The spice levels? ‘Zero spice, American mild, American medium, American spicy, Indian mild, Indian medium, and Indian spicy.’ Two points here. One, ‘Indian spicy’ is meant to be off the charts, gut-burning spicy. Two, ‘Indian mild’, going by the gradation, is spicier than ‘American spicy’.
Which, in the West, is one of the fallacies attached to the notion of Indian food. Responding to the tweet, another user wrote, ‘I was ordering takeout at an Indian place in Massachusetts & my brother asked for spicy. The guy on the phone said White people spicy or Indian spicy?’
The West treats Indian food as a homogenous entity. It must inevitably be spicy. It has to be a curry (most commonly chicken butter masala). That is accompanied by the usual fixins: the ubiquitous ‘dhal’ (always spelt with an ‘h’), ‘poppadum’, and chutney. This is not Indian cuisine in any sense. It is a sort of bastardised version of north Indian food.
There are, of course, fine dining Indian restaurants in cities such as London and New York. They offer the authentic stuff. But these restaurants are the preserve of the extremely wealthy and the freebie merchants. For the average punter, the local pub, local ‘Indian’, or local curry house familiarises diners with a uniform, nuance-free, misleading concept of Indian food.
It is a great pity that the West is not acquainted with the vast diversity of cuisines from each of India’s regions. What you get in, say, Tamil Nadu is unrecognisable from what you would find in Nagaland or West Bengal. And even within each region, there are so many ways of cooking the same item. The mustard (shorshe) fish, a staple in Bengal, and one of the few items from that region with which people from other parts of India are familiar, can be steamed and wrapped in banana leaves (paturi), cooked with or without potatoes, made into a thin gravy or a sticky one.
The delectable poppy seed delicacy, posto (regrettably, but invariably, referred to as ‘poshto’ in north India) can be of at least a dozen varieties, including one that is made with prawns – and not merely the ‘aloo poshto’ which north Indians think is synonymous with Bengali cuisine. That is why Australian food writer, Charmaine O’Brien’s just-published book, Eating the Present, Tasting the Future, which explores India through its food, is such a timely arrival. O’Brien writes eloquently about the glories of the cuisine from different regions of the country. And she admits how little she knew about any of this when she first visited India from Australia many years ago. ‘As far as I understood it, Indian food was singularly made up of gravy-based dishes explosive with chilli all called ‘curry’, along with pakoras, samosas, poppadums, and tandoori chicken.’
It is not just the West that is ignorant of the smorgasbord of culinary delights that India has to offer. People in one region of India do not know half as much as they ought to about the food in other regions of the country (see above). O’Brien puts that down to insularity, a suspicion of food from elsewhere, and a wish to indulge in food that one is comfortable with.
This is changing, though. Speciality restaurants in big Indian cities are now offering regional cuisines. That can only be a good thing.
The stereotypical notion of Indian food in the West needs to be smashed. One can only hope that O’Brien’s book – a joyful celebration of the variety, subtlety, balance and deliciousness of India’s food – travels well and, even in a small way, furthers that end.
