An American self-proclaimed humorist—the old-fashioned among us might use the term ‘clown’—in his column last weekend claimed that India has “the only ethnic cuisine in the world based entirely on a single spice”. “. As he noted in the same column that Old Bay Seasonings “taste like dander from corpses mixed with rust from around toilet fixtures at a New Jersey rest stop”, their tastes clearly run unusual, if not unusual.
In 2019, a comment by an American academic that ‘Indian food is terrible, even though we pretend it isn’t’, he received over 15,300 responses—more than any of his professors declared. By June 2021, his statement had also earned him a free meal from a well-known New York lawyer of Indian origin. It was then that the converting taste of lamb biryani in that meal turned the apparently skeptical professor into an Indian cuisine-lover.
In October 2020, a British historian silly posted on Twitter that he found idli to be the most boring food in the world. Presumably, Indians—including a parliamentarian with a penchant for erudite prose—became excited about it. Indeed, sipping on hot oils like mustard, urad dal and curry leaves, we Indians add tadka to foreigners intentionally into our existence every time we make derogatory references to our food.
Instead, Indians need to display a yogic calmness and allow themselves only a slight pity smile at the ignorance of smugly Americans. After all, his country gave the world Spam (mysterious meat as well as unwanted mail), spray cheese, deep-fried candy bars, and root beer. And only in America is chop suey a bright red macaroni-and-meat-sauce dish, not anything remotely Chinese, and biscuits a kind of bread.
The British are less prone to uninformed criticism because their colonial exploits introduced them to Indian flavors and they also benefited from local ‘curry houses’ run by Muslim East Bengali immigrants. These so-called Indian eateries served meats in orange-red swill with varying degrees of chilly heat, codenames Vindaloo, Korma and Madras, which became part of the weekly British dine-out or takeaway schedule.
By the end of the 20th century, Britain saw the development of local subcontinental Indian cuisine such as ‘Balti’, which has as much to do with the cuisine of Baltistan as the Gobi Manchurian cuisine of a region in north-eastern Chin. Local cooks also invented much-loved British dishes such as chicken tikka masala, with indigenous favorites leading to the creation of Indian staples such as Gobi Manchurian and Honey Chilli Paneer. America was a different story.
Thanks to distance and discriminatory immigration laws in the early 20th century that only allowed whites to settle, American exposure to Indian cuisine was halted for a significant number of decades, following an initial influx in the late 19th century. In 1899 a smooth-talking Indian immigrant was inappropriately named ‘Ranji Smile’ (later anglicised probably Ismail!).
His “Chicken Madras”, “Indian Bhagi Topur” and “Muski Sindh” reportedly wooed many as his good looks won the hearts of women across America. However, his reinvention as a large Indian ‘prince’ paid off any long-lasting culinary influence. A few years later, however, modest eateries serving South Asian immigrant docklands and ‘curry’ for factory workers appeared in New York, the oldest being the Ceylon India Inn.
The West Coast was another matter. In the early 20th century, some 2,000 Punjabi migrant agricultural workers (all men) lived in California, of whom 30 percent were married (or remarried) as Hispanic women. Can: in this case, “brown”. And Mexican wives soon learned to cook ‘Punjabi’ food based on their husbands’ descriptions, and also became familiar with ‘Indian spices’ such as cumin and coriander.
Boasting the natural synergy between Mexican staples and Indian ones – parathas/quesadillas, rajma/chilli, kachumber/salsa and corn tortilla/makki roti – it was a culinary match made in heaven. Perhaps those breed laws were also the reason why this unique combination dish was not spread the way Tex-Mex did in the later decades of the 20th century. Otherwise the strong flavor of Mexzabi or Punjikan food would certainly have made a name for itself in America.
In April 1921—exactly a century ago!—even a New York Times columnist mentioned an Indian eatery, perhaps the Taj Mahal Hindu restaurant, reopened. He wrote, “Indian gentlemen in the tomb in American clothes but with a big turban on their heads used to come for their curry and rice.”
Sadly, in 2021 another American columnist—albeit a clown—still thinks Indian cuisine is just curry and rice and a single masala. But the fault lies with India too.
As India’s economy opened up in the 1990s, restaurants and chefs wanted to expand overseas. But treating Americans to the masterpieces of immensely talented Indian expatriate cooks at Tony’s restaurants on the east and west coasts was not enough. How many Americans would want to spend $100 on a dish they already knew little about? Food trucks began taking Indian food flavors to the average American relatively recently.
In fact, if there were as many Udupi and tandoori outlets in America as there were burger and pizza joints in India today, Americans would not be so clueless when it comes to indigenous food. Of course, restaurants serving Indian-specifically vegetarian-cuisine have been around for some time in large American cities, but they remained under the patronage of the indigenous peoples and their descendants for much of the middle decades of the 20th century.
But having exported thousands of technos over the past 40 years, especially to the US, there was no excuse for letting American tasters remain uneducated in classic Indian flavours. By now most Americans should be as familiar with the many different types of dosai and vadas as they are with the coffee permutations on Starbucks menus and have become as accustomed to thayer-sadum and bisibele rice as their hominy grits, meatloaf and macaroni. -Desi cheese .
The peculiar taste—a humorous one with necrotic dandruff and toilet rust—is unlikely to appreciate any cuisine, let alone the diverse tastes of India. So we can safely leave her to indulge her taste buds with esoteric flavors lurking in the nooks and crannies of her world, rather than attempting to educate her on the finer points of cuisine. But for the benefit of the rest of America, it is time Indians get to start and run Udupis and Kake Da Dhabas.
Disclaimer:The author is a freelance writer. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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