Dreaming of India: Geography, History and Food

Recipe by: Yiggy Uploaded by Drimble Wedge

Follow me to a far off land, with ladies fair and beasts quite grand.

India is place that defies easy descriptions. Like the United States it has a wide diversity of regions and cultures.

It has deserts.

Flood plains and wetlands.

Mountains. And not just any piss ant mole hill. They've got Himalayas.

Rivers. Steppes. Rain forest. Temperate forest. Beaches.

And people. Lots of people.

And all those people, they gots ta eat. And they do alright for themselves.

Whooooa. Slow down there bub. These cows, they ain't for eatin'.

Now you got the right idea.

This is a thread about India. We're in GWS, so clearly this thread will have a heavy food component, but its not all going to be just about that. Culinary traditions don't arise in a vacuum, especially not ones as rich as India's. So in addition to being a jumping point for an ongoing exploration of Indian cuisine, which I hope will include many of you, this thread will also elaborate the history, culture and regions that made this food truly a product of India.

This thread will have (at least) three parts.

• A primer of India, its 28 states, its history and the impact on India's food as well as some minutae about India that I find to just be interesting and worth sharing.

• A primer of the central ingredients, seasonings and techniques that characterize Indian cooking. Like any culinary tradition, Indian food is a collection of flavors and techniques employed on fresh local produce. With these in hand, even if you don't want to play with classic Indian dishes, you can utilize the flavors and style of Indian cooking in whatever food you like to eat.

• A collection of links to Indian recipes produced by the forum for others to peruse and hopefully try something themselves. This part will mostly be whatever comes of the thread and will end up being as big or small as we deign to make it.

I plan on making ongoing additions and changes to the content in the initial posts. I'm certainly not an expert and am continually learning about this subject, so I welcome your insights. This thread isn't going to be comprehensive, and I certainly don't mean it to be. You could fill books on the topics we'll touch on in this thread. I hope to hit some of the broader points to give you a general feel and better context. That way you'll be able to jump in and do your own digging with your own specific interests in mind.

I've broken the thread into the replies so that (once this thread is completely finished and full) you can bookmark just the techniques so you don't have to scroll and hunt.

Wrapping your head around India

Like I've said, India's big. When reading through the numbers and the names, its very easy for the unfamiliar to get lost, to lose their bearings and walk away with vague, unhelpful impressions. So to start off lets think about and visualize some comparisons. These will make things more familiar to our stateside audience. Apologies to goons abroad.

India covers an area of roughly 3.3 million km2. A little more than a third of the area of the United States.

Now, if you visualized the landmass of India as a puzzle of different US states, it'd look like this...

And be composed of Texas, California, Montana, New Mexico, Florida, Illinois, New York, Colorado, Washington, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Connecticut.

Now take three times the number of people living in the United States and cram them into that area. 1.148 Billion people, roughly one fifth of humanity teeming inside India's border. And they're not uniformly spread out, by any means. Large swathes of this land is either wilderness or cropland. Roughly 2/3's to 3/4's of the population live in rural areas engaged in agricultural lifestyles.

While poverty is widespread in some areas, India has urban centers on scale with major US metropolitan areas with high levels of development. India has an extensive national highway system connecting all areas of the country as well as railroad infrastructure.