Thoughts on Foods

Just a few thoughts on some of my adventures in eating so far here in India. Photos to come once I get to a decent internet connection....

Sugar

People here put sugar in everything. I have consumed more sugar in the last month than I have in the last year. The little place where I took breakfast on my way to Hindi school in Mussoorie sells chocolate waffles. I'm not kidding. They are full of chocolate syrup, and they break up Cadbury's chocolate and put a little bit in every square on the waffle and serve it all with chocolate sauce. It's crazy. I have so far refrained from such a sugar buzz first thing in the morning, but the novelty is tempting. It’s reminiscent of the chocolate cakes they always served at the breakfast buffets in Brazil.

Jaggery

I have a new favourite comfort food. Jaggery. It’s solid molasses. You can carry it in your pocket and chomp off a bite whenever you want. What more can I say about this little bit of heaven on earth?

Milk

I was horrified the other day after a conversation with Rani, our Hindi tutor in Mussoorie. We were sitting having tea at Chaar Dukand (literally, Four Shops), about halfway up the hill between the town and the Hindi school. The milk man was walking down from the hills carrying his metal jugs of milk. He carries these on his back in a net made from crude jute rope that loops around the front of his forehead. Some of them also use mules. The milk man stopped outside the tea shop and refilled some of his jugs from a bucket of water that was sitting by the side of the road. Rani said that he stops there every day to adulterate his milk; he waters it down to about half its full thickness before he gets to town. Anil, the man who owns one of the tea shops, puts out the buckets of water (which, not surprisingly, is not purified) for the milk man to use. It’s completely out in the open and accepted. Even more shocking is that Anil buys the adulterated milk from this man! Rani said that all the milk sold in the town is adulterated. The only way to get pure milk is to buy the horrible UHT milk from Amul (the national dairy cooperative) which has had the life sucked out of it by the high-temperature sterilization process, or to know (and trust)somebody in the village who has a cow and get milk directly from them. I had noticed that the chai seemed a lot more watery, and the consistency was inconsistent. (How’s that for an oxymoron?) I mentioned this story to my friend Ramesh, who owns a farm near Dharamsala, and he said it’s the same situation here.

Just one more reason to keep things local and know where our food comes from!

Curd

Curd is the English word for dahi, which is the Hindi word for yoghurt. I am more convinced than ever that curd is the elixir of life. OK, maybe it’s not an elixir, but doesn’t that have a nicer ring to it than semi-gelatinous white goop? Anyway, I’m a big fan of curd. At home, I make my own and eat it every day. And I firmly believe that it should always be made out of the freshest local milk you can get. I’ve been convinced that the best way to avoid nasty GI issues when travelling is to eat lots of yoghurt and take acidophilus tablets (the friendly bacterial culture that makes milk into yoghurt) before leaving home, and to eat as much local yoghurt as you can wherever you end up. Normally, I eat vast amounts of curd in India. Definitely every day, and every meal if I can get it. The very few times I’ve had any stomach issues while travelling in India have been after a day or two without curd. Twice on this trip there have been short times before I’ve found a good curd source in a new town. The first time resulted in vomiting, and the second in the dreaded liquid ass.

Veg/Non-Veg

One thing that I love about the way people talk about food here is that "Veg" (the Hinglish world for vegetarian) is considered the norm. All menus are divided into Veg and Non-Veg sections. If you don't specify, people might ask to make sure you want "non-veg", because this is a little different. The use of the qualifier "non" makes the consumption of flesh somehow secondary to vegetarian diets, unlike in the west where vegetarian is still considered a little freakish in many places. I don't mean to sound like a righteous vegetarian here, especially considering my recent experimentation with omnivorous consumption patterns, but it's refreshing to see the primarily plant based diet taking the predominant, normalized place in the culture.

Mishti Dohi

This is an amazing Bengali sweet. I'm not much for India sweets, on account of my general distaste for sugar and the Indian tendency to put as much sugar as possible into all things, but I will go to great lengths to seek this one out. The name means "smoked curd," which admittedly sounds awful. It's sweetened yoghurt made in a little single-serving earthen pot, which is then somehow smoked. It's just a little bit sweet, very creamy, and has a very distinctive flavour - not quite yoghurt, not quite pudding, but oh so yummy. Sadly, it's hard to find outside Bengal, where I've never been. I was introduced to it by Shakti Maira, a Delhi artist and son of my friend Usha. Shakti is not a cruel man, so he also told me the best place in Delhi to find mishti dohi: Annapurna Sweets in the DDA Market near Gulmohar Park. The best one I've found yet though, was at the Britannia Restaurant in Mumbai. It's a Parsi place, but they must have bribed a few Bengalis to get this recipe.