An Invitation to Indian Cooking - Madhur Jaffrey [63]
Potatoes in thick sauce
Potato patties (aloo-ki-tikiya)
SEE ALSO:
Kheema used as stuffing (for peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant)
Recipes in the Rice chapter for rice cooked with various vegetables
Recipes in the Dals chapter for dals cooked with various vegetables
Recipes in the Chutneys, pickles, and other relishes chapter
ndian vegetable markets are an absolute delight to the eye and a source of great anticipatory glee to the palate. The wily shopkeepers have been tutored by centuries of salesmanship and by fierce competition. They call to you as you walk by, offering you samples to handle. What better enticement can you have than a couple of small, firm, shiny eggplants placed on the palm of your hand, or a ripe Alphonso mango waved under your nose? Or they will entice you with: “These fresh fenugreek greens just came in from the fields—at least take a look!” Another of their tricks is to begin peeling a fruit just as you think you have succeeded in resisting them. A bunch of fresh red leechees is hard enough to pass up, but when they start peeling them and the fragrant fruit juice drips to the ground, you need no further urging to pull out your wallet.
India produces most of the kinds of fruit and vegetables found in America and many, many more. But, of course, everything is seasonal. You can expect corn only in August, September, and October, mangoes only in the summer, cauliflower only in the winter, and fresh mushrooms only during the humid monsoons. So a change of seasons for us is more than just a change of weather. Our menu changes considerably, and for most Indians who are vegetarians it changes drastically. If you eat carrot “water pickles” in the winter, you eat watermelon-rind pickles in the summer, and if you eat tangerines, guavas, and apples in the winter, you can have melons, loquats, and cheekoos (a kind of round, all-brown persimmon) in the summer. There are no frozen vegetables or fruit to be had all year round, and no large-scale hothouses raising out-of-season vegetables. India does, now, produce varieties of dried vegetables, but they are used rather rarely. Winter is our good vegetable season, and summer brings the most luscious varieties of fruit.
When an Indian houswife goes shopping and buys about a dollar’s worth of vegetables, the shopkeeper, if he is friendly, will throw in a handful of green chilies and a bunch of fresh coriander (Chinese parsley) free. These two items are, as you may have already noted in many recipes, essential to a lot of our cooking, and there is a detailed note on them at the beginning of the book. The Indian housewife will also stock up on ginger (the rhizome or “root”), considering herself very lucky indeed if she manages to find the young, tender ginger. This has many advantages. Its skin can be lightly scraped instead of peeled; the tough fibers have not yet developed so it can be used for an instant relish which combines ginger slices, lime juice, and salt; it can also be cut, chopped, grated, or minced with much greater ease. This young ginger looks slightly pink, and if you ever happen to see it in some store, do buy it.
Onions are another important vegetable. Raw, they are used for relishes and garnishing. Ground, they are used to make the paste in which some vegetables and meats are cooked. They can be sautéed or fried and then cooked along with cauliflower or eggplant or used as stuffing for okra pods.
India grows many varieties of mushrooms, the most delicious (and expensive) of which is one that grows in Kashmir and resembles a heart-shaped black sponge! I have not been able to find this anywhere in America so my recipes are adapted to the commercial variety found in most grocery stores.
Most Indians eat a lot of greens—fenugreek greens, mustard greens, white radish greens, gram (or chickpea) greens, and, of course, spinach. Each is seasonal, and each area has traditional ways of cooking its greens. In northern India, where I come from, fenugreek greens, being very strong-flavored, are nearly always cooked with tiny new potatoes in