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.

The extent of state highways varies by state, but all of them are serviced to some extent. District roads are where the real disparity between rich and poor districts shows up. All and all, even with the national highway system, India has a fraction of the road length of the USA servicing three times the population. One of the results of this is that the rails are heavily used for travel, especially by the millions of hindus who make their pilgrimage to Varanasi every year.

All of these aspects have had an effect in some way or another on Indian cuisine. The infrastructure means that areas with access to the national highway system have a broad access to all of the goods available within India as well as products from abroad, for those who can afford these luxuries. What this means for the bulk of the population living in rural areas, many of them in poverty, is that people only have access to local produce and goods. This in turn means there is a regional variety even within the big tent of Indian cuisine. I'll elaborate on the particulars in some of the state by state sections, but the big point for now is this: For many of us being a "locavore" is trendy, and for many not that feasible, but in India its the mode out of necessity. Poverty certainly plays a role in this. One of the primary cooking oils and flavors in the cuisine of Bihar is frying in mustard seed oil. But one of the main reasons so many people use mustard seed oil in Bihar is because its one of the poorest (and largest population wise) states in India, so most of the residents can't afford ghee, the cooking oil of choice in many other regions.

What makes India so special?

Lots of things. India as we know it is a unique place in space and time that hit big wins in quite a few lotteries. It lays in a geological, geographical, biodiversity, historical and socio-cultural sweet spot. To get the whole picture you have to go back. Way back.

To Gondwana, roughly 250 million years ago.

Back then, India was just another face in the crowd. Just another piece of the contiguous landmass, part of one big, fierce ecosystem. But then something happened. India was tired of the ole Gondwanagang and decided to make a break for it.

India is in the upper right, you can see Madagascar shooting off about 75 mya.

India is barely on the screen in this one on the far right.

So India went from being a part of a large continent to being an island. But Yiggy, why the hell does this matter and what does it have to do with yummy Indian treats. Trust me, it does. When India split off from the main continent, it took a chunk of the greater ecosystems plant and animal species and marooned them on an island. And when species are stuck on an island for a couple million of years, they start to... chhaaaange.... For anyone who wants a really good treatment on the myriad ways that island biogeography influences evolution, David Quammen breaks it down in simple terms in his book The Song of the Dodo, one of my all time favorite reads.

Short and simple, species that survive better across continents tend to suffer on smaller land masses, and evolutionary strategies that wouldn't cut it on the mainland can thrive in island ecosystems. Now, even back then the Indian subcontinent wasn't that small, so evolutionary trends that you'd see in other places weren't as extreme. When you look at Madagascar, which splintered off from India on its flight North, you see island biogeography and evolution in concert to produce some of the coolest wildlife on the planet (most of it in threat of extinction now ). But there is still an effect on large islands. Just look at Australia to get an idea why; a unique cache of mammals, poisonous spiders and other great stuff you won't find anywhere else. India served as a raft for biological and evolutionary ferment much like this, stewing for over 50 million years. And then that raft found its way back to land.

And all that funky island wildlife got reintroduced with long lost cousins. The subduction zone created between the colliding plates also created a bunch of new ecosystems and niches including the Himalayas.

This created a perfect storm for the development of one of the richest sets of ecosystems and biodiversity on the planet. All of these species thrived and competed for ten million years. India's location meant that even during the last Ice Age, India was untouched with its vegetation and ecosystems mostly consisting of savannah, tropical grassland and rainforests.

What are some cool things you can find in India? Well besides elephants, tigers, saltwater crocodiles and asiatic lions (the last existing wild population anywhere) they have Mynah birds. [cooler than the mockingbird. Pack it up Texas].

Enter Homo sapiens sapiens, roughly 50,000 years ago. Earliest fossil evidence of modern humans was found in caves in Sri Lanka and date to ~40,000 years ago. Remains found in Uttar Pradesh, a central Indian state, date to ~19,000 years ago. Especially once the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago, India was the perfect home for humanity. Its range of ecosystems from mountains, steppes, river plains, forest, desert and grassland formed a Vertical Economy, a collection of different ecosystems in close proximity from which humans could harvest, trade and thrive. In his book Oak: The Frame of Civilization, William Bryant Logan describes three such vertical economies that allowed human civilization to form and grow, one being the Indus river valley, the other two being the Tigris-Euphrates river valley in mesopotamia and the vertical economy formed in the steppes of the Andes in Peru (for a great read on the birth of civilization in the Peruvian vertical economy you should check out 1491 by Charles C. Mann).

Another important aspect to India's success and lushness is the abundance of rivers. Having rivers can make a big difference in how easily a civilization will succeed in any given area. In his book The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs explains how one of the reason Africa has always had problems is a poverty of inland rivers and waterways. India's abundance of rivers made it a land ripe for agriculture.

There is a reason over a billion people live in India, its one of the best places on Earth. And all of those weird twists that lead to the evolution of tons of different plants and animals, why did that matter? Because people eat that stuff. Some of the best spices come from this land, including pepper. Thats right, one of the two most important seasonings (in any tradition) is native to India and a product of its rich biological and geological history.

The Big Cultural influences on the food

India has always been characterized by syncretism, with the variety of cultural practices arising from the different corners of the continent blending and bleeding together. This means that even though there can be differences in views, sometimes strong, there is still a strong tendency to coexist, adopt parts from other cultures that are liked, and ignore the rest as best as possible. The two biggest developments in the last few millenia with regards to strong influences on the cuisine are the rise of three major religions (Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism) and even more recently the control of the Mughal (or Moghul) empire from 1526 to 1707.

Hinduism as a religion dates back several thousand years, and in all of this time has adapted in several ways to encompass a broader Indian philosophy with several schools of thought. Now, I'm going to reserve comment on this area because I don't know a whole lot and don't want to make a total boob of myself, but theres a bunch of interesting info out there to read about for anyone that would like to digest it. With regards to food, a central tenet of the Hindu religion is Ahimsa, "do no harm", a driving influence behind the long tradition of vegetarian cuisine in India. Large portions of the population live with some variation of a vegetarian dietary restriction.

Meat eating is widespread as well, more so among muslim populations, but when meat is eaten it is normally restricted to seafood, lamb or chicken. In fact, fast food is wildly succesful in India right now. KFC has opened several locations, and Church's Chicken recently made a move into the market. McDonald's has adapted its menu to include lamb burgers and vegetable nuggets to cater to local tastes. No beef though. In most of the states cattle slaughter is banned. That said, there is still a small tradition of beef eating, which I'll mention in the Gujarat section.The ban on beef slaughter makes sense though, because cows provide a staple food for the people of India. From cows they get milk, yogurt, paneer cheese, cooking oils (ghee), and cow dung to fertilize crops. The cattle is also used for draft and farm labor. All of these factors make the cow a very important part of the Indian way of life.

Most of the traditions for preparing meat, and a great deal of other Indian dishes particularly in Northern India, originate from the Mughal empire's influence. The predominant culture for this muslim empire was persian. Its presence in Indian cuisine comes with the style of most meat preparations as well as the methods of cooking Indian dishes in thick, fatty sauces infused with spices. They brought the method of cooking meat tandoori style, in pits on skewers. Meat dishes cooked this way were normally kabobs prepared in roasting pit ovens. Another popular way of preparing meat dishes was to make forcemeats/meatballs, fry and sear them and them cook them in some sort of curry. Still, Mughal rulers respected the locals' shock and horror at beef eating, and so meat consumption among muslims was still limited to lamb and poultry. The stretches of the empire around Kabul, once a major Mughal city and now capital of Afghanistan, embraced beef eating traditions, but they didn't catch on in India.

So in a nutshell, vegetable culinary tradition stretching back 6 millenia with the Hindu religion, and cooking techniques and meat eating heavily influenced by the muslim, Mughal empire.