During my college years, so far as I was concerned, the curries I was enjoying were authentic Indian food. The restaurant menu said so. But I did not have the slightest idea where most of the dishes originated and I actually had not given it any thought. Sadly, at the time, I didn’t even care. To compound my ignorance, I didn’t really know much about India either.

Of course, I was aware of a few well-known cities: Bombay, Calcutta, and maybe Madras (as they were then known). How about states. Kashmir? (Thank you Led Zeppelin.) But could I find it on a map? How about other states? Ummmm…

What about History? Nope! Even though I was a history major in college, I did not know anything substantial. Sure I was aware of the Gandhis, but not much more. Beyond a photo¹ of Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev visiting the country, Indian history was out of my purview.

Surely then I should have known something about Indian music — being a musician and all. OK, maybe a bit: I knew who Ravi Shankar was — but that was due to his performance at featured in the Monterey Pop Festival documentary rather than the singular album in my family’s record cabinet. Eventually I would learn that there was a lot more to Indian music than my uneducated understanding of it back then. Something I also discovered about the food in no uncertain terms. But it took a long time for me to absorb and process all this information about music and food.

At the time, I just was getting to know the food, and really enjoying what little I knew. My interest in the food, as it turns out, eventually propelled me to learn a whole lot more about India: the country, the history, the music and the society. Which, like the best curries, are far more varied and complex than I could have imagined.

My Eyes Begin to Open

When the restaurant Rangoli opened up in Allston in the early nineties, it became my first small glimpse into the cuisine of southern India. The first indication that something was different here at this restaurant was when I watched a waiter bring a very long dosa to an adjoining table. “What was that?”, I thought to myself. At a subsequent visit, I found out.

Their menu included, among more familiar items, several new dishes from places I had never heard of: Hyderabad, Mysore, Malabar or Jaipur (actually not in the south, but…). After several years eagerly devouring the repertoire in restaurants and recipes fashioned by my nascent cooking skills, I was open to new dishes. Their version of Chicken Xacuti was a revelation — one that I have tried to re-create ever since. It was here where I very slowly began to become aware of the food from different regions of India.

Likely inspired by my initial visits to Rangoli, I began to read my cookbooks a bit more carefully, paying closer attention to where dishes I was cooking originated. One book in particular, Madhur Jaffrey’s A Taste of India was helpful in this regard since it organized recipes mostly by state (the city Hyderabad being the exception, warranting a chapter all its own). Over more than 200 pages, recipes from Bengal, Gujarat, Kashmir, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Hyderabad began to tingle my taste buds with new recipes, spice combinations and most importantly new flavors. While a few familiar recipes are scattered throughout the book, the majority were new to me, and I felt compelled to try many of them.

To enhance the recipes, Jaffrey begins each chapter with an introduction to the region and stories about the food she encountered in her travels. The book is lavishly illustrated with dozens of color photos (not so common for cookbooks published in the eighties) that bring the different regions to life.

Often my first attempt at a recipe would not be successful. While I could usually tell if it had promise, I was not able to determine what went wrong. Did I use too much chili? Not enough salt? Did the onions cook enough? Did I burn the spices? Often the answers were likely: yes, no, no, yes. Lacking enough experience, I was not yet capable of answering those questions correctly. The critical balance of flavors was still proving elusive to me.

One of the first dishes I tried from A Taste of India was Mysore Sambar; a recipe that looked simple enough on the surface. But with challenges. New to me were curry leaves and I didn’t know the first thing about them. The recipe asked for 6–10 fresh or dried curry leaves; I was only able to find the dried variety. The brittle leaves had no flavor whatsoever, and I doubt they added anything to the sambar. Years later, when I finally was able to obtain fresh curry leaves, it was life changing…from a cooking perspective.

This recipe also called for Sambar Powder and added the hint “next recipe” which turned out to be a homemade sambar powder. However, the concept of making your own masalas and the advantages of doing so blew right by me at the time. Instead, I opted for two tablespoons of Sambar Powder from a can.

I was a big foggy on what the sambar was supposed to taste like so I didn’t have a good yardstick to measure my efforts by. But I don’t think my attempt at this sambar was too successful because I have not made the recipe since! Regardless, this became the first dish I cooked from the southern state of Karnataka.

As I cooked my way through this book, I felt like I might have started to get a bit of a feel of the real India (as opposed to the elephant and turban version so often provided by restaurant menus). It would still be some time before I began to understand how the recipes developed; why ingredients for the “same” recipe differed between regions; and why so many dishes in the books never made it to the restaurants. The answers I eventually found would prove enlightening.

Dakshin

Several years later, a book named Dakshin provided a breakthrough for me. The recipes in Dakshin (meaning south) seemed quite different from any other books in my collection. Although, to be fair, many of the same recipes were “hiding” in the other cookbooks. Once I got the hang of a few new cooking methods, the recipes proved to be relatively easy to make in spite of the long list of ingredients. The spectacular photography of the dishes were enticing, and persuaded me to try several of them.

What really set this book apart were some of the techniques. The method to temper spices in oil for many of these recipes was noticeably different than the gentle sizzling of whole garam masala in many north Indian curries. Popping mustard seeds, browning dal, and most of all the intoxicating aroma of fresh curry leaves spluttering in hot oil was brand new for me and required some practice to perfect. After trying several recipes, I began to detect the differences from the curries I had been cooking and formed a rudimentary understanding of some of the southern cooking techniques.

This was just the beginning though. I was actively finding new dishes such as Chicken 65 online, and whenever I did, I would focus my attention the particular state or even city where the dish originated. I developed a particular passion for Hyderabadi food after an inspiring (but simple) buffet at a new restaurant. While Goa was responsible for my long-running Vindaloo fixation, I had never really thought about other dishes from that state. Now I started to look closer at other Goan recipes — finding Rechad Masala in the process. Bhel Puri popped out of a recipe collection that I downloaded right after discovering the internet. And various recipes for Gatte ki Subji from a few cookbooks spurred me to look for other dishes from Rajasthan.

As I started to cook more seriously and carefully at home, I began to see slow improvement. Because I was still looking to the restaurant food for my cues, I was critical of my efforts because they were so different than what I was having there. But the day was coming when all that would change.

For years, I had been blind to nearly all of the diversity found in the food of India, which I find sort of strange now. Looking back, when it came to music, I had been thinking regionally for years! Collecting records from New England, I found it easy to identify the specific style of many sixties bands from Boston and how they differed from their peers in the Midwest or California. In retrospect, I am a bit surprised it took me so long to start applying this methodology to the food from different regions of India.

Even so, after a slow start, I finally began to think less “globally” about the food, and slowly came to the opinion (which I think other people share) that there really isn’t any such thing as “Indian” Food. Rather there is food from Rajasthan; food from Karnataka; food from Hyderabad and so on. All in the family, but each possessing dishes and flavors unique to their locale. From spicing, to vegetables, to cooking methods, each region has their own way of preparing a curry. A episode of Netflix’s Menu Please perfectly illustrates the variety found around the country. In the video, the hosts sample a different dessert from 12 different regions of India. Each sweet is distinct, yet all are desserts. Which, when you think about it, is not so different from the US or anywhere else. Every state has their own take on common foods such as hamburgs (or bands), and each region has its own specialties. Variety is indeed to spice of life!

Footnotes

1. Photo credit: Photo Division, Government of India, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons [↖︎]