than live in any other region of the world.  This region is enormously diverse in terms of ethnic groups, languages, religions, and of course, food.

Like every country, India's regional cuisines are influenced by the climates and crops that grow in different regions.  Western India consists of arid and desert areas.  The North contains the foothills and mountains of the Himalayas.

In general, the North and West grow more wheat.  The South and more wet East use more rice.  Red meat is more common in the north with fish along the coasts and vegetarian foods being more common in the South.  Gujurat, a west Indian state, is also famous for its vegetarian-based cuisine.

The areas along the border with Pakistan and the western Ganges Valley have a long history of influence by Muslim groups from central Asia.  These groups brought elements of a cuisine built around herding and dairy.  Thus, dairy foods such as butter, ghee (a refined butter), and yogurt usually come from this part of India.  Madhya Pradesh and Haryana are states with these influences and cited as sources for yogurt-based dishes like korma chicken and lassi (a yogurt drink).

While Punjab is listed as a north Indian state, it is an ancient region now divided between India and Pakistan. Much of the Anglo-Indian and Indian foods we find in American restaurants come from this region including: tandoori chicken, naan (a wheat bread like a leavened tortilla), pakoras (India's answer to the hushpuppy), and paneer (a fresh cheese usually pressed and cut into cubes).

The South also has contributed to Anglo-Indian cuisine with more vegetarian dishes such as dal (lentil-based stews of sorts), sambar (another lentil-based dish), and biryani (a popular rice dish supposed created at the former Mughal court kitchens).  Many of India's spices as well as coconuts grow in the South.  Southern Indian cooking is often spicy -even by Indian standards- and coconut and coconut milk is more frequently used than the butter and ghee used in the North.  The South also contributed mulligatawny, a peppery stew whose interesting name is a corruption of the Tamil phrase for "pepper water".

Eastern Indian cooking is perhaps the least known in the Americas.  West Bengal and other coastal and river areas emphasize a lot of fish and seafood in their cuisine.  Hot chilis are also common in Bengali cooking.
Away from the coasts in Assam and surrounding areas, tea is grown in the hill country there.  Several areas also have a proud tradition of brewing local beers.  Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and Thai cooking influences also are common in the north and northeast of the Eastern region.  Sikkim, a small state in the Himalayas, is famous for its momos (dumplings very similar to Chinese potstickers or jiaozi or Japanese gyoza).

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are part of the country of India but largely remote and isolated.  Many of the tribal Andaman Islanders have almost no contact with outsiders and rely on fishing and fruit for their diets. So their contributions to Indian cooking has been rather limited.

Indian cooking has far more variety than my brief description covers, but I hope you will have some frame of reference for understanding the delicious recipes coming this week!