Food: Indian Delicacy

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Indian Delicacy
Thursday, November 30, 2006

Indian food, yes food from India, is something everyone should experience one time or another, if not often. Since I grew up in a small town kind of in the country, I had very little multicultural exposure in any sense, much less in the realm of food. Chinese takeout (which we never had, because my mother doesn't like it) was the extent of the international cuisine that was available in my area. Even when I went away to college I chose another ridiculously small town, but lucky enough for me, I started on an educational journey that led me to live in several states and also to visit several different countries. With this, I began to see and enjoy food which were not french fries, beef and mashed potatoes. In fact, I spent one year living in Great Britain, and if you know anything about England you will know that the Indian population there is very large, and that Indian food is a staple there, available both in plentiful restaurants and in the grocery stores. In my college cafeteria, where the "third option" in the US would have been pizza or something as canonically American, we had curry available every day.

For those of you who don't know what a curry is, it is just one example of the very flavorful food that is available from this culture. There are several types, and it is basically meat cooked in a deliciously flavorful sauce, that is eaten poured over rice. There are many colors and flavors of curry, and the meat can be chicken, beef, or often, lamb. If you want to attack cooking of Indian food yourself, this is where you should begin. I learned to make curry from a british friend of Indian descent, and the recipe is fantastic.

The thing about Indian food is that it is packed full of flavors. This is something that Americans don't know very much about, since our traditional foods (besides (and including) McDonald's) are all pretty bland. I have heard lots of people from other countries saying that American food is very boring and flavorless, and that we don't even use salt! Sometimes I think the only flavor that we have going for us is barbeque sauce, which is actually something that can be pretty flavorful, and is definitely pretty american. But the point is, be prespared fro flavor overload the first time you taste Indian food, and you will have to try to slow down, back up, and take in the flavors, to enjoy them. My sister told me once that she didn't like Indian food that much and only after a few tries did she realize that there are so many flavors, and that this is what makes the taste so excellent.

But, those flavors don't get there all by themselves. If you want to start cooking Indian food, it's possible that you are going to have to make a complete overhaul of your spice rack! My firned's recipe calles for something like 8 or 9 different spices, which you put in a cup with a little water and you make a *serious* paste of seasonings. When I think about how we usually sprinkle spices into a recipe, or put a teaspoon of one or two flavors into a dish, and then I look at this little cup of spices for putting in curry, I have a great appreciation for the cultural genius of flavor that originated this great food.

Anyway, Indian food has definitely become one of my favorite foods to this day. If you go to a good Indian restaurants (and if it's a good restaurant, it should have built the traditional Indian ovens used to bake bread and cook some meats), be sure to try a naan (a flatbread similar to greek pita, only lighter and tastier), maybe even a flavored naan with garlic or cinnamon. If they have it, try fish tikka, which is fish marinated in spices and cooked on skewers in a special Indian oven. If they don't have fish tikka, they probably have chicken tikka or something else similar. For a pretty "normal" curry, go for chicken marsala or chicken tikka masala. And since lamb is a staple, you should also think about trying a lamb curry or some seasoned lamb meat.

Even if you don't usually like foreign foods, you should give Indian food a try. There is nothing else like it when it comes to true, deep flavor.

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