Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 10 - India (regions: north and west)

Intro

Here we are at the Indian subcontinent, in my view the most interesting part of the world for food - particularly where the Indian food traditions overlap with others. As no country can truly compete with Belgian beer no food region can truly compete with Indian food. Move over Europe, move over the Middle East, move over China, just move over everything.

But, in saying this, I am, if this makes sense, considering India as a region rather than a country. India is at least comparable in diversity to Europe (it just ended up as one country) and what we refer to as Indian food is really a mix of different regional/minority nation cuisines both from within India proper and from nearby countries. Most conceptions of any national foods are a bit of a construct at the best of times but I think is particularly true to the idea of Indian food - where even regional foods cross national boundaries regularly, Bengal comprises of the Indian state of West Bengal and the entirety of Bangladesh so is Bengali food truly Indian in a national sense? A straightforward yes seems ridiculous, but so does a straightforward no. Similar questions can be asked, off the top of my head, about Tamil, Punjabi and Kashmiri food, just as a start. So the conception of “Indian food” is often more a conception of South Asian/Indian subcontinent food - delete as appropriate according to sensitivities, (As an aside, I am aware some people from that area dislike one or both terms but I struggle to find a term that doesn’t upset anyone, is actually regularly used and isn’t totally inelegant. Indeed the “Indian subcontinent” situation seems a near exact parallel to the controversy over the term “British Isles”.)

As such, for this post, and any others on Indian food, although I’m personally not mad on “South Asia” as a term I’ll be considering for the Indian posts food from anywhere within the region. With any geopolitical region (this applies to Europe as well) I prefer the most maximal interpretation in actual use - so, although most recipes will be Indian in every sense, I won’t exclude recipes from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan or Tibet if they crop up. I will exclude recipes from Myanmar purely because that’s getting its own post later.

Nepal. Bhutan and Tibet may seem surprising, their food is often considered quite distinct from India’s, but in reality their food is closely related to the food of north-eastern Indian states - food from Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet are very much interconnected for instance - so excluding them would be arbitrary. At the time of writing I haven’t picked out my recipes for this region yet but if momos will appear in this blog it’ll be two posts from this one!

Typically I talk about the history of a region in the introduction, largely due to self-indulgence and a wish to go around the garden path a bit, but I do think my knowledge of Indian history is probably not good enough to do it justice. Also, as stated, India is practically a continent in its own right in terms of diversity of culture - we can generalise the food history a bit once the British get involved as new products such as chillies get introduced to the whole area, curry gets spread across the empire and beyond (hi, Japan), Anglo-Indian food starts - but, to be honest, doing a potted history of India in a few paragraphs is almost as silly as attempting to do the same for all of Europe.

If I were to do so the natural through-line would be to pick up from where I left off in the Persia post and just go on about Mughals for a bit. But aside from possibly one recipe, what I picked isn’t court cuisine from Delhi or Hyderabad so it’d be a bit flimsy to talk about them and then randomly pivot to talking about, say, Gujarat. Once again, for more on the Mughals go to your local curryhouse and read the blurb above the kormas.

So no real history section - a few admin notes and we’ll get into the meat of things. Please note that I’ve used the same three books for all my Indian recipes so the next couple of posts may well head straight into the “What I cooked” section and omit the “My view” section at the end. This post will focus on the west and north of India as well and contains some Kashmiri recipes so may or may not contain some Pakistani recipes depending on your own view on what country legitimately owns Kashmir. Given the book these recipes are in, and the details of the ingredients, the recipes do look more Hindu (and therefore likely Indian) than Muslim if that makes a difference.

Finally, apologies for the dirty hob in some photos and the poor lighting and framing in some photos of books. I was in a bit of a rush, as usual!

The book(s)

My initial plan was to build my Indian food posts around Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible. Madhur Jaffrey, born in Delhi in the 1930s, is a huge figure in Indian food, having written well-received cookbooks since the 1970s, starred in her own cooking shows on the BBC and acted as a food consultant to high-end Indian restaurants in the USA. She’s also written fiction, appeared in dozens of Indian movies and obtained a CBE, spreading her life between India, the UK and the USA.

However I decided I need to supplement this book with some others for two reasons - the Curry Bible is excellent but broad in scope and not primarily concerned with regionality within India. Recipes from India itself compete for space with chicken tikka masala (I’ve tried this one, it’s surprisingly involved when starting from scratch) or curries from Guyana and South Africa. Even 19th century British recipes and Anglo-Indian food are part of the mix. There are plenty of regional recipes in there too but a book with such a broad focus risks being spread thin.

So I made two new impulse purchases at the same time as I bought Persiana - The Complete Indian Regional Cookbook by Mridula Baljekar and the plainly titled India Cookbook by Pushpesh Pant, a Phaidon publication absolutely packed with content. Both of these are good resources for regional food - with the former book being organised by region and the latter providing an origin state for every recipe.

The Phaidon book also provides the most important information any book can give - its weight:

These authors also have quite the pedigree. Baljekar is from Assam, has published several cookbooks on Indian food and appeared as a guest chef on British television semi-regularly, with the book I’m using receiving particular critical praise. Pant is a well-regarded retired international relations academic from Uttarakhand, regularly published in the international press and is widely regarded as an authority on Indian cuisine. He has been given honours by the Indian government (yes, other countries have honours systems), though I’m unsure how much of that was due to his cooking rather than his academic record!

Between these three books I could probably do a year of posts like this, but we’ll only be doing three posts on India before moving on.

What I cooked (and adjustments)

First up is the main dish, lamb kari, a Gujarati curry from the Curry Bible. a feature of this recipe is the inclusion of star anise in the kari mix of the region. This stems from historical trade with China - a country you would associate more with this particular spice! For those unfamiliar with the location of states Gujarat is on the very western coast, bordering Sindh in Pakistan.

Truth be told I was a bit worried about this recipe as my experiences with the Curry Bible in the past had varied from huge disappointment, for instance attempting a Sri Lankan curry thickened with nuts where somehow large quantities of spice somehow came out tasteless, to great successes, such as the chicken tikka masala I mentioned in a previous section turning out substantially better than a restaurant version. Despite my concern I only made two adjustments: substituting garlic for asofetida (as always) and using frozen curry leaves in lieu of fresh or dried leaves, a substitution I intend to consistently use going forward in my Indian recipes, as it’s preferable to dried but more accessible than fresh. I had intended to do a third adaptation and add some extra citrus and salt to the recipe to help flavours develop but I was satisfied that wouldn’t be necessary after looking at the recipe.

The other recipe from the same book is fajeto, mango soup also from Gujarat, I had considered making pooris (little puffy breads) with this but I decided to save the time and just get some pre-made ones. I did, however, make a fair few adjustments to the recipe.

Firstly I’d cooked some spices and added the wet ingredients to them, rather than dealing with the wet ingredients and then adding spices. This was because most recipes in the book are on one page, the recipe ended on a full sentence and was followed by a photo of the soup taking up the entire page, so I thought much of the recipe was omitted by accident. I was wrong but I played things by ear and guessed what was missing from the recipe.

When I found out that, in fact, nothing was missing and the recipe continued overleaf it turned out that my guesses were pretty similar to the actual recipe, save the order in which ingredients were combined. I doubt it changed much in the final product.

Along a similar vein I also added more fenugreek seed than intended because I misread the amount and only noticed when it was too late. On a more conscious vein I used yellow mustard seeds rather than brown as, unlike with black mustard seed, I though it was similar enough to be a valid substitute.

The meal wasn’t restricted to just one Indian state and both recipes from The Complete Indian Regional Cookbook were from the disputed state of Kashmir (on the Indian-Pakistani border, inland). One was simply an almond chutney, to which no changes were made save for halving the amount of coriander leaf (I am both a hypertaster for coriander and can get the notorious soapy taste from it, so this is a consistent adaptation I’ll be making from here on out).

The other recipe from the book, potatoes in aromatic yoghurt sauce, given in its description the Indian name of dum aloo Kashmiri, I made one minor change to. The recipe calls for ground fennel seeds, I have whole fennel seeds. I am also, on some level, lazy. Connect the dots.

The Phaidon book provides the final recipe, a rather rich rice dish called zafrani pulao - also translated as saffron rice. This one is from Awadh - if you don’t know where Awadh is it’s the state that contains Lucknow. If you don’t know where Lucknow is, let’s just say it’s a bit east-ish of Delhi and leave it there. I made a few changes to this recipe, save perhaps some minor timing differences, one being that it requires saffron to soak in hot milk and, being a tad lazy, I decided to just give it a bit more time in cold milk. I also didn’t dry the saffron out on a frying pan before use or grind it after soaking as I didn’t expect that to achieve anything.

I had planned one more recipe for this meal from the Phaidon book, kele ke dahi bare (banana dumplings in a yoghurt sauce), from Delhi, but time didn’t allow for this in the end. Fortunately it didn’t need much in the way of extra ingredients beyond what I already had in. A bit of yoghurt went to waste but nothing more than that.

Finally, I’d like to talk about my surprise over what I didn’t cook. In this post (and in the next one) I’ve made a fairly robust set of Indian dishes without making any breads or using any paneer. In one sense this is a shame but in another it shows the range of the cuisine that I can make a perfectly reasonable selection without using some of the most iconic foods. Lentils are also a big feature of Indian food but barely featured in this post, being only one ingredient in the kari spice mix, though they’ll be a bit more prominent in the next post of the series.

Cooking

Past tense today. With the kari I first needed to make the spice mix, as outside of Gujarat it’s not typically available for purchase. This had a few ingredients - namely cumin seed, coriander seed, cinnamon, dried chilli, star anise, cloves, black pepper, cashews, roasted peanuts, charoli/tiger nuts, melon seeds and roasted chana dal (a variety of lentil). These were all ground up in a coffee grinder in batches and mixed together. Conveniently the recipe provides the exact amount needed for one use.

In parallel I started work on prepping vegetables and additional spices for the remainder of the dish, as well as juicing a lemon. Oddly the tomatoes were intended to be grated and, although this was more of a pain than chopping them, it did seem to benefit the dish preparing them in this way.

Strangely the spice mix was to be soaked in water as I cooked the rest of the kari, so I did that and briefly fried the extra spices (ie those not in the mix), then the curry leaves, then the onions. Several minutes later I added ginger, chillies and meat one by one and cooked these ingredients with the lid on.

The spice mix (with its water) was then added and followed by salt and tomatoes, then coconut milk, lemon juice and coriander. The near complete kari was then left to simmer for an hour.

The end result will be shown with my saffron rice near the end! Suffice to say I was very happy with it save that the taste of the star anise didn’t quite cut through and it produced a lot of excess sauce.

Next, onto fajeto. Ghee (the tin with cows on) has been an option for a while now, it is used in the Middle East too, but the recipes in this post are the first time most recipes seem to prefer or require its use over oil. This particular recipe is also the first time in this blog I’ve used asfoetida as asfoetida instead of as erstaz-garlic, the recipe actually asks for it. Pretty cool!

With this one I did go a tad out of sequence versus the recipe and started off by frying my dried chillies, curry leaves and most of my spices before setting it aside.

Next up in my order of proceedings (but first in the book) the remainder of the spices are combined with chickpea/gram flour and yoghurt until smooth. The recipe suggested using a whisk but a spoon sufficed without issue.

Then in went canned mango pulp (reportedly this yields better results than fresh unless you have very high quality mangoes available), water, salt, a very small amount of sugar and fresh chillies. It went up to a simmer for a few minutes.

Then it was more or less done. The flavour needed to develop further (this was specified) so the mix was allowed to cool and kept aside until serving, but the whole process was rather quick and painless - even if the recipe suggested, optimistically and incorrectly, that it’s a ten minute recipe. Aesthetically it looks a bit ugly as it’s cooking but the final result is hopefully a bit gentler on the eyes:

Overall I enjoyed this soup a lot, I was worried that mango would be too sweet to be the main ingredient in a savoury soup but the spices really brought a lot of depth to it and made it clear that this is not a dessert. The only downsides to this portion of my meal were the premade pooris I bought to have with it. They are meant to be puffy. These are not puffy. They’re a bit oily and tough if anything.

Next up, the potato side-dish. First up I parboiled some small potatoes (not pictured, you know what boiling potatoes looks like) and then fried them in mustard oil - which I acquired for this as I didn’t think mixing mustard with oil, like in the last post, would really work for this.

Then I combined various ingredients into a yoghurt sauce.

And the potatoes were reheated in said sauce. I did gloss over a fair amount of small details in the recipe, truth be told, but this is the broad thrust of it and it’s not too complicated overall.

This was probably my least favourite of the dishes I made. It’s fine but the potatoes were a tad overfried and the yoghurt sauce was a bit lumpy rather than clinging to the potatoes, which was more an aesthetic problem (this one certainly ain’t a looker!) than one of taste but a problem nevertheless. Still, the potatoes were tasty enough, the mustard oil really added something, and the errors made were on my part rather than baked into the recipe.

The next recipe, almond chutney, was the most difficult to make out of everything I’ve made for this blog so far. It really took it out of me. I started off with soaking some blanched almonds in water and chopping up some ginger, mint and coriander.

Then I blended it.

The chutney was a bit too liquid for my tastes (and I do just mean a bit) but the mix of flavours was lovely, somewhat more herbacious than I expected, though the amount of herbs and its green colour should have been a hint. I probably could have presented it better than this top-down shot on a messy bowl but it did provide a nice side dish for my meal.

For the rice I opted for zafrani pulao, a fairly complex rice dish and another pilaf cognate. I think those finally end once we’re done with India. First I soaked my saffron in milk and my washed rice (the variety wasn’t stated but I assumed basmati) in salt water. In a strange instruction given I’m cooking rice the recipe then asked me to preheat my oven. I obliged.

Then I grabbed all the ingredients for the rest of the recipe and took a photo of them, forgetting to remove a ramekin containing used teabags from the shot beforehand.

I fried some spices, first cinnamon, cardamom and clove in ghee. Then I added onions and asfoetida and cooked for a fair while before the rice and turmeric went in. Finally saffron and chicken stock went in and the rice was cooked until the water is almost evaporated.

Then the oven comes in. The recipe tells me to take the pan and bake it in the oven for half an hour at a low temperature. I am very sceptical and think this will get me burned, dry rice but go along with it.

And, despite my serious concerns about burning, the rice was lovely and incredibly tender. I have no complaints and am still slightly confused about how the baking step seemed to improve the rice, rather than utterly ruin it.

The dog tray is back. And traditional to India as well as Poland and wherever else I’ve said.

Overall this meal was a big success - presentation wise I think I could have done better with the potatoes and chutney but that’s probably largely down to me. I’m pretty happy with all of this.

What I’d do differently

The recipe for the lamb kari has various warnings about what to do if the sauce thickens too much but, honestly, I found the recipe had the opposite problem and I had too much sauce for too little meat. So I would probably strain and save some before serving the first portion to use on another occasion. I’d also probably add more star anise to the spice mix to give that a bit more oomph.

For the dum aloo Kashmiri I would use thinner yoghurt, so I would be more likely to have a less lumpy sauce, and I would also fry the potatoes on a lower heat and with less oil as I think they were a bit overdone. I also found the almond chutney a bit too watery but am not quite sure how to fix that without negatively affecting the flavours.

For all other recipes I have no reason to make any changes, save perhaps fishing out cardamom pods before eating the final portion of anything and not buying bad premade pooris again!

My view on the book(s)

As said before I have had issues with the Ultimate Curry Bible with flavours not coming through and, although I did complain about the star anise in the kari, these problems largely seemed much lesser this time.

As always I’ll be covering the introduction - as this is a book about curry rather than Indian food per se the content is particularly interesting - it flits between Indian topics, sometimes with very deep roots, to a much broader history focused on one of the world’s global dishes. Quite a bit on Japanese curries, which is a bit of an interesting outlier in the curry world, so fair enough! This introduction is a rare case of the introduction being a draw in itself, in my view.

It doesn’t outstay its welcome either, as it’s only 37 pages of a roughly 350 page book, though not all the remaining pages are recipes, some being taken up with photos, indices, glossaries or occasional essays on particular dishes - one of which can be seen below:

As can be seen the typical layout is that most recipes fit on one page (the fajeto was an exception!) and a blurb is printed at the top so there’s not too much white space. Most have some small historical or linguistic tidbit (see next set of pictures - Mughlai lamb) whereas others have some practical information that doesn’t fit into a recipe format (see previous pictures - toovar dal/sambar) and others, to be honest, just fill space (see previous pictures - easy chickpea curry).

The photography for the book is modern, perhaps not exceptional but certainly good enough to avoid any complaints. However I do think the broader design is rather excellent - for instance the map image used near the start of the book and the text layouts on the recipes.

Overall I would very easily recommend this extremely highly had I not had issues with it on prior use. With that in mind I’m unsure on what to say save that at its best the book is phenomenal and, in this post, I found it at its best.

Complete Indian Regional Cookery seems a bit less characterful, reminding me heavily of the style used in Başan’s cookbooks for Turkey and the Levant which I used earlier in this blog. Frankly, that’s not in itself a bad thing at all, but familiarity does breed contempt - even when that’s deeply unfair.

I could relate this, in a fairly left-field way, to Marvel Cinematic Universe films. These are, as I’m sure you know, a long series which has a lot of variety in some senses while adhering very closely to a formula in others. In my view most of these films, and the series as a whole, are actually very good at doing what they do. Yet the raving Marvel fan of 2015 is often the same person as the jaded critic of 2020 simply because there’s so much of this stuff.

Along the same lines Complete Indian Regional Cookery is good but too close a similarity to other good cookbooks I happened to see earlier has done it no favours, despite the food being cooked being in a different tradition. Keep that in mind while reading this as had I done this blog moving east-to-west rather than west-to-east I may have been critical of Başan’s books and found them a bit generic instead of this book.

I mention Başan so much because, despite a different author working in a different cuisine, there are a lot of similarities between her books and this one. Once again there is a slightly too long introduction, with similar (good) content, with some needless filler (sections on common vegetables for instance, we know what a pea is!) and a few recipes that will get totally lost mixed into the introduction segment for no evident reason.

I have no idea who adopted this style first or indeed whether this is an authorial decision or a publisher one (perhaps the publisher is the same and this is the house style) but the commonalities continue into the recipes - the format is a good one but almost exactly the same as used in Başan’s book on Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, right down to having photographs of intermediate steps interspersed into the recipes (which, to be clear, is a good thing).

On the plus side, throughout both the recipes and the introduction the photography is impeccable, naturally photographs of intermediate stages of cooking are less striking than the finished products but otherwise everything looks great. And the recipes themselves are generally very clear and informative, once again aided by these intermediate photographs.

Some features of the book that are more distinctive are that the whole recipe section is organised by regions of India (north, south, east, west, central, north-east - not states) with two page spreads providing a brief and interesting mini-introduction to each region. There are some slightly odd choices in this organisation - for instance a recipe for momos, the famous dumplings usually credited to Nepal, is placed in the North Indian section rather than the section on the North-East, which seems surprising but, honestly, that’s nit-picking. This method of organisation is fantastic, particularly for a geographically diverse cuisine.

A more negative comment I would have is that I don’t particularly like generic English names being given to the dishes more prominently than their actual names, with their Indian names being relegated to part of the blurb above the recipe at best. Besides pubs Indian restaurants are probably the most common type of hospitality venue in the UK, there’s really no need to hand-hold with Indian names, if we can cope with ordering a takeaway curry we can cope with Indian names when cooking from scratch. Referring (for the last time) to Başan’s cookbooks she also did this but less extensively and it never really became as much of an irritant as it is in this cookbook.

Overall, trying to rein in my negative gut reaction to seeing a format repeated so exactly, this is still a very good resource that I would recommend for anyone interested in regional Indian cookery. After all, it’s organised by region and the recipes work well - that’d be enough by itself.

Finally onto India Cookbook, which I’ll refer to as the Phaidon book from here on out. Both because its name is very generic and also because it does share some commonalities in design and approach with Vefa’s Kitchen from the same publisher, featured in my Greek post.

The introduction, although fairly long, seems short given the huge length of the book - at slightly under 30 pages for a nearly 800 page book. Truth be told I have no idea whether I think this is too short or whether 30 pages is enough introduction regardless of how much recipe content there is. It’s definitely not too long.

The text in said introduction tends to be interesting but rather too dense even for my tastes. Fortunately it is periodically broken up with photography that, although a lot less polished than that of Complete Indian Regional Cookery is charming and characterful. Perhaps, like the Curry Bible, another case where the design in general, which I love, is stronger than the photography in and of itself.

As a Phaidon book the recipes themselves tend to be packed in at quite a high density — with the aim of this cookbook being considered a definitive resource. And, given the sheer variety of recipes, it could well be - the cover proudly proclaims the book as “the only book on Indian food you’ll ever need” and, though I would certainly want more books I don’t think it’s entirely wrong. I could just use this. With recipes sometimes coming in at three or four a page, with supplementary information on their states of origin, I would imagine this is as comprehensive at it gets.

Naturally this comes with a downside, only a small fraction of recipes included have a picture, which can be problematic if you don’t know what your end product should look like. And from my limited experience with the book so far that can be a concern - I have tried only two recipes, one for the rice dish which worked perfectly (despite being counterintuitive!) and one for the next post on dosa. With that I don’t know if the recipe works yet as it’s a multi-day process but I certainly found some additional information or photos on the consistency of dosa batter would have been useful.

Despite my writing on it ending on a negative note, like most books on here, it gets a recommendation. I’d find it hard not to give it one.

Overall with these books I would say that the Curry Bible is superior in terms of breadth, as it is global in scope while the other two books try and restrict their scope mostly to India itself (but not entirely - the Complete Regional Indian Cookbook credits one recipe to Tibet). The Phaidon book, unsurprisingly, wins on comprehensiveness - I’m not sure if any other cookbook in this cuisine could compete with it on that metric. Finally, the Complete Regional Indian Cookbook is probably the most convenient resource for doing what I am doing here, cooking by region. They all have their merits, they’re all good in their different ways and have their own foibles.