In this post we’re still on India and its surrounding countries, but now we move to the south and the east of India. Having rambled on about how really this series is on South Asia in general in the last post it’s worth noting that in this case the dishes are all from India proper but there are three dishes with some degree of ambiguity. One is a dish common across south India which is attributed as being Tamil in origin - Tamils live in both India and Sri Lanka, there’s no distinctively Sri Lankan ingredients in the recipe but I wouldn’t have expected any to appear given the specifics of the dish. The other two are Bengali dishes but explicitly from West Bengal (a state in India) rather then East Bengal (all of Bangladesh)..

Unlike my last post there’s a chance a lot of this food will be more unfamiliar with British readers - though some, particularly from the east, will be more familiar. Probably the most well known dish from the south of India in the UK would be the Madras (the old name for Chennai, in the south) - although there’s a lot of back and forth between Indians in the UK and in India itself, to the extent that reportedly the most popular cookery website in India is based in the UK, and it’s unclear whether the origins of that curry are in Chennai, the UK or both. In any case, I’m not making a madras in this post - but I am making dosa, the staple you’d find in any dedicated South Indian restaurant but which is quite rare in a typical curryhouse.

And, as a reminder, I’m using the same books as before so please read the last post if you’re interested in my views on those, I make one additional criticism of one of them but otherwise my views haven’t changed much.

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!