Q1.
Make a list of popular dishes in your region. Explore their origins and discover various cross-cultural influences.
Answer
Method. For each dish, ask three questions: (1) where does each ingredient come from? (2) where does the technique come from — tandoor, deep-frying, fermenting, marinating in curd? (3) where does the name come from? A dish is very often Indian in one of these and foreign in another, and that is exactly what the chapter means by adaptation.
The chapter’s own worked examples — use these as your model:
| Dish | Came from | What India changed |
|---|---|---|
| Samosa | Sambūseh, a Persian dish brought to the courts of the Delhi Sultanate by chefs from West Asia (Fig. 8.36) | The stuffing — meat, pistachio, almonds and walnuts became potatoes and peas |
| Jalebi | The Persian zalabiyeh | The shape and the syrup — zalabiyeh has an asymmetric floral coil and uses honey and rose-water syrup; the Indian jalebi has circular coils and simple sugar syrup |
| Naan | A Persian influence, cooked in a clay oven | It became part of the everyday cuisine of north India |
| Khichri | An Indian dish of lentils and rice, made for over a millennium | It “took on new flavours” as court spices and practices spread |
Sample answer: “Three popular dishes in our part of Maharashtra show three different histories. Puran poli is entirely local and very old — wheat, jaggery and gram, with no outside ingredient. Misal pav is a mixture: the sprouted-bean misal is local, but the pav is a bread the Portuguese brought to the western coast, and even the word is Portuguese. Biryani came with West Asian and Mughal kitchens, but our version uses local rice and masala and is made with the meat and spice we prefer. And one ingredient runs through all our ‘traditional’ cooking without being traditional at all — the chilli reached India from the Americas only in the 16th century, through Portuguese traders. Before that, heat in Indian food came mainly from black pepper.”
The point of the exercise: almost no famous dish is pure. The chapter says two-way influence “naturally occurred”, and gives both directions — Indian spices such as cardamom, clove, turmeric, coriander and black pepper entering the imperial kitchens, and Persian dishes entering ours. Even Akbar, it notes, tried to reduce meat consumption at his court, “partly under the influence of Jain and Hindu traditions prevailing at the time”. Food is the quietest and most reliable record of who a society has lived alongside.