As many of us try to eat less meat and, instead, eat more of the natural grains, vegetables, and fruits that spring out of our good earth, people are turning to whole or partial vegetarianism as an answer.
Vegetarianism already exists in a widespread manner in several Eastern nations. But among them all, only India has a robust history of it that covers the different classes and regions of an entire subcontinent, from pauper to billionaire and from the mountainous Himalayan peaks in the north to the lush tropics of the south. Hundreds of millions of people in India eat traditional vegetarian cuisines. Indian vegetarian foods are perhaps the most flavorful and the most varied in the entire world. Many dishes are of ancient origin or inspiration, and they are seasoned with an array of spices carefully blended for both health and taste. Every housewife knows that turmeric is an antiseptic, ginger is good for colds and nausea, and asafetida is a digestive. This knowledge is used daily, almost automatically. What is more, Indian meals are always put together so they are nutritionally balanced: a grain is always served with a vegetable and a dairy product, not only because they taste good together but also because together they are nutritionally complete.
With this book, I want to take you on an adventurous ride through India, tasting the real vegetarian dishes that Indians eat in the privacy of their homes, in their local cafés and temples, at the parties they throw for each other, and at their wedding banquets and religious festivals.
Just imagine crisp okra fries dusted with chili powder, turmeric, and chickpea flour, or grilled portobello mushrooms flavored simply with green chilies, a couple of squeezes of lime juice, and salt, or a hot, sweet, and sour mash of eggplant on toast. You will find all these in the very first chapter, Soups, Appetizers, and Snacks.
The Vegetables chapter holds more good things. Some of you may, just may, have already had the sweet, sour, hot, salty, and coconut-enriched Kodava Mushroom Curry, which originated with the hunter-gatherers of the forested regions of Coorg in southern Karnataka—though I doubt it. Even Indians who live in North India are not familiar with this dish as it is a specialty of just one community, the Kodavas, who live in the heart of a specific wet, forested region in the hills that rise from the Arabian Sea in southern India. And it is never on any restaurant menu in the West. Yet it is so easy to make. You will find that recipe here. You will also find a sublime spinach stir-fried with garlic, cumin, and fenugreek seeds, and some potatoes from Goa studded with mustard seeds and refreshed with green chilies and cilantro.
Indians eat more dals—dried beans and legumes—than perhaps any other country. From black-eyed peas to chickpeas to mung beans and even soy granules, dals are eaten every day, and each time in a different manner. A dal might be boiled by itself and then brought to life with a tarka, a quick seasoning with whole spices dropped into hot oil. It could be cooked with other dals in a glorious mélange or cooked with vegetables. It could be transformed into a savory pancake for breakfast, or made into a flour and used in a batter for fritters. For Indians, dals are a protein-rich mainstay. They are cheap, highly nutritious, safe to eat, and an easy way to get a daily quota of protein. You will find dozens of recipes in these pages that might well change the look of your daily meals forever.
An American friend once told me that she had eaten an exquisite poha upma in a hotel in Madhya Pradesh. A what? She too was not familiar with the name, nor did she know exactly what she had eaten. She just knew that she has yearned for it ever since. You will find that recipe here in the Grains chapter. Poha is a version of rice that has been magically cooked, flattened, and dried in such a way that it retains all its nutrients. Because it is precooked, it can be combined with spices and vegetables to make poha upma, a spicy pilaf, with great speed. Indians need and love such recipes, as they too want to put food on the table as quickly and easily as possible. I want to help you get to know this ingredient, as I am sure you will want to use it frequently.
As I traveled around India for this book, I kept my eyes wide open for vegetarian dishes that are both delicious and easy to make. India has so many of them, and we all should have them in our repertoire.
In a way, I have been traveling for this book forever. I was born and raised in Delhi, and until I left India to study drama in London that was my world, in culinary matters and otherwise. It was when I was in America and not finding enough acting jobs that I turned to writing and to writing about food. My first book was on the food of Delhi. It was what I knew.
But I kept asking editors for assignments that would make me explore other parts of India. I needed to know my own country, which is really a continent. If a magazine asked for ten recipes, I came back with a few hundred. I wanted to understand the region. Recipes not required for the article went into my “bank,” to be withdrawn as needed.
Over the years, I have developed my own system for collecting good recipes. I have learned that in India, these are always found in private homes, and that I cannot rely on generous offers of “written recipes.” Well-meaning housewives who willingly part with them often leave out crucial ingredients that they take for granted, or use colloquial names and words I do not understand. I have to see the dish being cooked in front of my eyes. This way I know the exact amount of heat being used, the length of the cooking time, the amount of liquid required, and the exact cut of the vegetable.
When I decided to write this book, I knew that I could not collect all the material I needed in one trip. India is a vast nation, about the size of Europe, with as much variation between the cuisines of the different states as there is between the foods in the countries of Europe. And while I could fly between states, I preferred to rent a car and go from town to town and home to home, relying sometimes on connections I had already set up through emails and phone calls, and sometimes on the suggestions of people I happened to meet. My first trip was to my home region, including trips to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Bengal, as well as to Bombay and the western state of Gujarat. I already knew all these areas quite well and could rely on friends and relatives to help me get the recipes I knew I wanted.
The next two trips were to areas that I knew less well, both in South India, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. This meant going right across India from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, a good 645 miles as the crow flies, with many productive detours along the way. Driving on the roads, with every manner of traffic, from camels to bullock-carts to over-crowded, careening buses, was always painfully slow but also generous in allowing for many delicious food stops!
In Andhra alone, there were at least five distinct cuisines to be studied. I stayed in palace hotels to collect the recipes of the powerful former rulers, the Nizams; in private homes, watching dishes cooked by aristocratic Muslim housewives, I visited Kayastha women, who specialize in a mixed Hindu-Muslim cookery, and vegetarian weavers, who produce the finest natural-dyed ikats and whose wooden handlooms sit just a few feet away from their cooking stoves. Many brides dream of a red silk Pochampally ikat for their wedding saree, and only these weavers can make it. I spend a whole morning with D. Lalitha, just such a weaver, whose husband uses turmeric and indigo and annatto to dye the threads that she will weave later. As he dyes, she is kept busy making a lunch of a saaru (toovar dal with tamarind and the Indian vegetable known as a drumstick), rice, dosakai pacchadi (a special orange squash-like cucumber cooked with curry leaves, green chilies, cumin, mustard seeds, garlic, and ginger), and a wonderful green mango pickle.
Some dishes in this book were found quite serendipitously. The woman setting up my travels in Andhra mentioned a clothing designer in Hyderabad, Vinita Pittie, who lived in a 230-year-old family mansion in the heart of the old city. She was, I was told, a wonderful Marwari cook. I was immediately captivated: I love clothes, I love examining old mansions, and I love the vegetarian foods of the Marwari business community, which originated in Rajasthan but is now spread all over India. Her food turned out to be utterly delicious. And sure enough, I ended up buying a saree with fantastic embroidery! (For more on Vinita Pittie, see Potatoes in a Marwari Style.)
As we traveled along, I would call a halt at the sign of a good roadside food stand. “What, a pesarattu stand! Let us get out!” Pesarattus are mung bean pancakes (see this page). I already knew that the recipe was going into the book, but I wanted to examine the technique of making the pancake yet again—and, let’s face it, I wanted to eat one, too!
We traveled to chili fields and chili auctions, where I insisted on looking into everyone’s lunch boxes and examining all the snacks being sold. How else could I understand the local palate? We went to the home of two sisters who made us Telengana-style food, rich in sesame seeds, and to the home of a lady from the Chowdhary business community who cooked an exquisite dish of spicy spinach.
In Karnataka, my routine was the same as in Andhra. Here I got in touch with Saras Ganapathy, the wife of a playwright I knew, and a very active social worker. She lives in Bangalore and knows everybody. I was going to be in Bangalore for just a week and then traveling through other parts of the state. I asked if she could please set up for me women from different communities who would do cooking sessions in the mornings and afternoons so I could watch and learn. It was a very tall order, but Saras managed it beautifully. She found me women from the Madhwa community who specialize in foods from the famous Udupi Temple area; Kodava women from the forests of Coorg whose mushroom and fern dishes are known only to them; women cooking foods from neighboring Tamil Nadu; women cooking the dishes of the Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmins; and women making the foods of the Palghat Iyers, who are Tamils living in Kerala.
In Bombay, I followed two very successful vegetarian jewelers to see what they ate for lunch and how they ate it. Both have shops at the Taj Mahal Palace. One, who comes from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, left his office every day around noon and went home to his family for lunch. This was the main meal of the day for the family. He spent about an hour and a half eating and then went back to his office. His father, who had replaced him in the shop for that time, then took his car and went back to the same home to have his lunch. They all live together. You will find the details of that meal, as well as the full menu, starting on this page.
The second jeweler, whose shop had been shot at during the terrorist attack on the Taj Hotel in the winter of 2008, is a Punjabi from Delhi. His lunch setup, right in the shop, was entirely different. He and his two brothers, who work at their various Bombay shops, all ate together. The food, cooked by their wives, came from home at the last possible minute in a large tiffin carrier. The top of one of the larger jewelry cases was cleared off. Yes, the mirror to check out the earrings a customer might buy was removed, a tablecloth was spread out, and the “table” was laid properly. Then the tiffin carrier was opened and the brothers sat down to a full meal, right in the middle of the shop. For details, see this page. The brothers pointed out a corner display case to me. On one shelf stood a statue of the elephant-headed god, Ganesh. When the terrorists’ bullets had come flying in 2008—the men showed me the bullet holes—they went all around the statue but never touched it. Now, the brothers refuse to sell the statue.
I was also very curious about the hundreds of ashrams in India, as they all serve vegetarian food. What were they like, and what did they serve? Did they have certain culinary principles that they followed, or a certain style of cooking? I have friends, Virendra and Indira Dayal, who are familiar with the Aurobindo Ashram in Delhi and took me there. It is located in a stunning modern building where the round, granite dining room, right at its heart, is open to the sky in the center. Anyone who is hungry is welcome to come in and eat—for free. The food, originating from all over India, is always made with very fresh ingredients, some grown on the premises, and is always mildly spiced and never too oily. I was taken around and shown where they grow, store, and cook their food. They even have a very good school on the premises. It is a whole way of life. (See more on the ashram on this page.)
Bombay Jewelers
My friends also took me to the Chinmaya Mission in Delhi, which is connected to the famous Guruvayur Temple in Kerala. The priestess invited us in and, knowing of my interests, asked the head chef to join us. He came bearing food all so simple and delicious that two of the recipes found their way into this book, the Spicy Paneer Slices, and a dish of poha, the pressed dried rice that I mentioned earlier.
Ah, the poha! For this book I am going to make you go running to Indian shops to get a few new ingredients to store in your pantry. Poha will be one such new ingredient for many and, true, you will not find it in your local supermarket. At least not yet. Very few Indian ingredients were available when I first started writing cookbooks. But today cardamom and cilantro, which I could not find then, are in every supermarket. Even better, you can sit comfortably on your couch and order almost everything you need online. Poha is a great new ingredient to learn about. Indian vegetarians always have poha in their pantries to make a very quick snack if unexpected guests show up. You should too.
For this book I have collected recipes for potato salad from Nepal, which came from my “bank” and a quick trip to a Queens, New York, restaurant, this page, the superb Eggs in a Hyderabadi Tomato Sauce, from one of the aristocratic families of Hyderabad, and a lovely potato dish, this page, from the Marwari business community that originated in the deserts of Rajasthan.
This is the wonder of Indian food—its specificity to each state, each town, each community. It is these very regional foods that I wanted for this book, as that is where vegetarian India is at its most glorious. I am equally interested in how people in different Indian communities eat—their eating habits and their menus—as these offer true glimpses into the variety of vegetarian worlds within India. I hope, in the pages that follow, that you will get to know some of these people as I did. Food, as we all know, does not exist in a vacuum. I always like to know the background of the dishes I eat. I hope you do too, and I’ll provide some context for the recipes as I go along.
I have also created quite a few “modern” dishes that use traditional Indian spices and techniques but have Western origins, such as the Pan-Grilled Zucchini with a Spicy Tomato Sauce, and Mangoes Mumtaz, a lovely, light, fluffy dessert.
Perhaps most important of all, none of the recipes in this book are overly complicated to prepare. They may have many ingredients and take a little time, but do not be put off by that, as the cooking process is usually quite simple. Indian dishes need their particular spices, and they need to cook at their own pace, but they do not require complicated cooking techniques. Vegetarians—and even non-vegetarians—will want them in their repertoires. In India’s ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine, it is believed that the simple acts of cutting and chopping and stirring are graces that can bring you peace and calm. This is what I wish for you.
A restaurant kitchen in Vishakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh
The most common Indian green chili, found all over the country.