In essence, thali is endless: if you finish a flatbread, they will bring you another, hot; if you empty one of the bowls, they will bring the next
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THE SPICY TASTE OF INDIA (Part 1)
Without Meat
But the generous Indian land yields three to four harvests of vegetables, fruits, and legumes a year. So Indians can be understood: why resist nature when it so naturally inclines towards vegetarianism? By the way, a traveler raised on meat borscht and meat pies unexpectedly easily tolerates temporary vegetarianism here. In the heat, food preferences somehow change, and the former avid meat-eater will be satisfied with legume soup, fruits, mulberries, and small watermelons.
And yet do not think that in India you will have to forget about meat. On holidays, for dear guests and in expensive restaurants, they serve dishes of poultry and goat meat. I confess, the talent of Indians in preparing meat was a complete surprise to me. It simply melts in your mouth. I don’t know how they do it, but here I was never served tough meat.
Drinks of the Land of Elephants
But when it comes to drinking, India is a real trouble. Alcohol is not widespread here and is expensive. Since British rule, gin and whiskey have become common. In some places in the north of the country, winemaking has developed in recent decades, and the result is not bad. But in general, wine more resembles something like fortified compote of unknown origin, heavily sweetened. In the northeast and central India, rice beer is brewed. It is whitish, unpleasant to taste, but cheap. In the states producing rice beer, one must be vigilant. Here they drink a bit too much by Indian standards, and when drunk, normally harmless Indians become utterly unbearable.
So what to drink? Bottled water, packaged juices (very sweet!), and coffee in a decent house, brewed by a hospitable hostess.
Tea in the homeland of 'those very elephants' is no less popular than in Russia, but our ideas about it, to put it mildly, do not coincide. That they drink it with milk here is quite understandable: a legacy of English rule. But that this murky mixture of milk, water, sugar, and tea dust is exactly the same slop that was served in Soviet canteens is inexplicable. Where, oh where did they learn this?!
At best, they served a cup of hot water with a tea bag or a teapot with a pale yellow contents and three tea leaves floating in it. I managed to find real tea only on tea plantations, where in colonial-style office buildings there is a semblance of a tea bar: they brew the specified variety, serve it on a tray, in an English porcelain cup, with milk in a milk jug and a fresh newspaper nearby.
But in stores and supermarkets, the tea, to put it mildly, is of lamentable quality. Apparently, current export volumes significantly exceed the carrying capacity of Columbus's fleet, and Indian tea in English packaging is easier to find in a domestic supermarket. Although I don't rule out that it exists in India too – you just need to know the places.
Sweet and Nasty
Indians are great sweet tooths. There is a great variety of sweets here. It is difficult to determine their nomenclature because the name of the product depends on the ingredients, not the shape. The shapes are simpler, there are only two – balls and strips. And the content can be sandy, curd, nutty, corn, poppy, oatmeal – in general, any kind, and even with fruit filling.
Sweets are extremely sweet and very specific. For example, Indian halva has little in common with the one we know from childhood. It is soft and more like sweet butter that is spread on bread. There is also a beautiful colored gajar halva, made from carrots. And the taste of the most popular Assamese dessert is generally hard to imagine: it is sour cream with nuts and spices. There is much more pepper in this dessert than rupees in exchange for a hundred-dollar bill.
And Again About Spices
Indian cuisine is as paradoxical as India itself. Local food must be accepted as it is, because to analyze it by parameters of products, measures, and cooking rules is as impossible as to believe in harmony by algebra. Indians are mystics by nature, and everything they eat has, along with taste and calories, certain mystical properties.
For example, an Indian does not associate the concept of cold and hot food with the actual temperature of the products. He may call cold food hot and vice versa. Rice, even freshly cooked, is cold food, so it is prepared with shambala (spicy seeds with a mushroom smell), which neutralizes the cold of rice with its warmth.
According to the laws of Ayurveda (the authority of this ancient book has been indisputable in India for several millennia), for physical and mental balance, a person must get all six tastes during the day: sour, bitter, sweet, salty, pungent, and astringent. Each product has beneficial and harmful properties, but by mixing spices correctly, one can weaken the negative properties of food and strengthen the positive ones. So spices play their role not only in the taste and aroma of the dish but also in the internal balance of harm and benefit, heat and cold.
At the end of the 20th century, biotechnologists managed to give a scientific explanation for the strange ideas of Indians about cold and heat: it corresponds to which way the DNA helix twists in the product – left to right or right to left. It remains to find out what and where the inhabitants of India knew about DNA several millennia ago.