mongo_jones

i think delhi can battle bombay to a standstill (and perhaps have a slight edge) with 5 star hotel restaurants (having the original bukhara and dum pukht is like having krishna rather than his armies on your side). however, when it comes to life outside the 5-stars bombay (and hyderabad) kick delhi's ass. don't know about bangalore--from what i've heard, all they've got there is a bunch of crappy pubs...

mmmmm meat shake...

i stand corrected--i was going by the (apparently) american-centric ifnormation from one of the websites i posted a link to.

pan, i thought that was the point i was making. perhaps i wasn't clear. and perhaps a separate discussion would be good: on the whole question of whether national designations are particularly useful markers for cuisines from heterogeneous countries? why don't you start it? mongo

i think there's a lot of silliness about buying packaged spices and such. sure, you can control flavors and freshness by making your own at home, but packaged spices are good enough for millions of indian home-cooks and they should be good enough for amateur cooks in the diaspora as well. this goes for not just chilli powder etc. but also garam masala and curry powder. and speaking of curry powder, cookbooks and food-writers give the impression that no indian cook worth their salt would be caught dead using curry powder, that it is just a western concoction or something like that. this is absurd--again as with other packaged spices most indian home cooks (and very good ones) have packets of store-bought garam masala and curry powder in their spice cupboards. they may additionally have other home-made spice mixes but packaged spices are not universally looked down upon--my mother, for instance, has her own original spice mix ("made only in our house" as our old housekeeper used to say) that she sprinkles on certain vegetable dishes, but uses store bought garam masala as well. somebody else mentioned mdh--that's what i use as well. but in most cases you're best off if you can figure out which brand your grocer has the highest turnover of; that way you're least likely to get stale stuff. spice-pastes too have their place. i don't think you're likely to be able to create a good rogan josh by using only the patak's (or other brands') rogan josh paste and the bottle instructions but if you have a good sense of how each paste works and tastes you can use it as a secret weapon. i often use a spoon of patak's vindaloo paste, for instance, in my keema curries. as for pickles etc. i used to like patak's for certain kinds but now i prefer the swad brand for most. i also have a nostalgic affection for baedekar's. when in delhi though i find i like the mother's brand of pickles to be my favorite for store-bought. rks: i gather you're collecting this information not for the purposes of buying spices but for research you're doing on the growth of ethnic ingredients in the u.s?

don't want to split hairs over this but i'd suggest that the second sentence quoted in my post above lapses back into the kind of generalization the first one tries to get away from. india has states not provinces, by the way. and the food in most american indian restaurants isn't really from any particular region or state. in india it is a simulacrum of what "indians like to go out to eat"--though this is changing. in the u.s it has achieved a certain material reality. hopefully, this will slowly begin to change too (though the news from england, where there's far more indians and other south asians, doesn't sound promising). i think one of the good things about sites like egullet is that it allows us to gain a wider view of things we haven't had the chance to experience yet. i, for one, don't have a lot of experience with french food but know better now than to think that they eat the same things or cook the same way in provence and alsace (or do they?). there is a certain tradition of thinking and writing about indian food in this country (conditioned certainly by the food that is actually available) that is a little hard to get out of.

i'll go out on a limb and say yes. i haven't encountered lentils anywhere (in the form of dals that is) that are cooked down to separate into a granular or grainy texture.

watery? no, not at all. some--like cholar (channa) dal, moog dal and kali-urad dal--are almost always quite thick. as for mushoor dal--bengalis make a watery version, other indians may not.

jason, others, vikram may or may not agree (though i suspect he will) but to talk about "indian" food as such is to engage in a tradition of generalization that a site like egullet should help dispel. despite what indian restaurants in the u.s would have us believe there are many indian cuisines and some of them don't use very many spices at all--and some aren't hot at all. thus there's no "they" there. there are cuisines that have almost no resemblance whatsoever to each other. there is i suppose a "mughlai" cuisine (an almost entirely restaurant animal) offshoots of which flourish in england and the u.s which could claim a certain pan-indian scope (in the same way that english, spoken by <5% of the population does among languages) but to generalize about "indian" food from that example is not a good idea. it would be like making generalized statements about "chinese" food (which i note you don't do, taking care to break it further into hunan, sichuan and so on) on the basis of what's found on the average american-chinese menu. it would be good if awareness of indian food on this site reached the levels that awareness of certain other cuisines have. we're all guilty of this phenomenon i suppose--i've been talking about "thai" as a fairly homogeneous thing; for all i know there's regional variations of thai food that are completely different from what i've experienced--i have heard that thai royal cuisine, is far less spicy/hot than regular thai cuisine. i'd be glad to be informed further. in a spirit of constructive criticism, mongo (edit to add the sentence in italics)

the consistency depends on personal taste. i make it ranging from pretty watery to thickish. it should always be easily pourable though. and keep in mind that it will thicken considerably in the refrigerator. glad to hear you enjoyed it regardless.

i think anil wanted to know where in delhi you'll be staying. with friends? at a hotel? if so, which one? many of the hotels have very good restaurants attached to them. also, delhi is huge--recommendations may depend on which end of it your hotel or friends are in.

Suvir will clarify this if he ever gets round to checking this forum again , but I'm guessing its the Hardwar/Benaras pandit tradition. So its quite likely that Suvir's family can trace its roots back to the 15th century through this connection, Vikram i didn't mean to imply that i was sceptical of suvir's genealogical claim--i was actually impressed. suvir, by the way, is still reading this forum--he dropped me a note last night on this very subject. now, if we can only get him to post again. amma must be keeping him very busy. now, what he should do is set up a computer in their lobby area that's always connected to egullet and ask his guests to post their impressions/reviews as they leave.

Not such a change - isn't that the same process by which they ended up with a British Indian 'vindaloo' that is way hotter than anything Goa has ever seen? true enough, but it is a change in north india where a lot of south indian foods get blandified in translation--even tam-brahm cooking can be spicier than your average new delhi dosa place will allow. by the way, perusing my penguin kerala cookbook i came across recipes for country style curries that call for multiple sliced fresh green chillies and 4 tspns of red chilli powder! all of this for about 500 gms of prawns etc. and a not very highly sauced final dish. unless the author uses much tinier tea-spoons than i do or is referring to kashmiri chilli powder (which seems unlikely) this seems almost unfeasible. for my spiciest chicken curries (with a whole chicken) i use 2 tspns of chilli powder, and even with the use of tomatoes/yogurt and quite a bit more water than is called for in these malayali recipes it usually turns out pretty hot. twice that amount of chilli powder with less than half the liquid and no tomatoes/yogurt/coconut-milk to cut it? if true, wow! and if true, also another example of north-indian restaurants blanding down--no nadan curry i've eaten in new delhi has approached this level of explosiveness. but this might be a discussion better carried out on the india forum.

look under "meat"--there's a recipe or 4. kalias (not the "tera kya hoga" kind) are indeed from bengal but they refer more to a preparation of fish in oil, not so much, as far as i know, to meat/chicken dishes. in a fish kalia usually you'll have mustard oil, some spices and the fish--no tomatoes. qormas/kormas have bengali variants--but i'm not sure what the genealogy of these dishes is. similarly there's a bengali-muslim biryani (usually made with goat) which is excellent but very different from the biryanis found elsewhere in the subcontinent. a classic bengali chicken dish is the "chicken roast"--which is rarely roasted in an oven. then there's a "stewish" preparation with carrots, potatoes and lots of thin gravy. in my opinion, east-bengalis (bangals) and now bangladeshis have the superior meat cuisine of the two bengals. bong and episure may disagree. my chicken and meat recipes (inherited from my mother) have probably been irretrievably mixed with styles from across the country (due to our air-force life)--it is a different story with fish, however, since that's an essential part of west bengali identity. i do know that my aunts' chicken dishes taste different than mine. but i'll post a recipe later and you can tell me what you think. where is gautam these days, by the way? he's probably our best resource (along with bong) for this sort of information. mongo

monica, don't have time right now to post my own recipes but in the meantime here's a link to a hideously designed but content-wise decent site on bengali food--it has some chicken recipes in there somewhere. you'll have to filter out the all-too-predictable bengal uber alles feel of parts of the text. http://rannaghar.netfirms.com/index.html mongo

context for the question: i was originally going to make a prawn curry from the penguin kerala cookbook but abandoned that idea since i not only didn't have fresh coconut, i didn't also have any tamarind in the house. i decided instead to make a prawn curry from one of my mother's recipes (her take on the bengali malai curry). certain crucial ingredients are of course not available to me: bagda chingdis (with the head on), genuine mustard oil, and also fresh coconut (as in not a coconut that was plucked months ago in some other country and has been drying up in the fresh vegetable section of a grocery store--sorry jw46, i should have been more specific). the lack of mustard oil i have grown accustomed to, and as for the prawns i can't afford the jumbo variety in the u.s. for the coconut, my mother's recipe calls for both grated fresh coconut and a thin milk extracted from the same coconut to be added at separate points. hence my question. here's the workaround i settled upon: i ended up using 2/3 of a can of lite-coconut milk. the idea being that since i was using more milk than was in my mother's recipe, and since even the lite canned milk is thicker than her extract, this would be a barely acceptable substitute. as it turned out the curry was quite good but almost a different dish. the grated coconut in the original creates a texture that is important, and also thanks to the extra milk my curry was a lot saucier (though not thinner in taste). i would post the recipe for this but this is one my mother's patented ingredients only recipes ("add some of this, a little of that" etc.)--how much of each thing you add is something you figure out through practice, and i'm afraid i didn't keep track tonight either. next time i'll experiment with the coconuts that are available and see how that goes. in the meantime can others in the u.s who make malayali or bengali style curries that call for coconut chime in with their techniques/approaches to the problem of fresh coconut and coconut milk?

thanks for the reply--do i just thaw it by itself or is it preferable to soak it in something? also, how much frozen shredded coconut will approximate 1/2 a fresh coconut?

does anyone know how much dessicated coconut would approximate 1/2 a medium coconut's worth of flesh? the latter is the amount of coconut called for in a number of the recipes in the penguin kerala cookbook--but it is written for an audience that has access to fresh coconut as well as people/tools to cut and shred it. here in colorado i have neither. i assume though that i will be able to find shredded, dessicated coconut in grocery stores. which leads me to the second question: what does one do to dessicated cocount to prepare it for use in a recipe that calls for shredded, fresh coconut?

where are you located?

just a joke bague25--if you read back through the forum's history, you'll see why.

all the jamaican food i've eaten in the u.s seems to have gotten the thai treatment (sweetened up for the american palate). i'd imagine there must also be a lot spicy african cuisines. i don't know why i imagine this of course, i just do. anyone know?

you mean the north indian restaurants may actually have been spicing it up for the non-native palate? there's a change! and vikram, that bhutanese chilli curry sounds very much like the sichuan hot chopped chicken dish i referred to earlier: hacked pieces of chicken in a sea of chili oil and HOT red peppers. floating like so many deceptive mines in this lethal sea are mushrooms, which have soaked up a lot of the oil--biting into one is like biting into ball of napalm. the first time i ate this at chungking in monterey park (one of the best sichuan restaurants in the san gabriel valley) my bengali eating habits--take rice and douse it with as much sauce as you can--almost did me in. the owner explained to me, while putting out the flames, that the correct way to eat it is to pull out pieces of chicken and stuff them into your mouth with rice and leave the sauce alone. in hyderabad (the capital of andhra pradesh), of course, you get an accompaniment with your usual dosa sides that is actually called gunpowder.

uh oh

a decent enough article but a few quibbles: 1. what does the title "after centuries the vegetarian feast of india finally arrives" mean? arrives where? has new york really been waiting for this for centuries? or does a cuisine only arrive after it arrives in new york? 2. still too much reliance on the generalized "indian" which in the context of food is pretty meaningless--there's occasional breaks into south indian and north indian but there's a whole world of south indian outside of the udupi kitchen. similarly the mustard seeds-curry leaves/tomatoes-onions division that is used to signal the difference between "south" and "north" indian doesn't really hold--the bengal kitchen, for instance, doesn't dabble very much with tomatoes in vegetable dishes. similarly the madras onion/shallot is a large part of many cuisines in south india (vegetarian and non-vegetarian). this is the kind of thing that writers could get right if they'd talk more to the chefs they interview instead of worrying about keeping their magisterial tone. 3. when do the indians in new york get to also become new yorkers? on the whole though the article makes me jealous of the range of indian food available in new york--though new jersey is no slouch either. mongo "never satisfied" jones p.s: i was impressed to read that suvir's family can track their history back to the 15th century. my paternal family can't even remember what their real surname was (the current one is a title bestowed upon a recent ancestor in the late 19th century).

never eaten malay food--always wanted to