About Indian food

[Jenise]

I love Indian food.

But one of the reasons I put off going out for Indian food is that it's all sauces, meat and heavy carbohydrates. What few vegetables are available are usually deep-fried or long-cooked as meat replacements on the vegetarian side of the menu negating most of the fiber and vitamin benefit of raw vegetables. Since raw and fresh vegetables are a big part of the meals I prepare at home and in my view neccessary to keeping both the calorie count down and the nutrition level high, the lack of fresher, rawer options to balance out a meal at a typical Indian restaurant makes Indian dining strictly a guilty pleasure. What Bob and I found ourselves wondering last night as we dined on just one such meal at Taste of Punjab in Surrey, B.C., is why?

Are the restaurants here just serving the food they think Western diners want, or does the typical Indian diet actually eschew raw/fresh foods? That would be the conclusion I'd draw from the few Indian cookbooks I have, but I wouldn't rule out that what-Westerners-want factor there either.

If any of you have visited India (Bob Ross, I know you have), andI realize there are significant regional differences, was it much different there?

Indian restaurants in general are not representative of the best of Indian cuisine. Most Indians are in fact lacto-vegetarian. The major protein sources are dals (dried legumes), yogurt, and cheese. The vegetarian side of Indian cooking is extremely wide and varied. The heavy sauce schtick is mainly the non-vegetarian Moghlai cuisine of the North.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Indian restaurants in general are not representative of the best of Indian cuisine. Most Indians are in fact lacto-vegetarian. The major protein sources are dals (dried legumes), yogurt, and cheese. The vegetarian side of Indian cooking is extremely wide and varied. The heavy sauce schtick is mainly the non-vegetarian Moghlai cuisine of the North.

-Paul W.

I do realize all that. BUT even when there are a lot of vegetarian choices on a menu, the non-legumes are pretty much saag, aloo, mutter and gobi. There's a whole world of other vegetables that one never sees in their restaurants, and I've eaten Indian food just about everywhere BUT India. What about raw and marinated saladdy options? Those haven't existed in my experience--anywhere!

All Chinese food is chop suey and moo goo gai pan. Or so I would have thought in Baltimore 1969.

There's a lot of variety in Indian cuisine- problem is, it's going to be tough to find where you are and not so easy even where I am, since the restaurants have standardized on a menu of the same 15 or 20 gloppy dishes from the same region. But if you can find someone from India who likes to cook at home, well... you'll rediscover okra and eggplant, you'll find the wonders of ghiya and karela. The flavors of the South will be a revelation to you.

When I get back from my next trip, I promise to post some stuff that you won't find at the local curry houses.

We have a number of Indian restaurants around here that have nights where all they serve is a vegetarian buffet. While I am not wild about buffets, these offer 8-12 vegetarian dishes with a fairly wide range of vegetables. They are reasonably priced and I find the vegetables hold up better in these buffets than when they do their regular buffet which includes meat dishes.

I do realize all that. BUT even when there are a lot of vegetarian choices on a menu, the non-legumes are pretty much saag, aloo, mutter and gobi. There's a whole world of other vegetables that one never sees in their restaurants, and I've eaten Indian food just about everywhere BUT India. What about raw and marinated saladdy options? Those haven't existed in my experience--anywhere!

Have never seen them, Jenise. Everything I've seen has been cooked. I know raw veges have never been a big part of our Chinese diet, with the exception of chopped cucumber and tomatoes as garnish. I always think that "salad" is a very Western concept. I know they do them in Thai and Vietnamese cooking, but even then they tend to be warm salads.

The raw stuff tends to be pickled.

Oh yes, thank you Stuart. You're right, we do get a lot of pickled veggies. I never really think of them as salad. But I've never seen pickled Indian vegetables that weren't also precooked.

[Jenise]

Have never seen them, Jenise. Everything I've seen has been cooked. I know raw veges have never been a big part of our Chinese diet, with the exception of chopped cucumber and tomatoes as garnish. I always think that "salad" is a very Western concept. I know they do them in Thai and Vietnamese cooking, but even then they tend to be warm salads.

I realize. I have a dear friend who is Chinese, and even though she was born and grew up in America (Hawaii), she's doesn't consider salad neccessary food at all and is very funny about eating certain vegetables raw. Like cauliflower--it MUST be at least blanched. She tells funny stories too of being a child, when she and her brothers wanted bologna and salami sandwiches like the other kids got. Her mother insisted on frying the meats first.

I realize. I have a dear friend who is Chinese, and even though she was born and grew up in America (Hawaii), she's doesn't consider salad neccessary food at all and is very funny about eating certain vegetables raw. Like cauliflower--it MUST be at least blanched. She tells funny stories too of being a child, when she and her brothers wanted bologna and salami sandwiches like the other kids got. Her mother insisted on frying the meats first.

Welcome to my life.

My mother is appalled when we put raw beans and broccoli in a salad. She's not alone, actually, I remember reading somewhere (could have been Jeffrey Steingarten) that there is some thought that we're not internally set up to eat raw vegetables, and things like raw spinach do us more harm than good, because it stops us digesting the nutrients from other food.

Personally, I think the Chinese thing has come from lack of clean water. To this day, my mother prefers to drink boiled water. I think that if you can't wash your vegetables in clean water, then you're not likely to have a culture that eats raw salad. Maybe that's true of India too ?

[Jenise]

I realize. I have a dear friend who is Chinese, and even though she was born and grew up in America (Hawaii), she's doesn't consider salad neccessary food at all and is very funny about eating certain vegetables raw. Like cauliflower--it MUST be at least blanched. She tells funny stories too of being a child, when she and her brothers wanted bologna and salami sandwiches like the other kids got. Her mother insisted on frying the meats first.

Welcome to my life.

My mother is appalled when we put raw beans and broccoli in a salad. She's not alone, actually, I remember reading somewhere (could have been Jeffrey Steingarten) that there is some thought that we're not internally set up to eat raw vegetables, and things like raw spinach do us more harm than good, because it stops us digesting the nutrients from other food.

Personally, I think the Chinese thing has come from lack of clean water. To this day, my mother prefers to drink boiled water. I think that if you can't wash your vegetables in clean water, then you're not likely to have a culture that eats raw salad. Maybe that's true of India too ?

I'm sure you and Annabelle would relate to each other quite a bit!

And I'm sure water's very much a factor in both places. As is the type of bacteria present from fertilizers that even clean water might not thoroughly wash away. When I lived in Saudi Arabia, we dipped everything in a bleach solution.

I'm sure you and Annabelle would relate to each other quite a bit!

And I'm sure water's very much a factor in both places. As is the type of bacteria present from fertilizers that even clean water might not thoroughly wash away. When I lived in Saudi Arabia, we dipped everything in a bleach solution.

No ! I'm assuming you mean clothing, and not food ?

Jenise, some months ago (last year) I had the pleasure of working with Suvir Saran. He has two great cookbooks dealing with Indian cooking. I can assure you that, even in their cooked form, the vegetables he prepared were fresh, crisp, and bursting with nutritious value. You might enjoy his books: Indian Home Cooking (co-authored with Stephanie Lyness) and American Masala. The latter deals with how he and his family "Indianized" many American dishes during his growing up years here in America.

Many of his veggie dishes were stir-fried, giving the veggies a quick blast of heat but leaving them still fresh.

I have found that most Indian restaurants simply overcook their veggies. Like you and others have already stated, much of this food is held in warming pans and served as needed. Why? I could not tell you. Maybe it is because they believe that this is what westerners see as Indian food. But the food Suvir Saran (and other Indian chefs with whom I have worked since then) prepared was nothing like I have tasted in Indian restaurants. Go figure.

rwj

Jenise,

I am told that restaurants aren't really a part of Indian culture. Whereas we Westerners will take guests out to a fine restaurant to entertain, in India the custom is to entertain in the home. As a consequence, the best Indian recipes are family recipes handed down mother to daughter, whereas restaurants tend to be undistinguished places that cater to the common denominator, and serve food least likely to offend. The exception being Northern Indian tandoori cuisine, which requires a special clay oven not commonly found in homes, and thus that cuisine and its satellites is what's most found in restaurants, both in India and in the USA (though it's rare that a Northern Indian restaurant in the USA has an actual tandoor).

My introduction to what you might call "real" Indian vegetarian cooking was at a restaurant called Annapurna in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was run by the family of Yamuna Lingappa, a Biology professor at Clark University, who hailed from the southern city of Udupi in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She and her husband (a Microbiology professor at my alma mater, Holy Cross College) started the restaurant as a way to get her family over as immigrants to the USA. It was a restaurant specializing in the uncompromised and authentic Udupi vegetarian cuisine of Southern India. The first time I ate there, I was in complete palate shock. But I fell in love with the restaurant and the cuisine.

Indian vegetarian cooking is almost limitless in its range of vegetable ingredients, cooking techniques, and spice and flavor combinations. But with rare exceptions, you're not going to find this in Indian restaurants in the USA. Check out Yamuna Devi's "Lord Krishna's Cuisine" if you want to see half the range of Indian vegetarian cooking. I say "half the range" because she's a strict Vaishnava and they don't use onions or garlic. Google around and you can find lots of excellent authentic Indian vegetarian recipes without the onion/garlic prohibition.

Regarding use of fresh vegetables, I grant you that Indians tend towards cooked veggies on the soft side. I suspect this is because historically they don't have a hygenic source of fresh water to wash fresh veggies with. The Chinese have a similar paranoia toward fresh salads. But India does have a vast range of raitas (fresh shredded veggies in yogurt) and chutneys (fresh minced greens and spices). And there's more than enough fiber in most cooked Indian veggie dishes.

It's an absolutely glorious cuisine, and IMO unparalleled for the variety and scope of its vegetarian dishes. Don't be prejudiced by the feeble dishes found at most Indian restaurants, anymore than you'd judge American cuisine by what you see at fast food joints.

-Paul W.

I posed your question to an Indian friend. He says he believes that it was really two factors as the cuisine developed.... lack of a good, reliable source of clean water in some areas, and lack of affordable refrigeration. Things tended to spoil very fast, so one simply cooked them or pickled them as they could be held longer that way.

Agreed.

But though Indian cuisine might seem to have unusually mushy vegetables to someone on the US west coast (though NOT to persons anywhere else in the USA), that doesn't make them non-nutritious, or fiber-deficient. Coming from Chinese vegetable cooking, where things tend to be on the crunchy side, it took a paradigm shift on my part to get used to the mushier texture of Indian vegetable cooking. But it's still a BIG step upward from the depths of the traditional New England treatment of veggies that I grew up with. Consider New England Boiled Dinner. It's a long-cooked stew of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. You put the ingredients in the pot with water to cover, and boil until you can't tell any of the ingredients apart. It's absolutely revolting and unpalatable. Indian vegetarian cuisine, done properly, is heavenly, even if the veggies are soft rather than crisp.

-Paul W.

If any of you have visited India (Bob Ross, I know you have), andI realize there are significant regional differences, was it much different there?

Jenise,

This is a hard question to answer because it seems like you are asking so many questions at once.

If your concern is whether Indian/South Asian restaurants outside of the subcontinent are representative of Indian cuisine, then I think I can safely say no. As Paul noted, particularly in the United States, everything is now interpreted through the narrow prism of Mughal cuisine--and even of that subtype it is a poor representation.

If your concern is whether Indian/South Asian cuisine as practiced on the continent is "all sauces, meat and heavy carbohydrates" and "what few vegetables are available are usually deep-fried or long-cooked as meat replacements on the vegetarian side of the menu", then the answer again is no. First, of course, meat plays a role ranging from minor to non-existent in the cuisine that most Indians eat. Second, the sauces and curries that I find typical of Indian restaurants outside of India are far more lumbering, heavy, and filling and less vibrant and delicate then their cousins from the subcontinent. Third, bread is bread and rice is rice, but I find that the norm seems to be to eat a lot more bread or rice at Indian restaurants in the United States than I did in restaurants in India--where often a single piece of naan or a pair of chapatis would be enough for an entire meal as they were merely vessels to get the food to my mouth and enhance the experience, I would not really fill up on them.

If your concern is whether raw vegetables played a major role in Indian cuisine in the subcontinent, in my experience they did not, but my experience was limited mainly to restaurants--some of which were quite excellent, some of which were merely okay, nearly all of which had really good food, but not the greatest which you can only find in Indian households. (And if they had been raw vegetables, I would not have eaten them due to health concerns). But raw is not equivalent to freshness or to quality of ingredients. I remember many a breakfast where I would have an idli sambar, which includes a kind of vegetable stew. Not raw, but the vegetable flavors in the stew were so fresh and so intense, it gives you exactly the kind of experience I think you are lacking at your visits to Indian restaurants. Steaming something until it has no flavor, using mediocre quality vegetables as the flavor of the sauce will overpower it anyway, mushiness, heaviness, and a feeling of oh-vey, these were atypical of Indian cuisine in India--and I didn't even have the best of it.

But that was just my experience and my diminishing recollections from my summer traveling there in 2000 and the caveat my representation of Indian cuisine reflects my limited experience, so I could gave gotten things wrong above.

[Jenise]

No ! I'm assuming you mean clothing, and not food ?

No, food!!!

A friend of mine who lives half the year in Mexico and is quite the germaphobe recently told me he does the same with produce he buys down there.

No ! I'm assuming you mean clothing, and not food ?

No, food!!!

A friend of mine who lives half the year in Mexico and is quite the germaphobe recently told me he does the same with produce he buys down there.

I was surprised to learn that here in the Pacific Northwest a common practice before making apple cider is to dip the apples in a bleach solution, especially if someone else has picked the fruit and it's not known if some of it has been on the ground. Even though the solution is quite dilute, I didn't find the idea of bleach in my apple cider (or food in general) particularly appealing. I suppose if produce is to be peeled anyway (not the case with cider), under some circumstances it might be a sensible precaution. For example, in the news recently was a problem with salmonella from "cantaloupe" (the almost universal mislabeling of muskmelon in the US) and advice from health authorities was to always scrub before cutting. Since I don't know who really does that, maybe bleach is a better idea after all.

[Jenise]

All Chinese food is chop suey and moo goo gai pan. Or so I would have thought in Baltimore 1969.

There's a lot of variety in Indian cuisine- problem is, it's going to be tough to find where you are and not so easy even where I am, since the restaurants have standardized on a menu of the same 15 or 20 gloppy dishes from the same region.

Yeah, I realize, which is why I focussed on technique/results in my complaint, if indeed I was complaining. The homogenization of restaurant fare is a separate problem (though I note that the dishes I've had at various restaurants even if they go by all the usual names are in fact so different from one place to the next that the names are next to meaningless). But hey, you may underestimate where I am. That is, ethnic food in northern Washington is crap, but I live mere minutes from the Canadian border and in 20 minutes can be in the heart of, as I realized last weekend in a moment, a very large immigrant Indian community and potentially some excellent opportunities for Indian dining. That's what led to the restaurant experience that spawned this post.

I'll look forward to you posting more about vegetable curries when you get back.

That is, ethnic food in northern Washington is crap, but I live mere minutes from the Canadian border and in 20 minutes can be in the heart of, as I realized last weekend in a moment, a very large immigrant Indian community and potentially some excellent opportunities for Indian dining. That's what led to the restaurant experience that spawned this post.

Keep in mind, though, that, as I understand it, Indians aren't big restaurant-goers. You aren't necessarily going to find the restaurant food any better in Vancouver than in Seattle. In the homes might be a very different story. Mind you, this is just what I've heard and read.

-Paul W.

Indians are not salad / raw vegetable eaters in general. But I could envisage Tandoori carrots or broccoli.

I had a look at The Taste of Punjab website

http://tasteofpunjab.ca/

Quite a brief win list. Mouton Cadet. Mmmm.

Vancouver Island aromatic Ortega would be nice. That said I introduced an English Bacchus in a London UK client restaurant's list and it didn't move. People order the familiar - like Mouton Cadet.

Anyone tried Rocky Creek Ortega (Vancouver Island) ?

In the UK Indians eat out quite a bit especially second generations - Gen Y people. The cuisine will vary depending on where the locals have come from - Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sikh Punjab or Gujarat

[Jenise]

Indians are not salad / raw vegetable eaters in general. But I could envisage Tandoori carrots or broccoli.

I had a look at The Taste of Punjab website

http://tasteofpunjab.ca/

Quite a brief win list. Mouton Cadet. Mmmm.

Vancouver Island aromatic Ortega would be nice. That said I introduced an English Bacchus in a London UK client restaurant's list and it didn't move. People order the familiar - like Mouton Cadet.

Anyone tried Rocky Creek Ortega (Vancouver Island) ?

In the UK Indians eat out quite a bit especially second generations - Gen Y people. The cuisine will vary depending on where the locals have come from - Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sikh Punjab or Gujarat

We didn't even look at the wine list; just ordered beer. Ortega's not a grape I'm familiar with, nor that winery. What's ortega like? In my world, an 'ortega' is a green chile.

We could see from our seat though that they had a full bar with a lot of Cognac-y and after dinner stuff. Fairly unusual for an "ethnic restuarant"--I think, like in the U.S., this means they paid quite a bit more for their liquor license. The restaurant was actually impressively full for a Monday night and at least half the diners were Indian. Always a good sign to me.

I've come late to the party, but this is an interesting thread. My two cents on bleach and on Indian restaurants.

In the Phillipines the American military sanitation people advised all of us to soak our salad veggies in Chlorox solutions. Food poisoning there was common and spectacularly uncomfortable, so we generally complied, or went without salads. One hyper-conscientious American mother in our neighborhood, who placed safety far above gastronomy, even soaked everything she cooked in Chlorox solutions -- and for good measure poured Chlorox into the baby's bath water, but that's another story.

As far as I've been able to discover, restaurants in India were relatively rare until after WW II when truck drivers from Northwestern India began to fan out all over the country, creating a market for cheap restaurants serving the Northwesterners kind of food, Mughal. Then, in I think it was the 1950s, what may have been the first really upscale India restaurant, named Moti Mahal, opened in New Delhi and featured, again, Mughal food. And following that the generally recognized upscale restaurant cuisine in India became mostly Mughal, even in places like, say, Calcutta, where home cooking is a much different sort of thing. This, as I understand it, is why we see almost exclusively Mughal cooking in restaurants in America. And that's a shame as Indian regional home cooking can be wonderful.