At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

India

Colleen Taylor Sen

Defining and describing a typical Indian meal is a challenge in view of the enormous physical, climatic, ethnic, and religious diversity of a country of more than 1 billion people, 15 official languages and many dialects, 8 major religions, and innumerable sects, castes, classes, and other social divisions. Most Indian languages do not even have a word for a meal and use circumlocutions. For example, to invite someone to your house for a meal, you would ask them to come and “eat” at a certain hour, the time indicating whether it is lunch or dinner. While an English speaker might ask if you had “lunch” (or “dinner”), a north Indian Hindi speaker would ask “roti khaya?” (Have you eaten bread?), and a Bengali speaker might ask “bhat kheiicho?” (Have you eaten rice?), indicating the importance of these starches in their diet.

Although there are enormous regional and even local variations in the food of the Indian subcontinent, Indian meals share some common characteristics. Generally, a diner never touches the food or plate of another person. Food touched by another person, even a spouse or other family member, is considered polluted and therefore inedible. In the past, leftover food would be given to servants, homeless people, or even cows and birds, but today, with refrigeration, most families reheat vegetables and rice from the previous night’s dinner for breakfast or take it to the office for lunch.

Albala

The traditional way of eating in India is by using one’s right hand, as this family is doing. This allows the eater to mix the elements on the plate to his or her personal taste and enhances the sensory experience of dining. (Szefei/Dreamstime.com)

Traditionally, people sat on the floor for meals and took their food from banana leaves or thalis (round metal plates with a raised rim holding little bowls), using only their right hand to convey the food in their mouths. Today, many middle-class people in cities sit on chairs at dining tables and eat from plates using Western-style cutlery, mainly forks and spoons, since meat and vegetables are already cut into pieces. Those who can afford it have two main meals—lunch and dinner, the former being the most important—and two supplementary meals: breakfast and a light snack in the afternoon, sometimes called “tea” or “tiffin.” The core of a meal is a starch (such as wheat, rice, millet, sorghum, or corn) plus boiled lentils (dal), which together provide most of the needed amino acids. They are supplemented by vegetables, meat, and fish and an array of condiments, including sweet chutneys; sweet, sour, hot, and very hot pickles; salads; and yogurt. Vegetarians (who constitute around a third of the Indian population, mainly Hindus, but only around 5 percent of Bengalis) avoid meat, although very few Indians are vegan. However, even nonvegetarians eat relatively little meat for economic reasons since meat is expensive, although meat consumption is increasing with rising incomes. Alcohol is very rarely consumed with a meal; the standard beverage is water.

Indian meals do not normally have a sequence of courses. Everything arrives more or less at once, although certain dishes may appear at different points in the meal. Even in Bengali cuisine, where dishes are served sequentially, they remain on the table throughout the meal and are mixed together on the same plate. The Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, for a decade Mexico’s ambassador to India, writes:

In European cooking, the order of the dishes is quite precise. It is a diachronic cuisine. … A radical difference: in India, the various dishes come together on a single large plate. Neither a succession nor a parade, but a conglomeration and superimposition of things and tastes; a synchronic cuisine. A fusion of flavors, a fusion of times. (Ray, 2004, 28-29)

Sharing and Pollution

In some cultures, eating from others’ plates is considered rude unless there is a close personal connection. Sharing is not uncommon, but custom dictates that one ask first. This only applies to countries where private plates are the norm, as in Europe and the United States. Strangers eating from another’s plate can be a violation of personal space or might be considered a form of pollution, as someone else’s fork and saliva touches your food. This can be true even if that person is a person one would normally kiss. In India, even a spouse’s plate is polluted. At a family dinner table, siblings or spouses may regularly eat off each other’s plates or even surreptitiously snag food. Arguably, private dining space only developed with the idea of private property in the context of capitalism in the West, and in fact the idea of pollution is anything but universal. In Ethiopia, gursha is exactly the opposite, a gesture of closeness in which one person picks up food with the flat bread injera in the hand and feeds another.

The following is a description of a meal in the home of a middle-class Bengali family: Ranjit, a colonel in the Indian army; his wife Anisha; and their two daughters Rinku and Tinku (their pet names, used by family members), who are 7 and 15 years old, respectively. They live in a spacious apartment in an army complex at Fort William in Kolkata. The family has their main meal at midday. During the week it takes place around 2:00 or 2:30 p.m. when the girls come back from school, but on weekends it may be an hour or so earlier. Whenever he can Ranjit joins his family for lunch, in which case they eat in the dining room. But when it just the girls and Anisha, they often have lunch in the TV room while watching television. Dinner is typically much later—at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. or even later in some Kolkata families. The interval between meals is broken by an afternoon tea around 5:30 or 6:00 at which savories, such as samosas, sweets (both Western and Indian style), and tea are served. Tea is served in the British style with milk and sugar, rarely spices.

Anisha, who does not work outside the house, does all the cooking herself, although a part-time male servant does the daily shopping at a nearby outdoor market. It’s not uncommon for men to do the shopping in Bengali families, especially for fish. Part-time servants also help with chopping the vegetables, which can be time consuming, and the washing up. In the past middle-class families had live-in servants, but this is becoming rarer. It is common in cities for several families to share the services of helpers.

Anisha’s kitchen, like most Indian kitchens, is small by Western standards. She does most of her cooking on a couple of burners fueled by bottled gas. (Ovens are rare in Indian homes.) Anisha sometimes uses a pressure cooker, which speeds up the cooking of meat that otherwise can take several hours. The Indian batterie de cuisine is also relatively small. A common receptacle is a deep stainless steel or cast-iron pot (karahi) with two handles and a flat or slightly concave bottom that is used for sautéing and deep-frying. Rice and currylike dishes with a liquid gravy are prepared in a straight-sided pan with a lid. A tawa, a flat heavy iron griddle with a long handle, is used for roasting and preparing breads that require little or no oil. A perforated metal spoon is used for frying and draining, and a ladle is used for stirring. In Bengal, a large knife mounted on a wooden board called a bonti is used to cut fish and large vegetables. In the past all the preparation was done sitting on the floor, but in modern households such as Anisha’s the work is done on granite or marble counters. She grinds the spices by hand using a stone rolling pin on a stone slab.

Today some relatives are visiting, so the midday meal will be slightly more elaborate than usual. Because it is mid-June and the weather is very hot, the menu features some dishes believed to be cooling. Anisha cooks everything in advance and warms the food over the stove before serving. In general, Indian food is not served at a hot temperature: warm or even room temperature is standard. Her first task is to cook the rice, which is the main starch in the Bengali diet and is served throughout the meal. First, she washes the rice carefully, removing any impurities, and drains it well. She brings water three times the volume of the rice to a boil, then adds the washed rice and cooks it over medium heat until each grain is soft yet separate. (In traditional Bengali society, a girl being considered as a bride had to cook rice for her potential in-laws. If the rice was sticky, the candidate was not considered suitable.) Anisha drains the rice to remove excess starch and keeps it warm over the stove.

Today’s meal will start with a bitter dish called shukto that is intended to stimulate the appetite (just as the French take a glass of vermouth as a digestif). Shukto is the traditional first course in a Bengali lunch, especially in the summer because of its cooling properties. Anisha carefully slices the vegetables: potatoes, eggplant, white radish, potol (a small green squash), unripe banana, and bitter gourd; the thickness of the slices depends on how quickly the vegetable takes to cook. She sautés the vegetables in vegetable oil, then mixes them with a paste of ground turmeric, ginger, cumin, and mustard seed and simmers the mixture until the vegetables are cooked. The final touch is a sprinkling of panchphoron fried in ghee. Panchphoron (meaning “five spices”) is the standard Bengal masala (spice mixture), made from equal parts of fennel seeds, radhuni (known as celery seeds though actually a different plant, Trachyspermum roxburghianum), nigella (black cumin or onion seed, which is actually neither cumin nor onion; in Hindi it is called kalonji), fenugreek seeds, and cumin seeds. At the very end she adds a little milk and sugar. Bengalis are famous for their sweet tooth, and a pinch of sugar is often added to vegetable and meat dishes.

Next she prepares dal, a seasoned soupy preparation of boiled lentils. There are many varieties of lentils and many methods of preparation. Today she cooks urad (black) dal, which is a typical summertime dish (see recipe) and more complicated to prepare than the masur dal (also called red or Egyptian dal), which is the usual dal served in Anisha’s household.

Next because there are guests, she prepares three vegetable dishes: one fried, one lightly spiced, and a third that is heavier. Normally she makes only one or two of them. The fried dish is sliced eggplant rubbed with turmeric and salt and then deep-fried in mustard oil. The second is sweet golden mung dal; mung dal is dry roasted, simmered with onions and green chilies, cooked with sautéed bay leaves, and cumin seeds and finally mixed with a little milk and sugar. The third dish is lau ghanto, slices of bottle gourd that are sautéed and then simmered with cumin, turmeric, coriander, and chili paste and finally stir-cooked with bori—little pellets of ground dried lentil paste that are bought ready-made.

The centerpiece of a Bengali meal is fish, which is a marker of Bengali identity. “Maccher bhate bangali,” says a proverb, meaning “Fish + rice = Bengali.” In Bengal, even people who would be vegetarians elsewhere in India eat fish, which is jokingly called “vegetables of the river.” Carp is a favorite, cooked in mustard oil (a traditional Bengali cooking medium) or boiled to make a stew called maccher jhol, which is what Anisha makes today for her guests. She rubs thick slices of carp with turmeric and salt, then fries them in mustard oil. She sautés panchphoron and a paste of aromatic spices in a little oil, then adds water and some potatoes, which were fried earlier. After a few minutes, she adds the fish and cooks the mixture a while longer. However, because her children don’t like fish, Anisha makes a chicken curry as well. She sautés sliced onions in ghee, then adds chilies, garlic, and onions ground into a paste and sautés the mixture with chopped tomatoes. She stir-fries chicken pieces, adds water, and simmers the chicken for around an hour. Finally, she adds some quartered potatoes and cooks until the chicken and potatoes are done and the gravy has thickened. Her final task is the preparation of tok, a sweet and sour chutney that will act as a palate cleanser before dessert. Tomatoes are often used in this dish, but her children don’t like them either, so she makes it with apples.

Anisha sets the table herself in the dining room. She spreads a cloth over the table and puts cotton napkins at each place setting together with a plate, a knife, and a spoon. Anisha serves everyone herself, starting with the guests, then her husband, and finally her children. First she takes around a bowl of rice, putting some on each plate until the person served asks her to stop, often by saying bas (enough). Next she brings out the other dishes on their separate serving plates and serves each dish to her guests and the family. Shukto comes first, followed by the dal, the vegetables, the fish, and the chicken curry. However, although the dishes are served sequentially, they remain on the table throughout the meal so that people can take more of a dish they particularly like. A dish of hot pickles is there for those who like to add a bit of piquancy to their food. The rice is constantly replenished as needed. Each guest is served a glass of water, although Indians in general drink very little during the meal.

Anisha sits down and serves herself only after everyone else has eaten. At the very end of the meal she serves a typical Bengali dessert, bought from one of Kolkata’s many sweet shops: mishti doi (sweet yogurt), a thick, sweet yet slightly sour yogurt made from buffalo milk that is always sold in little clay pots, which help keep it cool. Mishti doi is eaten with a spoon. Tea or coffee are not usually served at the end of a meal.

The older members of the family eat with their fingers, mixing a bit of food with the rice and popping it into their mouths. Tinku and Rinku eat solid items with their fingers but use spoons with the dishes with gravy. Some people mix several items together, while others prefer to eat them separately. In an Indian meal, the diner becomes an active participant in the creation of the meal by mixing and matching dishes and flavors to suit his or her individual tastes.

When the family dines alone, the children talk about what happened at school, and Rinku is especially talkative. They aren’t allowed to bring their beloved cell phones to the table. When guests are present, the conversation touches on the activities of friends and relatives as well as pending marriages, a favorite topic of conversation.

Albala

Urad dal is one of the richest sources of proteins and vitamin B as well as fiber, which makes it easy to digest. (Manubahuguna/Dreamstime.com)

When the meal is over, Anisha clears the table; sometimes the children help her. A part-time maid comes in to wash the dishes in the sink. Leftovers are stored in the refrigerator, to be recycled at a later meal.

Urad Dal

½ pound urad (black) lentils

6 cups of water

A pinch of turmeric powder

2 tablespoons of ginger paste (ginger ground in water)

Salt and sugar to taste

1 tablespoon clarified butter (ghee)

½ teaspoon mustard seeds

2 dry red chilies

1.Bring the water to a boil, and add the dal and the turmeric.

2.Cook over high heat until the lentils are cooked (around half an hour).

3.Add the ginger paste, a little sugar, and salt and mix well.

4.Heat the ghee in the krahi, and sauté the mustard seeds and chilies until they stop crackling.

5.Pour over the dal and mix well.