Regions of India.
Turmeric and ginger were in Harappan cooking pots more than four thousand years ago. The chilli that now defines so much Indian food arrived only five centuries ago, with the Portuguese.
The north — Punjab, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh — eats wheat breads (XXIX.7), dairy (XXIX.8), dal and the rich onion-tomato-cream gravies descended from the Mughal courts (XXIX.4); Kashmir cooks lamb with fennel, dried ginger and Kashmiri chilli. The south eats rice with lentils, coconut and tamarind (XXIX.9). Bengal and Odisha in the east cook freshwater fish in mustard oil and mustard paste, with panch phoron (XXIX.3), and are famous for milk sweets made from chhena. The west is varied: Gujarati food is largely vegetarian, gently sweet-sour, rich in pulses; Rajasthan, dry, cooks with yogurt, gram flour and long-keeping dishes; Maharashtra with peanuts, coconut and goda masala; Goa, Portuguese for 450 years, with vinegar, pork and seafood — vindaloo descends from the Portuguese carne de vinha d'alhos.
History is layered in the food. Starch grains of turmeric and ginger survive in Harappan cooking pots from about 2500 BCE. Buddhist and Jain teaching from the sixth century BCE made vegetarianism a way of life for many communities; Jains avoid even root vegetables. Arab and European traders came for pepper and spices; the Portuguese, after 1498, brought chilli, tomato, potato, cashew and papaya from the Americas; the Mughals, from 1526, brought Persian rice dishes, dried fruit and rich gravies; the British planted tea in Assam. The workshop maps the regions.
Below: India's main culinary regions, the one you choose highlighted with its staples and signature dishes, and a timeline of moments that shaped Indian food.
- Describe the main regional cuisines.
- Explain India's vegetarian traditions.
- Place the chilli and the Mughals in Indian food history.
- Choose dishes from different regions.
Many cuisines, layered by history
Read the map as a starting point. Every region contains many communities — Chettinad and Udupi cooking in the south differ as much as Punjabi and Awadhi in the north — and caste, faith and family shape what is eaten as much as geography. A large share of Indians eat little or no meat, more than in any other country, and Indian vegetarian cooking — with pulses, dairy, vegetables and spices — is the richest anywhere. Even meat-eating households often keep vegetarian days.
A tasting tour for a weekend: dal makhani and roti from the north (XXIX.5, XXIX.7); idli with sambar from the south (XXIX.9); Bengali fish in mustard sauce (shorshe maach), fried in mustard oil with panch phoron; Gujarati steamed gram-flour dhokla; a Goan prawn curry sour with vinegar and kokum. Cook each with its own fat — ghee, coconut oil, mustard oil, groundnut oil — because the fat is part of a region's flavour (XXIX.2).
Cook one dish each from two regions — a Bengali fish curry in mustard oil and a Gujarati dal — and note the different fats and spices.
Terms
- Mughlai
- Rich court cooking of the Mughal north.
- Jain food
- Strict vegetarian cooking without root vegetables.
- Panch phoron
- Bengal's five-seed tempering.
- Vindaloo
- Goan vinegar-and-garlic pork, of Portuguese origin.
Sources
- K. T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion, Oxford University Press, 1994; and A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, 1998.
- A. Kashyap and S. Weber, "Harappan plant use revealed by starch grains from Farmana, India", Antiquity 84 (2010), Project Gallery: starch grains of ginger and turmeric in cooking-pot residues and on human teeth, about 2500–2200 BCE.