An Invitation to Indian Cooking - Madhur Jaffrey [9]
But India has a way of influencing, if not overpowering, everything it comes into contact with. Very soon the mighty Moghuls were chewing the betel leaf, crying in ecstasy over the mango, adding more spices to their Persian meats, and relishing the vegetarian dishes prepared for them by their Hindu wives and mistresses. It was this combination of richly cooked Persian meats and rice (sometimes called Moghul food) with the local vegetarian styles that gave birth to what I call the Delhi cuisine.
Although this book basically contains the food of the Delhi region, I have, I must confess, cheated slightly to include a few recipes for foods which were cooked in our home but which orginated in other states. I feel very attached to these dishes, and as this is essentially a personal book, I had no compunction about including things that have been adapted in my own kitchen.
I’m sure many readers are curious about just how different the other Indian cuisines really are. One tends to think of India as one large subcontinent almost the size of Europe (without Russia). It is divided into about twenty states and territories. (I say “about” because the number keeps changing.) Each state has its own language, history, literature, dress, and culinary traditions. Transportation of fresh produce isn’t particularly efficient, reliable, or cheap, so each area tends to eat what it produces locally. In some states like Kerala, Bengal, and Andhra Pradesh, the staple is rice, whereas in others like Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the staple is wheat. Along the coast fish and seafood are eaten extensively and are often cooked in coconut milk. In the northern interior, where people see neither the sea nor coconut palms, they usually eat an unleavened whole-wheat bread with dal and vegetables.
In Bengal, I’ve had an entire meal consisting of five different lobster dishes served with rice, the most delicious being one in which the lobster was cooked with mustard seeds and freshly grated coconut. This was followed by Bengali sweets—tiny squares, rectangles, and balls, no bigger than a sugar cube, colored pink, green, and yellow and made with milk, cheese, and sugar.
In Kashmir, where the people are often red-haired, green-eyed, and freckled, the staple diet is meat, fish, and rice. Meat and vegetables are dried during the summer months and stored to be used once the snow begins to fall and movement becomes restricted. The spices used are those which are thought to provide heat for the body—cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, black peppers, chilies. Even their tea is delicately spiced. Kashmiri food often has a red appearance owing to the liberal use of the Kashmiri chili, which is not very hot but provides flavor and color. I’ve had meals in Srinagar in which every course was meat, including a mincemeat dessert.
Modern Bombay boasts of hundreds of instant products; the label on one reads: “Instant Dal. SAVE time, labor, money. By adding only water, READY within three minutes.” Side by side with this evidence of “progress,” Gujarati-speaking people of Bombay still relish more traditional foods. One great favorite is a paper-thin bread, eaten with the pulp of the best seasonal mangoes. This bread is made by dipping two balls of whole-wheat dough into fat and flour, rolling them out together very thinly, and toasting them on a hot griddle. The two layers are then separated, making an ever finer, lighter bread. Another favorite is undhya (meaning upside down). Whole, often