The key to the Indian way of eating is combining

What does the way most Indians eat our food have in common with the West’s great Michelin starred restaurants?

And we started doing it thousands of years before the West had any restaurants at all, let alone a Michelin guide.

 

If you have been to a fancy Western restaurant or even to one serving that kind of food in India, you will have noticed that the food comes out from the kitchen already plated. The main component of the dish (usually a protein) will be surrounded with a few smears of sauces and one or two side elements (say, a stalk of asparagus or a mushroom).

 

   The chef will tell you that he has worked hard on creating the perfect combination of flavours. You must cut a bit of the protein, spear it with your fork, then dip (or rub) it in the sauce (or sauces) and then try and skewer a bit of the vegetable (asparagus, baby carrot etc.) on to the same fork. It is the way the flavours marry each other that makes the dish special, you will be told.

 

   Ask the same chefs about Indian food and they will say that it’s very different. After all we eat everything with our hands. They may be too polite to put it in words but the subtext will be: yours is a primitive way of eating so different from the delicate mingling of flavours that characterises the food of top Western chefs.

 

   In fact, they are completely wrong. The opposite is true.

 

   Central to the misunderstanding of the sophistication of Indian cuisine is this business of ‘they eat everything with their hands.’

 

   Yes we do. But we don’t just grab our food and thrust it into our mouths as they would do in medieval Europe where a royal banquet could consist of a roomful of drunks tearing a roast swan or chicken apart with their bare hands or stuffing their faces with bread.

 

   The key to the Indian way of eating is combining. Nobody takes, say, a piece of gobi and puts into their mouths. In India, every mouthful is, almost by definition, a combination. We will take a chapati (or paratha or dosa or whatever), tear off a bit and then wrap it around the gobi. We may also then add a little chutney or achaar to the mouthful. Even rice is never eaten on its own. There is always a gravy of some kind: dal, a curry or a sabzi with a rasa. Once again, we may add some seasoning like pickle, chutney or a spice mix (like podi) to the mouthful. When there is a dish that seems complete on its own, a biryani for example, we will still want to combine it with a salan or a raita.

 

   In India, every mouthful is a combination. Each diner makes it to his or her specifications. Some will add more sabzi and less roti to the mouthful. Some may want to make it spicier and will use more pickle. No matter what the kitchen sends out, the final mix of flavours will depend not on the chef but on the eater. And every mouthful will usually include a starch (chapatis, rice, etc.) so that it is perfectly balanced and not too carb-heavy or too protein focused.

 

"In fact, at least with rotis, we could never use cutlery because we need to wrap each mouthful."

   We are, as far as I know, the only people to eat like this. I have been racking my brains to think of another cuisine where every time you put something into your mouth you have wrapped it yourself and controlled the balance of ingredients.

 

   Think of the French. They eat their food pretty much as the chef sends it out. And when it comes to starches they may use bread to soak up the sauce but that’s not a particularly sophisticated way of combining carbs and proteins (or vegetables) compared to our chapati-wrapped small mouthfuls.

 

   Or think of the Italians: when a bowl of pasta comes to the table that’s pretty much it. There is no room for individuality in eating except perhaps for the extra cheese they may add. It’s the same with rice in the West. When a risotto is served you eat it exactly as the chef has cooked it. Likewise with paella in Spain. In India, on the other hand, it is up to the individual diner to decide how much dal goes with the rice and whether they want to add anything else. (For example many Gujaratis will add mung or some other lentil.)

 

   Indians have never bothered to point out the elements of sophistication and individuality in our way of eating and have blindly accepted the Western characterisation that we just eat everything with our hands because we don’t know how to use cutlery.

 

   In fact, at least with rotis, we could never use cutlery because we need to wrap each mouthful. And even with many meat dishes we need our fingers: for instance to get at the mutton in a biryani. (As the saying goes, eating biryani with cutlery is like making love through an interpreter.)

 

   It’s not that we don’t know how to use cutlery. It is that cutlery is not suited to our cuisine. That should not be such a difficult concept to grasp: no Westerner can eat a steak with chopsticks. It’s the same thing with cutlery and Indian food.

 

   Nor is it right to say that we are the only people who eat with our hands. Many Westerners eat many dishes with their hands: pizzas, fried chicken, all sandwiches etc. along with many fruit such as bananas and such vegetables as asparagus.

 

   The West has never really mastered how to make individual mouthfuls with the hands so Westerners are more comfortable with wraps: a taco for example seems exotic and adventurous but requires zero skill to eat it. In India, wraps are not a part of our tradition. The exceptions have all been created relatively recently. The Nizam’s Roll, for instance, is a 20th Century invention.

 

   Even the Far East has nothing like the complexity of our tradition. Japanese is a chef-driven cuisine (epitomised in the concept of omakase) and the Chinese eat communally as the food comes out of the kitchen. In many restaurants (most, probably) they don’t even put condiments on the table.

 

   Why does the importance of the Indian tradition of wrapping individual mouthfuls in rotis never get the global attention it deserves? Well mainly because even Westerners who like Indian food and are willing to use their hands never quite master the art of wrapping food in bits of chapati or paratha. And at Indian restaurants abroad we want to make it easier for them so we rarely serve chapatis. Instead we give them butter naans which are not ideally suited to the delicate art of wrapping. And when Westerners soak up gravy with these naans we let them think they are eating as Indians do, never mentioning that most Indians never make naans at home.

 

   I don’t really mind that people in the West don’t get how sophisticated and complex the Indian way of eating is. But it does get on my nerves when they act as though Japan has a superior food culture because Japanese people use chopsticks. And when chefs at Michelin starred restaurants tell me that ‘you must combine everything on the plate in one mouthful’ it’s becoming harder and harder to stop myself from saying ‘listen pal, we were doing this centuries ago when your ancestors were hunting down and cooking hapless animals on open fires and did not know what a condiment or a seasoning was.’