Registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India under R.N.I 53640/91
Vol. XXV No. 8, August 1-15, 2015
Eat India!
An occasional column by a British freelance writer on her eight years in Madras
A masala dosai with coconut chutney! Mmmmm. Oothappam! Mmmm, idli! The mere thought of these delicacies seems to send a deluge of saliva running from any true South Indian mouth.
Food, everyone loves it and loves to talk about it. I am, however, intrigued at the Indians’ obsession with food. In England we talk about the weather first; it’s not really polite to ask a stranger what they had for breakfast. In Madras the first question of the day is: what have you eaten?
“Madam!” says the cook, looking with contempt at the apple I am eating, “That is not breakfasting properly.”
Everywhere I look, everyone is eating, all day long; food is omnipresent. It is the first thing offered when you enter a home, it is a ritual, it is hospitality. The word ‘companionship’ is derived from the Latin con pane meaning with bread. To eat with family or companions gives fundamental nourishment to body and soul. It is a way of life in India – look around and you see people smacking their lips and wiping juice from their chins. For rich and poor alike, food is the common link.
There are tiffin boxes on the back of motorbikes, fast food joints down every street, tea stalls on every corner, bicycles with urns wobbling precariously, veggie restaurants, non-veggie hotels, juice stands, sugar cane vendors, sweet shops, biryani stands. Driving around Chennai can make you hungry.
Under the eves of a shop selling hardware, a woman crouches on her heels frying delicious samosas. The sweet scented smoke fills my nostrils, my mouth waters. From a bottle stopped with a twist of brown paper she pours on a vicious looking red sauce. Street food: how I should love the courage to eat it, but my driver forbids it. “Very dangerous. Mam will get sick.”
Food is intertwined with every ceremony from cradle to grave. Food happens all the time and at strange times. We go to a house we have been invited to for dinner at 7.30. Sitting around drinking whisky for three hours, our tummies rumbling, our heads spinning, we are astonished and famished when dinner is served at 11pm! One Indian friend laughs at our predicament. “Never turn up before 9.30 and always have a sandwich at home first,” he advises. “But this way of eating is ridiculous,” I say, “it’s so bad for your body to go to bed with a stomach full of curry.”
“That’s the way we Indians do it.”
In the mango season we are generously sent boxes of sweet ripe mangoes from our landlord’s farm. We get fat. In the wedding season, we get even fatter. We are expected to attend a wedding every week most of the year where a display of wealth and privilege is reflected in the quantity and quality of the food. Ceremonies are synonymous with food, and for the less-privileged this generosity has come at a high price and is therefore impossible to refuse politely.
As ‘foreigners’ we are frequently the guests of honour. All eyes are upon us and a claustrophobic attentiveness accompanies the hospitality. My daughter attending her first Indian wedding at the age of 13 struggled with her manners. It was five in the morning and a man was ladling spicy curry from a bucket on to a banana leaf. No sooner had she politely finished one portion than another was dished out. She looked at me with wide eyes, but etiquette forbade me to help her. I know that a wedding is not over until payasam is served. This intensely sweet pudding is the pinnacle of an important ceremony, so I asked for it and when we had forced it down we were free to leave, feeling sure we had disappointed our host with our lack of gluttonous enthusiasm.
India is the Land of Spices: no country in the world has as many varieties of spice as India and much of the spiciest food is in the South. Initially we Westerners struggle with this spice overload, being more familiar with our national dish, Chicken Tikha Masala. This dish was invented in Scotland – along with black pudding, haggis and deep fried Mars bars. The Scots have an interesting approach to healthy food, as do
the Indians, and they share a similarly sweet tooth.
In such a large country with thousands of miles of changing topography, local produce and geography have played a large part in informing regional culinary traditions. To accommodate their own restrictions, religious groups have further modified these traditions – it is unusual in many places, especially in South India to find meat on a menu.
The history of India and its invaders has also played a role in the history of its culinary culture and has coloured the Indian style of eating. The Portuguese introduced the tomato, the potato and, amazingly, the chilli to the west coast of India. The Persian and Mughal invasions instilled yet more diversity. Even the more cowardly palates of the British colonialists left a few milder modifications to dishes in their wake, and took back to England such national treasures as kedgeree and mulligatawny soup (the latter having been invented at the Madras Club).
Nowadays the overriding influence seems to come from the strong ties that India has with America (where there are 80,000 Indian restaurants). Fast food joints have flooded Chennai in the last ten years and their popularity is taking its toll on the health of young and old alike.
Obesity in the younger generation has burgeoned and India now has the highest incidence of diabetes in the world. It is easy to see why. Traditional Indian foods that are unprocessed and high in fibre and minerals – vegetables, pulses, fruit – are being eschewed in favour of fast foods laden with salt, saturated fats and sugar.
As a developing country, India has benefited from many Western innovations in technology and medicine. However, taking on bad Western food habits is surely a national disaster in the making.
