Regional Cuisine: Reading India Through Food

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There is no such thing as Indian food, in the way there is no such thing as European food. What exists is a set of regional cooking traditions shaped by what will grow in a particular soil, what a community is permitted to eat, who ruled the area and who traded with it. The differences are not decorative. A Punjabi kitchen and a Tamil kitchen use different staple grains, different fats, different souring agents, different spice blends and different sequences of service, and a cook from one would need instruction to work in the other. Reading the map through food is one of the more reliable ways to understand how varied the country actually is.

Start with the grain. The alluvial plains of Punjab and Haryana and the drier tracts of western Uttar Pradesh grow wheat, so the daily bread is unleavened flatbread cooked on a griddle or in a clay oven. The Gangetic east, the coasts and the whole of the south grow rice, and the meal is built around it. In the semi arid Deccan and in parts of Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra, millets such as jowar and bajra have been the traditional staple, and they are being actively revived on nutritional and drought resistance grounds; the United Nations designated 2023 the International Year of Millets at India's proposal. Fats follow the same logic. Mustard oil dominates the north and east where mustard is grown, coconut oil the Kerala coast, groundnut oil Gujarat and western India, sesame oil parts of the south, and clarified butter, or ghee, appears wherever there is dairy wealth.

The technique that unifies most of these kitchens is tempering, called tadka or chhonk in the north and thalippu or oggarane in the south: whole spices are bloomed in hot fat for a few seconds so their fat soluble aromatics are released, then poured over or cooked into the dish. The spices in that pan differ regionally in a way that is almost diagnostic. Bengal uses a five spice blend called panch phoron with fenugreek, nigella, cumin, black mustard and fennel. Tamil and Kerala kitchens use mustard seed, curry leaf and asafoetida with dried red chilli. Kashmir uses fennel and dry ginger powder and almost no onion or garlic in its Brahmin cooking.

Empires, oceans and new world crops

Much of what visitors think of as timeless Indian food is comparatively recent. The chilli is not native to India at all: it arrived from the Americas with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, entering through Goa and spreading inland within a few generations, displacing black pepper and long pepper as the principal source of heat. The potato, tomato, cashew, guava, papaya and pineapple came by the same route. Black pepper and cardamom, by contrast, are genuinely indigenous to the Malabar coast and the Idukki hills, and they are the reason Romans, Arabs, Chinese and eventually Europeans sailed there at all.

The Persianate courts left the other great layer. Mughal and successor court cooking brought slow braising, rich nut and dairy based gravies, and rice cooked with meat. Awadhi cuisine in Lucknow developed the sealed pot method known as dum pukht, in which a vessel is closed with dough and cooked over low embers. Hyderabad developed a different biryani technique in which raw marinated meat and partly cooked rice are layered and finished together. Kashmir's wazwan, cooked by a hereditary guild of chefs called wazas, is a multi course banquet served on a large shared platter, with the number of dishes traditionally running into the dozens. None of these traditions is quite the same thing, and calling them all Mughlai obscures more than it explains.

Communities that were themselves migrations produced their own cuisines. Parsis, descended from Zoroastrians who reached Gujarat from Iran centuries ago, cook dhansak, a lentil and meat stew, and steam fish in banana leaf with a green coconut chutney. Goan Catholic cooking took the Portuguese preparation of meat in wine and garlic and turned it into vindalho, using palm vinegar and chilli. Syrian Christians in Kerala make appam with fermented rice batter and coconut, served with meat stew. Bohra and Moplah Muslim communities on the west coast have their own biryanis and pastries. On the eastern edge, the cuisines of the northeastern states share more with Southeast Asia than with the Gangetic plain: fermented soybean, bamboo shoot, smoked and dried meat and river fish, minimal oil, and chillies including the ferociously hot bhut jolokia of Assam and Nagaland.

Rules, restaurants and the vegetarian question

Food in India is also a system of rules about who may eat what with whom. Vegetarianism is associated with Jain, many Vaishnava and some Brahmin traditions, and with regions where those traditions are socially dominant, notably Gujarat, Rajasthan and Haryana. It is much less common in Kerala, West Bengal, the coastal south and the northeast, where fish and meat are ordinary. Survey estimates of the vegetarian share of the population vary widely, and researchers have argued persuasively that surveys overstate it, because respondents in some communities have strong social reasons to describe themselves as vegetarian regardless of practice. The honest statement is that a large minority of Indians are vegetarian, that the share is regionally and caste patterned rather than national, and that the precise figure is contested.

Restaurant food has its own history, shorter than most people assume. Coastal Karnataka's Udupi Brahmin cooks built a national chain of vegetarian restaurants in the twentieth century, spreading dosa and idli far beyond the south. Irani cafes, opened by Zoroastrian migrants in Bombay and Hyderabad, gave those cities their bun maska and chai. And the north Indian restaurant menu familiar around the world, with tandoori chicken, butter chicken and dal makhani, was largely created in Delhi after 1947 by refugee restaurateurs from what became Pakistan, who adapted the clay oven of the northwest to commercial cooking. That menu then travelled to Britain, Australia and North America and became, for millions of people, the whole of Indian food. It is a fine cuisine. It is also one regional style out of dozens, invented within living memory, and the more interesting map lies behind it.

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