As with the travels with students to the Middle East and Asia that Barbara and I have done in recent years, eating local foods is a significant highlight of the experience here in India. When we were in China in 2004, we realized how much more diverse Chinese food is than what one gets in Chinese-American restaurants back home--and the same is proving true here in India.
At one of our hotel stays (a short one at our most upscale hotel), the breakfast buffet included the following: idlis (soft rice cakes), corn dumplings, vadas (very light doughnut shaped buns), sambhar (a nice sauce that goes with several other things), pongal (a variation on what we had at the village in an earlier post--a rice and sugar cane porridge with whatever else one wants to add), puma (a multi-grain dish), poori (puffed-up, deep-fried items), bhaji, sweet lassi, fresh papaya, curd (a denser, richer yogurt), shikanjii (a sweet and salty drink), watermelon juice, and spider rolls (little dumplings with little sticks of something on them). And coffee--while we think of tea as particularly Indian (and it is), including spiced tea with milk (chai), coffee is popular here, often served with hot milk (sort of an Indian cafe con leche). Yum.
Another buffet menu (served yesterday for lunch at our visit to InfoSys, here in Bangalore, to which we've moved in recent days--part of the complex of major information technology corporations here): dahi wadi (small grain dumplings with sweet chutney), Indian green salad (with lots of red onions), tomato with dal shorba, kadai fish curry, tindly varuval, gobi mutter masala, dal tadka, rice pilaf, cured pickles, papad(am) (a very thin, crispy bread), a variety of naan (thicker flat breads), gulab jamoon (like doughnut holes served in sweet syrup), and fresh fruits (papaya, watermelon, pineapple).
We don't, of course, have such extensive buffets often. We're now staying at Christ University in Bangalore, with a good but modest breakfast buffets: idlis, vadas, hard-boiled eggs, perhaps a rice dish, and some (excellent) fresh fruit, as well as milk coffee or tea. We also are sampling from the food court at a mall several blocks away, which features a variety of small places (see photo below) with inexpensive ($1-2) items, many of which are tasty, and which we haven't encountered back in the U.S.
We've also cooked our own Indian food--we had a cooking class the other night, taught by the chef who teaches restaurant cooking classes, and his student assistant. Our group divided into six groups, each responsible for one of the six dishes we would be preparing in the large professional kitchen on campus as part of the Hotel Management Program. We each got a hat and an apron. My group was responsible for making dessert, a carrot and raisin halwa (ingredients included many grated carrots, sugar, khova (milk solids), liquid milk, ghee or clarified butter, hand-chopped almonds, cashews, and raisins). Other dishes included fish tikka (with both fish and prawns), cottage cheese tikka, corn and potato patties, lamb chops (spices/ingredients included coconut, coriander leaves, chili, mint, onion, pepper, cinnamon sticks, cloves, ginger, garlic, salt and oil), peas and potato curry, and mint and cumin pulao or pilaf.
It took several hours to pull all this together by hand (no machine processing!), and the chef had us wash everything (pans, knives, counter-tops) before we were to sit down at a long table to eat our results. We did most of the actual work, but the chef circulated throughout the process to help us with tricky steps or techniques (his almond splitting technique with a large knife was admirable). And the results were great; eating them was almost as much fun as the work in the kitchen. It was an enjoyable group activity, but also gave us insight into the work that goes into Indian cooking, and the kind of knowledge that has made it one of the great "food civilizations."
I should mention a few other things about food here. One is the north/south India difference: in the south, where we are, rice is the basis or accompaniment to many dishes, and appears in many more forms than just pilaf; in the north, wheat is the basis for breads and some dishes. The South is also more conservative in its Hinduism, and there are more vegetarians (the upper Hindu castes in particular would avoid meat), while in the north, which is more Muslim (especially the northwest), there are more grilled meats. Most restaurants have large lettering out front indicating whether they are "non-veg" or "veg" or both; some are "pure veg" (like "glatt kosher," not only veg but more strictly veg--no fish, for example, though foods cooked with ghee would still usually be allowed). Dana and I went to a cafe last night with a local woman to a cafe which lists further considerations: some dishes were marked with a symbol indicating they were suitable for Jains (one of the Indian religious faiths), including no garlic or onion.
Some of our students encountered such things in unexpected ways when, weary of delicious Indian food all the time, they sought out a McDonald's--not hard to find. But: no pork sausages (forbidden to Muslims, a number of whom live here in Bangalore), but also no beef (forbidden to observant Hindus), so no Big Macs! Instead, there's a chicken Maharaja Burger (which the students declared delicious).
And I end with a more somber note about food: not everyone here has enough. We learned in one of our social work lectures earlier that almost half of India's children are malnourished, sometimes chronically so, resulting in stunted growth (a larger proportion of Indian children are malnourished than in sub-Saharan Africa, they tell us here). We spent time in classrooms the other day with a program that seeks to educate slum (the local term) children, and found that they provide three meals a day to the children involved; during the month breaks in the school year, teachers said that they could see some of the children "shrink" without the food they normally got at school. The gap between the middle class and the poor is a key issue here in India.
Until the next post! Bruce
At one of our hotel stays (a short one at our most upscale hotel), the breakfast buffet included the following: idlis (soft rice cakes), corn dumplings, vadas (very light doughnut shaped buns), sambhar (a nice sauce that goes with several other things), pongal (a variation on what we had at the village in an earlier post--a rice and sugar cane porridge with whatever else one wants to add), puma (a multi-grain dish), poori (puffed-up, deep-fried items), bhaji, sweet lassi, fresh papaya, curd (a denser, richer yogurt), shikanjii (a sweet and salty drink), watermelon juice, and spider rolls (little dumplings with little sticks of something on them). And coffee--while we think of tea as particularly Indian (and it is), including spiced tea with milk (chai), coffee is popular here, often served with hot milk (sort of an Indian cafe con leche). Yum.
Another buffet menu (served yesterday for lunch at our visit to InfoSys, here in Bangalore, to which we've moved in recent days--part of the complex of major information technology corporations here): dahi wadi (small grain dumplings with sweet chutney), Indian green salad (with lots of red onions), tomato with dal shorba, kadai fish curry, tindly varuval, gobi mutter masala, dal tadka, rice pilaf, cured pickles, papad(am) (a very thin, crispy bread), a variety of naan (thicker flat breads), gulab jamoon (like doughnut holes served in sweet syrup), and fresh fruits (papaya, watermelon, pineapple).
We don't, of course, have such extensive buffets often. We're now staying at Christ University in Bangalore, with a good but modest breakfast buffets: idlis, vadas, hard-boiled eggs, perhaps a rice dish, and some (excellent) fresh fruit, as well as milk coffee or tea. We also are sampling from the food court at a mall several blocks away, which features a variety of small places (see photo below) with inexpensive ($1-2) items, many of which are tasty, and which we haven't encountered back in the U.S.
We've also cooked our own Indian food--we had a cooking class the other night, taught by the chef who teaches restaurant cooking classes, and his student assistant. Our group divided into six groups, each responsible for one of the six dishes we would be preparing in the large professional kitchen on campus as part of the Hotel Management Program. We each got a hat and an apron. My group was responsible for making dessert, a carrot and raisin halwa (ingredients included many grated carrots, sugar, khova (milk solids), liquid milk, ghee or clarified butter, hand-chopped almonds, cashews, and raisins). Other dishes included fish tikka (with both fish and prawns), cottage cheese tikka, corn and potato patties, lamb chops (spices/ingredients included coconut, coriander leaves, chili, mint, onion, pepper, cinnamon sticks, cloves, ginger, garlic, salt and oil), peas and potato curry, and mint and cumin pulao or pilaf.
It took several hours to pull all this together by hand (no machine processing!), and the chef had us wash everything (pans, knives, counter-tops) before we were to sit down at a long table to eat our results. We did most of the actual work, but the chef circulated throughout the process to help us with tricky steps or techniques (his almond splitting technique with a large knife was admirable). And the results were great; eating them was almost as much fun as the work in the kitchen. It was an enjoyable group activity, but also gave us insight into the work that goes into Indian cooking, and the kind of knowledge that has made it one of the great "food civilizations."
I should mention a few other things about food here. One is the north/south India difference: in the south, where we are, rice is the basis or accompaniment to many dishes, and appears in many more forms than just pilaf; in the north, wheat is the basis for breads and some dishes. The South is also more conservative in its Hinduism, and there are more vegetarians (the upper Hindu castes in particular would avoid meat), while in the north, which is more Muslim (especially the northwest), there are more grilled meats. Most restaurants have large lettering out front indicating whether they are "non-veg" or "veg" or both; some are "pure veg" (like "glatt kosher," not only veg but more strictly veg--no fish, for example, though foods cooked with ghee would still usually be allowed). Dana and I went to a cafe last night with a local woman to a cafe which lists further considerations: some dishes were marked with a symbol indicating they were suitable for Jains (one of the Indian religious faiths), including no garlic or onion.
Some of our students encountered such things in unexpected ways when, weary of delicious Indian food all the time, they sought out a McDonald's--not hard to find. But: no pork sausages (forbidden to Muslims, a number of whom live here in Bangalore), but also no beef (forbidden to observant Hindus), so no Big Macs! Instead, there's a chicken Maharaja Burger (which the students declared delicious).
And I end with a more somber note about food: not everyone here has enough. We learned in one of our social work lectures earlier that almost half of India's children are malnourished, sometimes chronically so, resulting in stunted growth (a larger proportion of Indian children are malnourished than in sub-Saharan Africa, they tell us here). We spent time in classrooms the other day with a program that seeks to educate slum (the local term) children, and found that they provide three meals a day to the children involved; during the month breaks in the school year, teachers said that they could see some of the children "shrink" without the food they normally got at school. The gap between the middle class and the poor is a key issue here in India.
Until the next post! Bruce
The philosophy and sociology of food--intertwined in a salacious description of what you are eating, seeing and preparing! I would love all the vegetarian options. And I appreciate your addressing the social justice issues (especially SES ones) around food scarcity and inaccessibility among the poor.
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