The joke amongst my friends is that I would spice my spices if I could. And they couldn’t be more right. It takes every ounce of control I have not to add haldi to meatloaf, garam masala to pasta sauce or elaichi to iced tea. I love food but of all the food in the world, it is Indian food, with its abundant use of spices, that I love the most.
In 1990, I moved from India to attend graduate school in Virginia. Like many other young Indian students, I was terribly lonely. I hated Virginia—it was so cold, the people seemed nice but distant, and nothing seemed to taste quite right. One night, in a fit of nostalgia, I began to cook my mother’s kheer. I combined the rice, milk and sugar and as the milk began to boil, I wept. Through my tears, I stirred in the cardamom, the spice that formed the high note of the dish. Soon the entire kitchen smelled like my mother’s. As I was finishing up, a young Indian man on campus rang the doorbell. He had caught the aroma of simmering kheer and come to find its source. And that, folks, is how I met my husband.
Back then, the spices were rare and—when you could get them—expensive. I borrowed the cardamom for my kheer from a kind neighbour. There were few choices of pickles, no chutneys, no packaged rotis or naans and only one type of basmati rice, always priced outrageously. When I got married, we struggled to even get paan for the wedding. Making Indian food seemed like such a tamasha. I had to make paneer from scratch, cook my own rotis (with difficulty, for the atta was too fine), and grind my own pastes and masalas. The very thought of making paneer bhurji at 7 pm, after a hard day’s work, was enough to make us order out.
There was also a lot of misconception around the cuisine. When I began to teach modern Indian cooking in the late ’90s, Americans who came to my classes would be astounded to learn that not everyone owned a tandoor, that I did not use ghee in everything, and did not care for curry powder.
Today, as Obama celebrates Diwali in the White House, American shelves are loaded with so many spices that I find myself like a child in a toyshop. Ingredients like kokum and gongura that I never saw as a child now line shelves. Paneer is made in Wisconsin and sold everywhere; Pillsbury makes several types of naans and rotis; there are jars of ginger-garlic pastes and, at the last count, six varieties of garam masala.
It doesn’t end there. Years ago, I would struggle to find simple atta, and now there is bajra, makki ka atta, so many types of south Indian flour that I cannot identify all, and several kinds of basmati. Prepared dosa batter, once unheard of, Sanjeev Kapoor’s chutneys and spice mixes, and packets of my favourite masala chai are commonplace.
Just as America has changed, so has my cooking. I now combine my Indian ingredients with products sourced from farmers’ markets, and often use quick-cook western techniques with my beloved spices. A typical dinner at our house could be Brussels sprouts sauteed with leeks and curry leaves, a lamb stew with butternut squash, deconstructed golgappas, chicken simmered in green mint chutney and a Rooh Afza granita with vodka!
At my cooking school, I get a lot of young American Indian students. They love their mom’s food, but want me to show them how to do it without spending hours in the kitchen. And my American students are no longer asking me to teach them “chicken curry”—they want to make the perfect Chettinad chicken or patraan ni maachhi.
Of course, my favourite change, and I can wax poetic until the cows come home, is that I now have a chappati lady! As we tuck into our fresh chappatis, which I pick up from her every Sunday, my lonely, hassled, tamasha-cooking days seem so far away.
(The author is a columnist for The Washington Post. Her book, Modern Spice, will be published in 2010.)
