An Invitation to Indian Cooking - Madhur Jaffrey [79]
For most of the recipes in this book, I have used Carolina rice. If you use some other variety, you may have to experiment with the amount of water needed and the cooking time. All uncooked rices are not the same. Where I have used Indian basmati rice, I have indicated how it should be cooked.
Even though India consumes a lot of rice, not all Indians are rice eaters. In fact, the Indians can be divided into the rice eaters and the wheat eaters. While most of South India and Bengal are considered rice-eating areas, Delhi, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh are generally conceded to be the wheat-eating areas. During times of grain rationing, each Indian has to declare himself a wheat eater or a rice eater and have a big “W” or “R” stamped on his ration card. This entitles him to get the major portion of his weekly ration in the grain of his choice.
To confuse matters further, there are those Indians, too, who eat both rice and wheat. Even though I come from a wheat-eating area, our family in India ate both rice and wheat bread for lunch, and wheat bread (chapatis) for dinner. With the rice and the chapatis, we ate our meat, vegetables, and lentils (dals). When rice and wheat breads (chapatis, pooris, parathas, etc.) are served at the same meal, one is usually served before the other. In our family rice was always served first, but I have eaten in homes where the chapatis were served first.
Most Indians eat rice with their hands. It is mixed with the lentils or meat and vegetables and eaten with the tips of the fingers. Not all the rice is mixed with the rest of the food at once. You serve yourself each dish on a separate part of your plate. The only things you may put on top of your rice are the lentils and other souplike and semiliquid dishes.
Rice can be cooked with almost any meat, vegetable, or fish and served as a main dish. It can be cooked with whole or powdered spices; it can be boiled, steamed, or baked; it can be cooked in water or in aromatic broths. It can be the side dish as in plain boiled rice, or it can be the main course as in pullao and biryani. It can be pounded or ground to make desserts like kheer and phirni. The visiting physician prescribes it when he leaves with the injunction, “Give her khitcherie and chicken soup.” (Khitcherie, which means “hodge-podge” consists, in this case, of a porridge made of rice and lentils.) The wary tourist with stomach tremors is advised, “Eat nothing but boiled rice and yogurt for a few days!” Every festival, the rice-growing villagers get drunk on their local variety of rice wine—“wine” being a polite word for the rotgut they generally produce.
For important occasions, rice is tinted a bright yellow with turmeric or vegetable coloring or, best of all, saffron, which gives it not just a yellowish orange saffron color but a delicious fragrance as well. I’ll never forget my first introduction to saffron. I was in my early teens and on my first visit to Kashmir. We were riding past a hill and valley that were completely purple from all the crocuses growing there. I remarked on their beauty to my Kashmiri companions, who in turn told me that the flowers meant something more than just beauty to them. “This is zaafraan,” they said. Zaafraan? I thought. I wondered vaguely why, if this was the saffron flower, it was not saffron-colored. One of the young Kashmiri boys got off his horse, plucked a flower, and brought it to me. He pulled its petals apart, showing me the stigma, which is dried and called saffron, and he told me that thousands of stigmas were needed to get a tablespoon of saffron.
Rice is not used merely for eating, though. It has its place in all the Hindu religious ceremonies; it is thrown into the fire at weddings because it is the great