Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 12 - India (regions: north-east/Himalayas)

Intro

Well, it’s been a while since the last post here, hasn’t it? This little project isn’t dead - but I was intending a holiday abroad (that the delta variant has prevented) and worked to get ahead on the actual cooking, so I could take a few weeks off this. Leaving me with about four more posts to write about food I’ve already cooked, not counting this one! Had I waited a bit longer to finish this up it’d have been five. Anyway - let’s get past the idea of terrifying backlogs and onto the idea of this selection of food I cooked back in June:

This post covers final region of India before we move further east. The intention was to focus on the north-east, those states near to or east of Bangladesh that do things a bit differently. However the remit of this has extended as, in my ignorance, I didn’t realise how quite a lot of this food is actually Himalayan, rather than specifically north-east Indian. For instance one recipe is specifically from Uttarakhand, and, through careful examination on a map, one can determine that this state is, to use the technical term, nowhere near the north-east.

As a border region there’s some interplay here with the food of Tibet and of China proper and the recipes reflect that. Indeed one recipe (that I had always thought was Nepalese) is actually Tibetan in origin, another is popular in nearby areas of India but actually is Nepalese. Which I’m glad about - Nepal lacks its own post purely because I don’t have a good print cookbook for it, it’s a great cuisine that gets too little attention and I’m glad I could represent it a little. These “India” posts are, after all, really more about the subcontinent in general than just India itself. Cuisine does not respect borders et cetera.

One book that does a great job in elaborating that truism is the Ultimate Curry Bible - showing not only how Indian (in a broad sense) cultures and states interacted with their neighbours and each other but also the role that 19th century imperialism had in globalising this food and the current culinary links between ethnic Indians/Pakistanis etc abroad and the countries of the subcontinent themselves. This is a lazy, if somewhat florid, way of saying we’re saying goodbye to that book now. It’s fantastic but with such a global focus pinning down regionally-specific dishes from it was always challenging and it was just a bit too difficult this time. Maybe if I continue this project into 2022 I’ll find an excuse to use it on this site again.

What I cooked (and adjustments)

The adjustments made were the same as usual - i.e. asafoetida replaces garlic, coriander leaf is reduced (I’m a hypertaster and also find it soapy) but as I know and trust these books I don’t double the seasonings, as I often do with unfamiliar books. All recipes are from The Complete Indian Regional Cookbook, as it’s easiest to locate recipes from a particular region there, save for the chutney which is from India Cookbook. Unless stated or heavily implied (eg by a photo of a bottle of oil) most things that are fried are fried in ghee.

The core of the meal I was intending to make is called chicken with tamarind and palm sugar, Naram Kukhura Ko Masu, which I’ll be probably just calling tamarind chicken in this post. There are three primary reasons for this:

1) It’s a Nepalese dish that spread to North East India, giving some representation to Nepal in this series of posts.

2) It includes sichuan pepper and I was interested to see if the flavour of this would cut through given the spicing is fairly robust on this as is. To cut a long story short, not particularly. Which is a shame.

3) It includes jaggery, essentially cane sugar juice boiled until it crystallises when cooled. I was curious to give this ingredient a punt and thought this may be the last chance in these blog posts (correctly).

Otherwise the recipe has fairly similar flavourings to what you’d expect from an Indian dish, save the inclusion of all things lime - juice, zest and (kaffir) leaf. The chicken is jointed, fried and then cooked in sauce, like in a stew.

The rice accompanying it was a pilau rice, specifically an Assamese variant with raisins. Not an ingredient I’m usually enamoured by but it does work well in pilau.

My partner was curious about a particular side, potatoes with poppy seeds (Afu Guti Diya Alu), so I also made that. The name, I think, undersells the dish as the recipe also includes a five-spice mix (mustard, cumin, fennel, nigella/black onion/kahlonji and fenugreek seeds), turmeric and chillies as well as poppy.

Two further sides were made. The first of these were Indian cheese balls (Sanar kofta, sana being a regional name for paneer in the north east, apparently). These are largely what you would expect - fried balls of mashed potato and paneer with spices and a sauce.

The second of these were momos, pork and ginger dumplings reportedly originally from Tibet but which I always associated most with Nepal. They’re also popular in mountainous regions of India, hence their inclusion in the books I use.

I’m a big fan of momos so I’m going to be self-indulgent and talk about where you can find them. In the UK you can find them in Nepalese restaurants, in some Indian restaurants that go beyond the usual range of dishes and, occasionally, sold in dedicated shops - there was briefly a momo bar in my current city and where I went to university a van selling momos started turning up at markets in my final year. Good times.

Finally I made an apple, clove and ginger chutney from Uttarakhand. Which borders Nepal … on the west. A big part of why I changed the name of this post, as said earlier!

There were plenty of recipes that nearly made the cut - from coconut dumplings to another tomato chutney but, in the end, there’s only so much time in the day and I knew it’d be overambitious to attempt these.

Cooking

I started off with my apple chutney so I could focus on other dishes while it was boiling - I forgot to photograph the garlic-substitute asafoetida but otherwise all you see here is all that goes into it.

Now, this is a really technical recipe so sorry in advance if I go too fast here. I cut up the apple, put all the stuff into a saucepan, put some water in and brought it to the boil. Then I simmered it until it looked thick enough.

Hob already a bit messy even at the start. Sorry, but this may be a theme for the next few posts.

This is it after a lot of simmering (it will appear again in the background of other photos), I think it wasn’t quite done yet by this point but it’s reduced down substantially.

And then the chutney was stored in cleaned and sterilised jars (it filled about two and a half, so the lemon curd jar in the back didn’t get any attention). I’ve no idea how long it keeps because it’s been a month and a half and it’s still as good as the day it was made.

Despite not looking visually pleasing this is an excellent chutney, firmly the best one I made in this series of posts and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone.

Aside from starting the chutney first and the momos last I must admit that I lost track of what I made in what order - so, somewhat arbitrarily, here’s the setup for the tamarind chicken recipe. As usual the ingredients (but not the quantities) are shown below - the blue tupperware contains cardamoms, the orange pot is jaggery, the frozen leaves are kaffir lime leaves and the crushed chillies got left in shot by accident. Like a coffee cup in a fantasy drama.

Then I waved a magic wand and everything got chopped up, ground or blended as needed. I really should do that more often.

Then I jointed the chicken - which was a hassle, truth be told.

With all this prep-work done the actual cooking started. Once again, apologies for the mess in the kitchen!

Firstly (not pictured) some of the spices (cinnamon, cardamom and bay leaf) were fried in mustard oil for a few seconds. Then the blended mix of onion, ginger and asafoetida were added with all the other spices and cooked for a few minutes. As the picture indicates this mix required a lot of attention to not stick to the pan, you can see some of the paste threatening to burn in this shot.

In with the tomatoes, then more cooking.

Unsurprisingly given this is tamarind chicken we do need to eventually add some chicken. This is the stage where it got added, with the mix in the pan being used to coat it. Initially it’s essentially fried in the pan but later on water was added, a lid put on and the mix allowed to simmer.

Unsurprisingly given this is tamarind chicken there comes a time when we do need to eventually add some tamarind. That time is now and I also added some chilli and the jaggery. A few minutes more on the hob and some coriander leaf garnish and it’s done!

Overall I thought this was modestly successful - it had a nice flavour but most of the really distinctive ingredients (at least for Indian food) didn’t really cut through. The sichuan pepper wasn’t really cutting through and to some extent even the tamarind was a little muted. Having a jointed chicken rather than just chicken parts also made it rather unsatisfying to eat due to all the small bones. Still good but many small complaints.

The next dish I’ll be showing are the poppy potatoes. Quite simple ingredients but with a lot of spice - the black seeds are actually mustard seeds rather than poppy seeds, the (white) poppy seeds are next to it. (The ingredients behind the spices are for another recipe.)

Firstly I toasted the poppy seeds, prepared the appropriate mixes for all the other spices and soaked the potatoes for a while, as directed in the recipe.

The potatoes were then shallow-fried and removed from the pan.

At this point what’s described as the five-spice mix (described earlier - mustard, cumin, fennel, nigela/black onion/kahlonji and fenugreek) is given a brief fry, then chilli and asafoetida are added and cooked for a few more minutes.

Finally the potatoes were added (with turmeric and water) and cooked for about ten minutes on a low heat. The poppy seeds were added right at the end, the heat turned up and everything mixed together. Et voila.

These, overall, were quite nice but certainly lacking something. The softness of the potatoes was odd for this kind of dish but was clearly intended. I was more concerned that the poppy seeds didn’t seem to stick very well to the potatoes, which most certainly was not intended. Some flavours cut through, others didn’t and this overall should have been more flavourful than it actually was. I’m certain I can improve this but I’m not quite sure how!

Onto the cheeseballs. What’s in the photo were the essential ingredients (sans mashed potato) - the jar with the difficult label is a homemade garam masala. Probably from The Ultimate Curry Bible, though I can’t recall for sure. Otherwise in this case I’ve been lazy and bought pre-made ginger paste instead of blending more ginger - I can’t quite recall why I did this for some recipes but not others.

Everything was prepped for the recipe - the large bowl contains what will be the mix for the cheeseballs, namely spices, chilli, egg, mashed potato and paneer.

The balls themselves were then rolled up and shallow-fried.

The final steps were to make the sauce for the cheeseballs. In reality these steps took a while (particularly reducing the sauce) and everything was kept aside for a while while I worked on other dishes but, broadly:

Cinnamon and cardamom were added and briefly fried (a few seconds only), then onions were added until starting to brown and the remaining spices added in separate batches about a minute apart each. After these brief frying steps water was added and brought to the boil, with the resultant sauce reducing on a simmer until thick enough. The cheeseballs themselves were to be added at this stage but as the sauce looked a tad too watery I allowed it to simmer for a bit longer to thicken up and only added the balls and chilli near the end.

The final result was, honestly, a little bland. I had high hopes for this one so it’s a bit of a shame.

Rice or bread? This time, rice. I made an Assamese variant on something everyone knows - pilau rice. The rice with turmeric pictured is washed but uncooked.

Ghee time. Some spices and bay were fried briefly in it.

As the cooking progresses the hob becomes more and more of a mess.

Then onion was added and fried until thoroughly browned.

The rice and raisin mix was then poured in, combined with the ghee and then some water was added in. This would be what the rice was boiled in.

Once boiled the rice was ready to serve, we had it with some flaked almonds as a garnish as recommended by the recipe. That seemed to go quite well.

And overall, it’s some nice pilau rice. A good but familiar dish that seemed to work based on this recipe.

The final thing I cooked were the momos. You can tell because of the quality of the light in these shots - the sun is quite low in the sky and casting dramatic shadows.

Firstly, I made a dough, but as this looked visually quite uninteresting, no long proofing or large increases in size, I’ll skip to making the filling. Literally the ingredients shown below were combined in a food processor (which evidently I’d figured out how to work by this point) make up the filling - it’s relatively simple:

The dough was rolled and a wine glass was used to make circles in the dough - these serve as the base and also the top of the momo and the filler is put between them. The seal on the dumpling is made by wetting the edges slightly and crimping the halves together.

I then steamed them for ten minutes over a pot of boiling water, the steamer was oiled to prevent sticking but, as can be seen, plenty of them tore anyway and look a little worse for wear. Overall they came out quite ugly on the whole to be honest.

They were, however, delicious, and I hope to refine my momo technique over time. Truth be told I was lucky that these are steamed dumplings - my malformed but tasty treats would be inedible if they had to be boiled with those tears!

What I’d do differently

Some things don’t need change. For instance I was extremely pleased with the chutney and I’d probably also not change anything much with the pilau.

Everything else could do with some tweaking. The momos were a bit roughly made even if the flavour was spot on, but that’s just technique - practice’ll sort that out. However some of the tears on these dumplings were due to their sticking to the steamer so I would use squares of baking paper to prevent sticking (rather than oiling the steamer) - I do this with dumpling recipes that I’ve cooked but not yet written up for this series and it works better. I’ve also since acquired a dedicated electric steamer and it’s excellent for doing dumplings, so naturally I’d use that.

With the tamarind chicken I think I may need to up the tamarind and sichuan and, most importantly, just use chicken thighs instead of jointing a chicken. That’d be quicker than jointing a chicken and, frankly, just more enjoyable to eat.

The poppy potatoes were alright but I think they did go wrong in some way I have trouble placing - they didn’t really shine as much as I was expecting. I did, if anything, overtoast the poppy seeds but otherwise I’m drawing a blank on what I need to do to improve that.

With the cheeseballs … honestly, I’d probably just not do them. I just think they’re inherently not very good. I’d maybe do a different potato fritter, cook something else with paneer, whatever. But the paneer in the potato fritter was just a bit too bland and the accompanying sauce couldn’t save it. If I had to do them again I’d fry them a bit more lightly (I did overcook them) and add less water to the sauce so it’d thicken quicker. Mostly though I’d just brace myself for disappointment.

My view on the book(s) - updated

Truth be told my initial impressions of the books, as laid out in post 10, largely still hold true, but I feel that having cooked with the same books for three posts running I should update my views slightly in light of more experience with them. These are:

1. The Ultimate Curry Bible hasn’t let me down in any of these posts, which surprised me. I’d had bad experiences with flavours just not coming through when cooking from this book but not a peep of that over the course of these posts. This said I have used it less than the other books, perhaps as there’s more to Indian food than just curry and there’s more to curry than just the Indian subcontinent.

2. The Complete Indian Regional Cookbook has proven reliable and consistently good. My annoyance with its design issues still remain but my current views on it are more positive than my initial impressions imply. Granted its strengths and weaknesses are the same as I initially identified but I’m appreciating its positive points more over time, and I think the tone of my earlier comments on it were a bit too negative.

3. The India Cookbook remains great but I’ve noticed that it seems to often omit stages in cooking where adding in water would be helpful - see the overly thick dosa batter in post 11. So perhaps the book’s a shade less suitable for a beginner than would be ideal but if you’re happy to deviate from the recipes a bit based on knowledge or instinct it’s still a great resource.

   I also later noticed that it has a weird section advocating Ayurveda medicine in the intro, which I certainly don’t approve of, but if I can ignore a bit of woo so can anyone else! Particularly as, in this very post, it delivered probably the best chutney I’ve ever made.