Q1.
1. What would happen if chillies disappeared from our kitchens for a week?
Answer
For one week our food would still be cooked, still be filling and still be healthy — but it would taste flat, and most of it would lose its red colour. Nobody would fall ill and nobody would go hungry. We would simply go back to what India did before chilli arrived: use black pepper.
What would change, day by day:
- Day 1. The dal, the sabzi and the sambar would taste plain. Everybody would keep saying “something is missing”.
- Day 2. The colour would go. Rajma, chhole, fish curry and most gravies get their red from chilli. They would look pale brown or yellow.
- Day 3. Cooks would start using black pepper, ginger, garlic, mustard and hing more heavily to bring back some heat and sharpness.
- By mid-week. Pickles, chutneys and papad would be missing from the thali, because red chilli is a main ingredient in nearly all of them.
- All week. Dishes that never needed chilli would be completely unaffected — plain rice, curd, milk, all sweets, poha, upma, most breakfast foods and food cooked for a sick person.
- Outside the house. Chilli farmers and traders would lose a week's earnings, and so would the shops selling chilli powder. That part is not a small matter for them.
| What we would lose | What we could use instead |
|---|---|
| Heat in the mouth | Black pepper, ginger, mustard, garlic |
| Red colour in gravies | Tomato, beetroot, or a little turmeric for yellow |
| Pickles and chutneys | Sweet and sour ones — amla, tamarind, mango with jaggery |
| The kick in street food | More lemon, more black salt, more chaat masala |
The point of this question: Chilli feels utterly Indian — but it has been in our kitchens only about 400 to 500 years. India cooked without it for thousands of years and did perfectly well. So the week without chilli is not really about food. It shows how quickly a thing that came from far away can become so much a part of us that we cannot imagine life before it.
Try it for one meal: Ask at home for one dish to be cooked with black pepper instead of red chilli, and taste it beside the usual one. Pepper's heat comes later and stays in the throat; chilli's heat is sharp and quick on the tongue. That difference is what Indian food tasted like before the Portuguese ships arrived.