An Invitation to Indian Cooking - Madhur Jaffrey [8]
The result of all this is that in the last few thousand years, Indians have developed a most balanced and varied vegetarian cuisine. The essential proteins in these meals are provided by the many dals (lentils, split peas, black-eyed peas, chickpeas, etc.) and by yogurt relishes and milk desserts. The variety is provided by the sheer number of vegetable dishes. Each is cooked with a different combination of spices—some with sauces, others “dry,” some vegetables cooked in combination with others, like potatoes, peas, and cauliflower, others grated and stuffed in bread, some boiled, some sautéed, some fried, some pickled, and some puréed into fresh chutneys.
The longest chapter in this book is the one on vegetables. That, as well as the chapters on Rice; Breads; Chutneys, Pickles, and Other Relishes; and Desserts should provide enough material for vegetarians to make interesting and wholesome menus.
I also give, a little later, a list of sample menus both vegetarian and nonvegetarian. Use them if you feel you need initial guidance, but experiment and try any combination that strikes your fancy. Also, don’t feel compelled to plunge into Indian cooking with a full-scale banquet. An Indian soup with your meal one day, a tomato chutney with your roast lamb the next, some sweet rice with your duck on the weekend—these are good beginnings. If you are in the habit of serving spaghetti and meat sauce quite often, try rice and kheema instead. It is a pleasant variation and equally simple.
All the dishes in this book can be made in standard American pots, pans, and skillets. It does help, however, to use good-quality heavy-bottomed pots, especially for rice. For making Indian bread a tava, or rounded griddle, is very convenient, but you can use instead a cast-iron skillet. For deep frying we use a karhai, which is similar to a Chinese wok. Many specialty kitchenware stores carry woks. If you can find one easily, do buy it. It is a worthwhile investment. If you cannot find one, don’t be discouraged, as I will suggest substitutes whenever a karhai (or wok) is called for.
A word about the limitations of this book. If you are looking for an encyclopedic tome encompassing all Indian food, you certainly won’t find it here. Such a task would have taken me at least twenty years, as I would have had to approach it slowly, region by region. What this book does offer you is the chance to understand and cook the food of one specific area—the region in and around Delhi, including the adjacent sections of Uttar Pradesh.
Since Delhi is a city, pretty much like Washington, D.C., you might consider knowing the food of this area alone as being rather limited. But that is not so. First of all, the best Indian food is that which is specifically regional. I would rather that you started with a thorough understanding of the cuisine and eating habits of one region than with a vague superficial understanding of the cuisines of the entire subcontinent. Second, even though Delhi is just one city, it is the capital and was, until the British threw them out in the nineteenth century, the seat of the great Moghul emperors. And it was in their royal kitchens that the Delhi cuisine was conceived. Because of the Moghuls’ power and prestige, their cuisine was then aped, with interesting local variations, in the courts of the lesser maharajahs, rajahs, generals, and governors scattered across the nation.
The Moghuls were originally nomadic Tartars from the plains of Mongolia. They were so unused to living in permanent structures that the first palaces they built in India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resembled gigantic tents but were made of red sandstone and marble. They were also unused to the heat, so they immediately set about building canals everywhere—they even had canals