Lime Leaves

Most citrus leaves are edible. In fact, they are downright addictive. Particularly when steeped and added to a martini.

(However, that's not this article.)

Somebody smart at my local farmers' market figured out that they could market lime leaves. As many of you might know, winter is the time for citrus fruits. Ergo lime leaves.

While they are not a perfect substitute for kaffir lime leaves in Thai cooking, they work perfectly excellently in the soups. Most importantly, they work really well as substitutes for curry leaves in Indian cooking particularly when you slice them into pieces. They are hardier so they will not be edible and you will have to fish them out but they lend exactly the correct aroma.

Your rasams and your chitraanam can now be "locavore".

The CC is just thrilled.

2-acetyl 1-pyrolline

Do you love Thai food?

Do you love fresh bread?

Do you love basmati or jasmine rice?

If so, you're in love with this particular molecule.

It amplifies itself in both Indian and Thai culture with their love of jasmine blossoms and pandanus leaves — both of which have the above molecule as a dominant fragrance — and which are added to rice to amp up the already existing fragrance.

Sanskrit literature has a tendency to have lovers' meetings beneath jasmine trees. The majority of Indian miniature paintings in the "romantic lovers' mode" feature jasmine trees. Even today, jasmine is the dominant flower for weddings in India.

Clearly in the modern parlance, 2-acetyl 1-pyrolline, you got game!

Japanese Dinner

Tuna croquettes (マグロのコロッケ)
♥
Baby potatoes fried in duck-fat with gomashio ♥ Truffled foie gras
♦ ♦ ♦
Oyako Don (親子丼)
♥
Miso soup with acorn squash & ginger
♥
Greens with calamansi vinaigrette
♥
Homemade Japanese pickles — carrot; watermelon radish; ginger ♥
Winter vegetables in tare sauce.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The CC was "traditional" — American, Filipino, French, Indian, Italian, Japanese. (Thai couldn't make it sadly.)

Lamb chops with rosemary & anchovies
♥
Brussel Sprouts with parmesan & pomegranates
♥
Stuffing with chestnuts & sage
♥
Champagne with pomegranates
♥
"Fruit Salad" with apples, tangelos, pomegranates

Sri Lankan Fish Patties (Malu Paan)

One of the great things about "fusion" cooking is how seamless it can actually be.

Canned tuna is not exactly the most exotic of ingredients. It's quite boring and bourgeois and very middle-American. We're just going to use Sri Lankan magic to amp it up a few notches.

There's nothing new about Sri Lankan spices either. They're all there in India but it's the combinations that are new and as the CC has pointed out endlessly, this is just a combinatorial game.

You're most likely to encounter this stuff as "fish cutlets" — the mixture is deep-fried. However, a little dig underneath the surface and you see it also as "fish patties" and "fish rolls" and "fish balls".

There's also the ubiquitous malu paan which is the same fish filling inside a bread that is baked.

For the record, the paan is from the Portuguese pão and is the same as the Japanese パン (pan), the Filipino pandesal (bread with salt), and the Indian paav (a much more accurate transcription of pão.) The Portuguese spread the cult of yeasty bread baking all along South-East Asia.

What matters, of course, is the filling at the center of these concepts.

All the CC has done is to take the patties and stick them in a burger bun (which is vastly simpler) and achieves the same purpose.

Dinner is served.

Ingredients

1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds

1 tsp black pepper

1 sprig curry leaves
1 piece of fresh turmeric (or 1 tsp ground turmeric)
1" ginger
4-5 green chilis

2 large potatoes
1 can tuna

1 medium-sized onion (diced finely)

cilantro (finely chopped)
1 lime

salt (to taste)

Note 1: The combination of cumin, coriander, and fennel in the ratio 2:2:1 along with ground turmeric is often used in Sri Lankan cooking particularly in dishes involving fish. It gives it that characteristic "Sri Lankan" taste.

Note 2: While this mixture is freely available in Sri Lanka pre-made, the CC assumes that the majority of the audience will not have access to this. Also, if you're going to add black pepper to the final mix, you might as well grind it all together.

Note 3: Fresh turmeric adds a complexity that ground turmeric simply doesn't. The CC vastly prefers the former but feel free to use the later.

Recipe

Grind the spices to a fine powder.

Grind the ginger, green chilis, and turmeric to a paste. (If you grind the spices in a mortar and pestle, you can do this in the same step.)

Boil the potatoes in water until tender. Peel and mash gently.

Heat some oil in a pan. Add the diced onions and curry leaves and fry for a bit until the onions have softened. Add the spices and ground paste and fry till the raw smell has dissipated. Roughly 2 minutes.

Add the tuna from the can and break it up. Let it cook for 4-5 minutes. Add the boiled potatoes and mix it all well together.

(If you are going to deep-fry into "fish balls", make it drier than normal. Otherwise it should be wet enough to form into patties.)

Dump the whole stuff into a bowl. Let it cool for a bit. Pick out the curry leaves and discard. (They don't do this in Sri Lanka but then the leaves there are more tender than the ones found here.)

Add the chopped cilantro and the juice of one lime and crush gently using a potato masher. Mix and check for salt.

To make the patties, you can just either pan-fry them with some oil (which is the way the CC prefers) or for a fancier richer taste, do the same after an egg-wash and coated with breadcrumbs.

Fruit Salad

The CC just adores the name mostly because it totally lies about the underlying subject — well, maybe not about the "fruit" part — but this ain't no bloody salad!

This Indian dish has so much amazing science and trickery inside of it that it's worthy of the slipperiest of slippery gods. (Oh, Agni! Oh, Loki!)

What is it?

Fruits in a milk reduction with complex spicing.

When stated like that, it sounds so boring which it totally is not. It's a masterpiece of complex chemistry with that assured magician's sleight of hand which veers it towards genius.

One day the CC returned to his apartment where his roommate greeted him sheepishly, "I'm sorry. I ate it all. I couldn't resist."

The CC knew even back then the kinda effect this dessert has on people so he just said, "Why don't you go shopping? We'll make it again, and we'll make a party of it on Friday?"

And we partied.

He grilled the steaks, his girlfriend (now wife) cooked the rest of the meal, and the CC had already spent his time earlier reducing milk for dessert. We were poor graduate students but we had a blast.

How does it work?

You reduce whole un-homogenized milk until it resembles a thick soup. You add cardamom, saffron, and slivered almonds. Then you cool it down till it's really ice-cold. You add fruits in a bowl, pour the soup all over it and eat it.

When the CC added the citrus fruits to the bowl, the roommate yelled, "It's gonna curdle." Logical thinking but dead wrong! That's the magic trick.

When the proteins are denatured and the final product ice-cold, the citrus doesn't have enough time to make the milk curdle. Eat it right away or GTFO, as the kids might say these days.

The more variety of fruits you add the better. The CC prefers apples, oranges, pomegranates. You may prefer something else. Go nuts!

(The citrus fruits must be peeled. The tannins in the skin have a higher probability of making it curdle.)

What's the problem?

It's hard work. It's an insane amount of work specifically since the kinda burners that we have in apartments are rather puny.

All you're doing in the most important step is "reducing" milk i.e. you're removing the water from the milk and simultaneously denaturing the proteins.

This is one of the truly rare cases where the CC is going to talk about specific equipment. You are best off with a enamel-coated cast-iron pot — something like a Le Creuset.

There's a reason for this. The CC grew up with this dish. It took hours and hours and hours and hours of stirring. It always does. Back in the day, the CC thought that having a book would be an antidote which was logical until he dropped the book into the flames and the house almost caught on fire. Not so great after all.

What's so great about the enamel-coated iron pot is that it heats the milk uniformly.  From the sides as well as the bottom. The milk bubbles away at a uniform rate. You stir occasionally and try not to worry too much.

You'll worry anyway.

You want the milk to reduce by half. It'll change color because the water goes away and the bright white milk turns cream-colored.

The CC wants to point out that most Indian desserts involve reducing milk into various levels of submission. When looked at in that light, this is the easy end of the spectrum!

Ingredients

(serves 6)

2 gallons whole milk
sugar

6 cardamom pods
saffron
1/4 cup slivered almonds

1 orange - segmented, skin peeled
1 apple - cut into cubes
1 pomegranate - seeds separated

Note 1: The product itself is not amenable to storage but the milk mixture absolutely is. You can make more and just pour it over the fruits right before serving.

Note 2: When you serve it, it's great if you can chill the bowls ahead of time. It's not strictly necessary but it's nice.

Recipe

Heat up the milk in a pot. When it comes to a boil, reduce the heat and start stirring. Keep stirring. This is gonna take the better part of two hours or so.

Add the sugar to taste. The CC prefers less but your tastes may vary.

Keep stirring.

Seed the cardamom pods and crush them to a powder in a mortar and pestle.

The milk should reduce by half and the color changed from bright white to almost cream-colored.

You didn't miss the memo about keeping on stirring, right?

When reduced by half, add the cardamom powder, the saffron, and the almonds and take off the heat. When it has cooled down, stick it in the refrigerator till it is ice cold.

Put the fruits in a bowl. Pour the milk mixture all over it. Serve at once.

That 70's Show

The CC is absolutely obsessed with collecting recipe books that date back to the late-60's and early-to-mid 70's.

Why the 70's?

It's the first transformation of many of these societies into the modern consumer world and it set off a wave of rather "naïve" cookbook writers almost all women who were documenting the recipes of an earlier age.

The naïveté shouldn't be taken as a pejorative. It's actually a compliment. They were literally writing down what they knew without any filter. These are really amazing documents.

These cookbooks have been updated but they have never been bettered. They are actually the source of inspiration to most modern cookbook writers who all down to a fault refuse to acknowledge the immense amount of ideas that they have nakedly stolen from these earlier writers.

The CC is always collecting these things as he travels. (They tend to be rather cheap.)

There are a few commonalities which are just extraordinary.

One is that they all tend to be obsessed with a level of precision. It is very important to them that the reader make the dish perfectly. The instructions tend to be rather precise and detailed. (This, of course, just warms the cockles of the CC's cold analytical heart.)

The other is how they were marketed. Not through the traditional channels. Often via "nail salons" or "beauty parlors" which was the domain of women. It was word-of-mouth and viral marketing at its earliest and finest.

The third is the primitiveness of the publishing industry at the time. They are frequently published in indifferent editions. Pictures are rare. The print is not glossy. The binding is falling apart. Spelling mistakes abound. However, the passion just jumps off the page!

The fourth is a level of awareness of nutrition. It's not the modern gluten-free fat-free version but they are rather interested in the fact that in an era where budgets are tight that the food not only be delicious but also nutritious.

Last but not least is the obsession with the pineapple. No, the CC is not joking. Hawaii only became a US state on Aug 21st, 1959. There was a massive global marketing campaign to sell pineapple across the world. You can see the obsession everywhere from Life Magazine to newspapers and magazines in all the corners of the world. Think "Mad Men". These women were not exempt from the pull of the siren song. Rest assured that there will be a recipe or three for pineapple in these books!

The CC has had plenty of books go in and out of his kitchen but you will take these books out of his cold dead hands!

---

Here's an extraordinarily incomplete list — roughly going westwards:

Middle-East

Arto der Haroutunian (Middle-East at large)

Afghanistan

Helen Saberi

India

Tarla Dalal (Gujarati vegetarian)
Ummi Abdulla (Kerala Muslim)
Joyce Fernandes (Goan)
Kamalabai Ogale (Maharashtrian)
S. Meenakshi Ammal (Tamil vegetarian)
Katy Dalal (Parsi)
Minakshie Das Gupta (Bengali)

Sri Lanka

Chandra Dissanayake

Taiwan

Fu Mei-Pei

Philippines

Enriqueta David-Perez

Caribbean

Babette de Rozières

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The Sealing of the Pot

The CC received a clay pot as a gift recently.

It was a classic meen chatti (मीन चट्टी - literally: fish clay pot). The first word is from Sanskrit (= fish) and the second most likely from the local vernacular.

Instructions were provided to "season it" but the CC needs to understand what that means so he proceeded down the rabbit hole (as he is wont to do) about what that really entails.

Clay is quite porous as a material. However, it can be fired at high temperatures after which it becomes hard. That's how bricks are made which has been known since at least Sumerian times.

Clay is also an extraordinarily poor conductor of heat.

These combined facts act as an advantage in fish cookery.

The critical point about a clay pot is that no matter how hard you try to heat it in a reasonable time (= less than five hours, for example), it's very difficult to raise the temperature of the interior of the pot to above 70°C^† — which is the outer limit of the temperature that fish proteins denature.

Of course, if you fired the crap out of the pot, eventually it would rise to the temperature of the flame but we're talking cooking here not cremation!

The other critical point is that if you don't raise the temperature beyond the denaturation point of fish proteins, they will stay soft independent of the cooking time. If you held the temperature precisely at a certain point, your fish would stay perfectly tender whether you cooked it for ten minutes or ten hours!

This is how airlines control food, for the record. The temperature is never allowed to get above the denaturation point of the proteins in question — chicken, beef, fish, vegetables, whatever!

The principle of clay-pot cooking is the same as that of sous-vide cooking except that it is being done in an intuitive way rather than formally. It also has a massive advantage over sous-vide in that you can fry or sear the fish and have it cook in the complex juices generated by it. You don't need to worry about the problem of precise timing either which was a useful fact in the frenetic frazzled world of yore unlike modern day times.

There's a price to be paid for this freedom. Nothing comes for free.

The pot is a complex apparatus. If you drop one of your metal pots, it'll get dented. If you drop a clay pot, it shatters and you get to start all over again. (Luckily, they are cheap but that's not the point.)

Poor conduction also goes both ways. It's really hard to raise the temperature and it's equally hard to lower the temperature. A certain boring-ness is required in the usage of a clay pot. You can't just dial the temperature up and down like a metal pot.

Much more importantly, you can't add hot water to a cold pot, or cold water to a hot pot. It will crack. The poor conduction means you cannot have the interior and the exterior at significantly different temperatures.

The seasoning of the pot is really quite simple once you grasp the concepts. You alternate boiling cold water in the pot and toss it out followed by coating it with cooking oil overnight. The water percolates through the pot and mends micro-holes in the clay and the oil conducted via the water generates enough carbon residues to plug the holes. It also generates a non-stick surface at the bottom of the pot over time (exactly like a great cast-iron frying pan.)

There are two fallacies about clay pots and since chez CC, we tend to be the analytic sort, we're going to dismiss them.

The first is that the seasoned clay pot is not porous — it absolutely is! The water inside the seasoned pot has to be going somewhere. It's not evaporating significantly at 70°C^‡ so it must be disappearing somehow. It's evaporating through the porosity of the pot. It's being wicked^§ away.

This porosity created a bit of a problem for the CC in the second round of water seasoning when the pot had been coated with oil overnight. Enough oil/water was being wicked away through the porous clay that the CC's gas flame went a little crazy. It's basically a baby version of a grease fire. It was such a minuscule amount of oil that it posed no risk whatsoever but it was quite unnerving until the principles had been grasped.

The second which is really the flip of the first is the myth that you can't cook in a dry pot without water. You absolutely can as long if you want to raise the temperature above 70°C. You could quite plausibly cook the clay pot to up to 1000° C but the CC really doubts that your puny stove generates enough BTU's for that. (Your oven only goes up to 275°C!)

Remember, if you do amp up the temperature of the pot, you will not be able to add cold water to it. You must either cool the pot down and start over or heat the water to the same temperature and add it. Most cooks do the former not the later since it's too risky.

In fact, many recipes ask you to first boil stuff till the water disappears, take the fish out, and then use the pot just like a frying pan adding the fish back at the last step. (The reverse is also true. Some recipes ask you to use it like a frying pan and then add the fish and warm water a little at a time thus lowering the temperature back down.)

Let's abstract out the principles of the perfectly seasoned clay pot.

[1] With water inside, the temperature will not go above 70°C until the water disappears.

[2] The clay pot is a very poor conductor of heat.

[3] The dry clay pot will allow you to fire it up to 1000°C.

Now that we've grasped the principles, we're ready to roll.

One of the great glories of Mughal cooking is the perfectly cooked daal. This involves the denaturing of lentil proteins and some of these lentils tend to get slimy if the skins split. The clay pot is the ideal apparatus since it preserves the skin perfectly while letting the water and spices to enrich the dish via osmosis but not allowing the lentils to burst.

The truly great dish of Gujarati cooking is undhiyu (ઊંધિયું — literally: upside-down.) The Mughals totally envied this dish! It's a classic mélange of spring vegetables, complex vegetarian meatball-esque preparations, and spices cooked in a sealed upside-down (sic) pot in the dying embers of a fire overnight at low heat. Same logic goes for long-term low-temperature cooking and the denaturing of the proteins.

If you go to North India during winter, you'll find yogurt served in clay pots. The clay pots are being used for two purposes — heat preservation and water-evaporation. Even in the cold temperatures of the North-Indian winter, the clay pots retain the heat of the warm mixture of milk and bacteria^¶ and wick away enough water to make the yogurt rich and delicious.

So this device which is at least 20,000 years old (based on Chinese excavations that date back to 18,000 BC) is truly a magic apparatus. It just requires a little understanding.

We're just the latest in a truly ancient lineage.

---

† You can verify this quickly and empirically by sticking a finger for less than a second into the water that has been boiling in the clay pot for an hour. Nothing much will happen. If you stuck your finger in real boiling water for even less than a second, you would get second-degree burns!

‡ The CC will not bore you with the details but roughly speaking in an environment with no air-flow (e.g. your exhaust fan) the evaporation rate is linear in the temperature differential between water and air for temperatures around 100°C. Estimating your house to be about 25°C (80°F), you are only getting roughly 60% of the evaporation of boiling water. The rest of the water has to be going somewhere!

§ You can test this by covering a pot and heating water in it. It will never boil but soon much of the water will be gone.

¶ The clay pots have the advantage of porosity. The yogurt bacteria are sitting in there and they help develop the culture implicitly particularly if you make yogurt every day or week in the same pot. (The clay pots that they use are small. Individual use, one might say, in modern parlance.)

Holi Hai! (होली है। )

It's the festival of colors and even though New York is hit by the largest snow storm in years, it would be remiss of the CC to not present the ne plus ultra of Indian recipes.

It's called thandai (ठंडाई - literally: coolant.)

It's traditionally served with bhang (edible cannabis - which is legal in India!) but even without that it's truly terrific. It's very sweet but you can cut back.

Ingredients

(serves 2)

2 cups milk

8 cashew nuts
8 blanched almonds
8 pistachios
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1/2 tsp black pepper
4 long peppers (pippali)
4 green cardamoms
4-6 dried rose buds
1 tsp poppy seeds
pinch of saffron

2 tbsp sugar (or more to taste!)

Note 1: The CC has gone easy on the sugar. It's much more sugary than this.

Note 2: The rose buds are not optional. That's what gives the dish its characteristic fragrance. You can find them in your local Chinatown.

Note 3: It also sometimes features magaz seeds (edible kernel of watermelon seeds) but it's reasonably exotic and the CC left it out. Add 8 of them if you have them.

Note 4: The sugar in the recipe catalyzes the bhang in your brain and gives a "higher high". The nuts which have fat help dissolve the fat-soluble cannabis.

Note 5: The recipe has connections to Mughal culture. The Mughal Emperors were massive opium addicts. Oddly, alcohol wasn't much in fashion possibly because of Muslim edicts. The same logic of catalysis and sugar applies to opium.

Note 6: All the spices used are considered "cooling spices" in Indian cooking which makes sense since Holi comes on the cusp of the absurdly hot Indian summer.

Note 7: The black pepper and long pepper are "hot spices" and they're there for "balance". A ridiculous concept but you must enter into the medieval Indian mindset.

Recipe

Soak all the ingredients in the milk for at least two hours. Blend in a blender finely.

Strain and serve cold.

Green Peppercorn Pickles

The CC is not the sentimental type and he's certainly not the rhapsodising type but if there ever were something to send him into a Proustian "madeleine" moment, it would be these pickles.

What are they?

Fresh green peppercorns that have been pickled with just salt and lime.

A good friend of the CC's used to eat them with yogurt-rice. He couldn't cook if his life depended on it (still can't!) so these were "a lifeline for kitchen failures and the lovelorn". Bit of a harsh judgment on the CC's part.

Back to the peppercorns.

Only going to work with fresh peppercorns which are hard to find. Ideally, you would use just salt but you need lime to get the pH of the liquid down to the right level. The lime does not participate in the final product as a taste since the canning process neutralizes it.

If you're going to make truly great steak au poivre or the classic Thai green fish curry with green peppercorns (พริกไทยอ่อน), these be the peppercorns that you want to use. In a wondrous world, you'd have fresh peppercorns all year around but it's not a wondrous world. We can just make it a little more wondrous with food technology.

Ingredients

(based on your canning jar size)

500 grams green peppercorns
8 tbsp sea salt
4 limes (juiced and passed through a sieve)

water

Note: Canning jars come with a sealant. The sealant is activated when inverted in boiling water.

Recipe

Wash the peppercorns really carefully. Set aside.

Bring water to a boil. Dump the bottle inside and fish it out. You are just sterilizing the bottle. In this bottle, drop the peppercorns, the salt and the lime juice. Add enough cold fresh water to top off the jar.

Add the sealing mechanism and seal carefully. Gently put the bottle upside-down in the boiling water. Bring to a boil and let it boil for about 5-6 minutes.

Fish it out and let it sit.

Takes about 2-3 weeks to pickle. Once you open the bottle, you must keep it in the fridge. Use a clean fork/spoon to fish out the pickles. Add more salt and water to cover them when you do so.

Soy Me Up, Soy me Down!

There are soy sauces and there are soy sauces but they are neither equivalent nor substitutes.

Historically, soy sauce arose in China but it spread across South-East Asia and then the world. As it spread, the production became local and its irresistible umami flavors were tweaked to local tastes.

That means that Chinese, Japanese and Thai soy sauces (just to use three as an example) are totally different. Even within a single culture there are multiple kinds of soy sauce that have different end uses. This parallels the equally different kinds of fish sauce each tweaked to local tastes.

The CC can hear the screams from the peanut gallery already.

"You mean to say, that I must now stock different kinds of soy sauces?!? Are you nuts?"

Sadly yes.

If you want to get the right flavors then yes, and yes the CC is nuts. (Not much doubt, was there?)

The point about the "right" flavor is made most memorably in one of the episodes of the serialized food manga Oishinbo (美味しんぼ).

The name is a portmanteau word between oishii (= 美味しい, delicious) and kuishinbou (= 食いしん坊, glutton). On the one hand, the manga has a simple format which is important in a serialized format just like a sit-com, which is why it ran for 30+ years, but it's so heavy-handed and Oedipal that Freud might have objected!

However, it's both excellent and makes important points. At one point, the father upstages the son by making the same dish with the same ingredients but using Chinese soy sauces rather than the equivalent Japanese versions because the dish is of Chinese-Japanese origin not truly Japanese. (As stated, heavy-handed but still with a point.)

If you choose to engage in this journey, these are not expensive products and they store indefinitely in a cool and dark environment so it's not as big a burden as it sounds.

How many can you get away with at the bare minimum?

The CC is guessing between four and six — two for Thai food, one or two for Japanese, and one to two for Chinese. More if you want to cook Indo-Chinese or Filipino.

Sorry.

Just don't shoot the messenger.

Pickles

It's not well known but the CC is crazy about pickles.

Broadly speaking, the world of pickles is divided into two kinds — acid-based and oil-based.

This has everything to do with botulism which is a bacterium that grows in the absence of oxygen. You need some technical chops to make oil-based pickles.

Acid-based pickles are vastly easier. Firstly, the acid prevents the growth of bacteria in the first place, and secondly, they're just tastier by the CC's taste buds. So life is easy for the CC.

The CC has grown up with pickles. He used to make them routinely as a kid with his grandmother and his great-grandmother (!) growing up. Looking back, it seems painfully clear that the grandmother wasn't that particularly interested in them. She continued for a few years after her mother died but that tapered pretty quickly. The family was even less interested which leaves the CC as the sole flag-bearer. And so it goes.

Except for the absolutely amazingly awesome green-peppercorn and lime pickles, the CC doesn't care for any of them. (They were mostly oil-based. Except the one that the CC likes. Hence the bias.)

The Indians and the Japanese have an vast tradition of pickling. (Other cultures obviously do too but the CC is just pointing this out as a compare-and-contrast.)

It's quite extraordinary. It was much more needed in the Japanese case because of the short growing season. It was completely unnecessary in the Indian case but the CC assumes they just loved the taste?

Fast forward to the modern world and the Japanese have an amazing device that allows you to make pickles without mistakes. It's just a plastic doo-hickey that presses down. It serves two purposes. It allows you to keep the vegetables below the water line, and if necessary, it presses down to allow vegetables to release their juices.

It works like a charm.

The absolutely simplest pickle involves just three ingredients — four, if you count water.

It's called 塩漬け (shiozuke - salted pickles.) The konbu and the salt combine to add a magical umami to the final product. Salt lowers the pH. They are acid-pickles in all but name.

The firmer the ingredient, the easier it is. It's pure magic with such things as the stalks of rainbow chard or watermelon rind.

Theoretically, the hard stalks of kale or broccoli should work but the brassica family simply doesn't taste that great. The CC has tried it. It basically sucks. Let it go.

These pickles are best eaten within three to seven days because the ingredients will continue to soften but you want that crunch!

Ingredients

rainbow chard stalks
4 tbsp salt
2 small cuts of konbu

boiling water

Recipe

Cut and wash the stalks. In a clean sterile container, layer the konbu followed by the stalks. Top with the salt.

Pour boiling water all over it. Figure out a way to make sure that the ingredients stay below the water line.

Ready in three days.

The Medieval Myth

One of the most pernicious lies about medieval cooking is that cooks used spices to cover up the smell of rotting meat (or fish.)

It just persists and persists and persists and it's just ludicrous on the face of it.

If we can distinguish between these things via smell, surely our fore-bearers were equally talented at it.

Also, spices were not cheap. The Arab and the Venetian middle-men had a stronghold on the supply and they charged pretty hefty premia for these things.

The upper classes who could afford the spices could obviously also afford the best meat and fish that money could buy since it was all local back in those days.

The idea has been thoroughly debunked by scholars like Paul Freedman but the popular imagination keeps it alive. It's absolutely amazing that so silly a meme has persisted for almost a few centuries at this point.

It's very clear to see the antecedents of medieval European cooking in modern terms. Just pick up a Persian or an Indian cookbook. They still have the same relation to spicing that would be expected in Europe in the middle ages.

Nobody in history has ever wanted to eat rotting meat. We have extraordinarily sophisticated tuned apparatuses in our systems to detect against poisoning. They even go into complete and utter overdrive to prevent us from doing so (e.g. vomiting during pregnancy, etc.)

Consider this idea as debunked.

The Dark Side of Food

One of the most important concepts associated with food is that it is pretty much the only activity that we do daily. There's also shitting but that's the end result of eating.

We eat to live. Literally. Our bodies are just a mechanism by which food gets transformed into fuel for our brain.

Every other activity that we do daily is basically optional but not eating.

There are many consequences to this simple observation. We'll proceed from the relatively trivial to the relatively profound.

No, your mother's version of that dish is not the "best". It's not even "typical". It's probably even shit. Let's start with that.

It's just something you ate on a daily basis and hence established the basis on which you rest your (very shaky) foundation of food. You may even perpetuate that because it's the only thing that you know. If you want to break out of the arbitrariness of your birth, and it is extraordinarily hard to do so, then you must first accept this brutal fact.

Did you notice that the CC referred to your mother's cooking as "shit"?

Notice how the metaphor neatly connects to food. We work symbolically through food. Everything from "no free lunch" to "corny" to "sour grapes" to "dish fit for the gods" — Shakespeare made the last one up as he did also "salad days", "in a pickle" and "the milk of human kindness".

There are literally no languages that don't have wondrous phrases related to food. It's so elemental that it's taken for granted. Everything from "essere buono come il pane" ("to be as good as bread" = "as good as gold") to 羊頭狗肉 ("sheep's head, dog meat" = "false advertising".)

Since eating is literally the only mandatory activity that we do, it goes without surprise that it's the ideal mechanism of enforcing group conformity.

There are absolutely no religions in the world that don't have a mandatory taboo on some form of eating. Judaism has kosher laws, the various religions in India have strange forms of vegetarianism, Christianity imposed rules of eating on Fridays, etc.

Needless to say this is all bullshit. Humans are famously omnivore. What one group eschews another embraces. The Chinese would laugh at the Jews. The meat-eaters mock the vegetarians. Fish on Fridays? Please.

Notice the bullshit metaphor also works via food. The only thing worse than your own shit would be the shit of a bull.

These rules have nothing to do with food and everything to do with enforcing group identity. You define yourself not only by what you are but also but what you are not.

The group identity mechanism works via what the Japanese would call  内外 ("uchi-soto" = "inside-outside"). Follow the food rules and you're an insider. Don't and you will be brutally excommunicated.

Lest you think that this mechanism is "religious" in nature, the CC will be happy to pontificate.

Try arguing barbecue in the US. There's great barbecue everywhere from Virginia to South Carolina to Kentucky to Texas. However, none of these groups agree with each other. Everyone seems to think their own version is the "best" — an entirely laughable notion that any outsider (like the CC!) might care to disabuse them of. They're all great; they are just different.

So you see, your mother's version of that dish is not the "best". It's your own fierce form of enforcing identity. You are sticking by what little you know and even if your mother is a terrific cook, you are trying futilely to convince others that it is food fit for the gods.

The most famous example of this "food as identity" enforcement was the Spanish Reconquista — the re-establishment of Christian rule in Spain. The Arabs and the Jews were forced at sword-point to eat pork in public as proof of their "conversion" to Christianity. The Spanish then took their concept to the Philippines which had no particular ban on pork and hence turned the pig into a newly formed "religion".

The great ramen maker, Momofuku Ando, neatly also turned these religious identity rules to his advantage by casually observing that there was no religion in the world that didn't embrace the chicken. The first ramen noodle flavor was chicken. (He wasn't particularly interested in the vegetarians.)

Which brings us to the fact that vegetarianism is another example of an entirely post-facto-rationalized system erected on extraordinarily shaky foundations.

Humans are omnivorous. We will literally eat anything which you can plainly observe because what one country or ethnic group rejects, another will happily eat. Since they all can't be right and they're all equally human, it stands to reason that they all must be wrong.

Science backs it up in spades. We are omnivorous, and we definitely evolved because of our capacity to eat meat. Arthur Clarke famously points this out in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kubrick gives this profound notion the utmost respect by filming it most memorably with a magnificent jump-cut.

We even have specialized meat receptors in our stomachs. Evolution at its finest. It gave us a powerful concentrated source of fuel and pushed our brains to much larger sizes.

Is there a point to this depressing discourse which is almost tailor-made to offend just about everyone? Why yes, there most certainly is.

If you really want to get to understand another culture, the ideal mechanism is through its food. Not only will you be wearing a different identity, it will make it far easier to discard your own. Discarding your identity is not for the weak. You will be left adrift and will be forced to fend on your own. The group enforcement mechanism will kick in dressed in full riot gear.

However, it's one of the few ways to throw off the arbitrariness of your birth (which you had no choice over) and get to enter into entirely new mindsets.

When phrased like that, you're looking at the greatest adventure in life. Needless to say, it's highly recommended.

Getting Medieval on the World's Tastes

The format of medieval cuisine has waned over the centuries but if you squint hard enough, you can still see its antecedents reflected in modern food.

Medieval cuisine — at least in the European sense — was characterized by its use of exotic spices and ingredients. Meat was expensive with game being even more so. There's heavy use of black pepper, saffron, cardamom and ginger and a reliance on a sweet-sour taste. Nuts make their way into most dishes either in the native form or as a thickener – almond milk is practically a cliché.

Most cooking was hard not just from the point of the expense of ingredients and firewood but labor as well. There were no modern conveniences. Everything was done by hand. When we talk about "medieval cuisine", we end up inevitably talking about the nobility because that's what's documented and they're the only ones who could afford to do so.

The modern conception finds some of these dishes to be strange. Meat cooked in sugar syrup or honey is relatively alien to the modern palate – even though it tastes terrific. Our tongues are still the same but our trained response seems to be a little off-center. (You can still see it in dishes like pork chops with apple sauce except the sauce is now served separately.)

Even the format of the meal is a little strange. The stomach needed to be "opened" with an apéritif (literally from Latin: aperire - "to open"), then followed by vegetables, then "heavy meats", then "closed" with aged cheese and a digestif.

If you recognize the above as the slightly modified format of a classic French meal then you will understand the medieval roots of modern eating. (The placement of the salad has been moved around a few times by the French and Italians – and the Americans – but that's fodder for another post.)

Medieval cuisine in its traditional sense but with New World enhancements is most clearly seen today in Persian and Indian cooking. Indian is not that surprising because most spices originally came from India and classical Indian cooking borrows heavily from the Persian format so they are joined at the hip. In fact, most cooking styles borrow heavily from the Persian format given that they were the original Empire spread over vast swathes of modern-day Asia, Africa and Europe. You can see the same formats spread with the medieval Arabic Empire over Northern Africa into Spain and all the way to Sicily.

The point is that these cooking styles have still maintained their "medieval nature" — there's heavy use of spices, saffron, black pepper, ginger, nuts, and a marked preference for sweet-sour tastes.

A slight detour must be made at this point about why spices lost their use in Europe as opposed to modern-day Iran and India where they are still as popular as they were a millenia ago.

Most spices were imported from India to imperial Europe. The spices were a province of the nobility and both Constantinople and Venice were founded on the basis of taxation of the spice trade. In modern economic terms, the middlemen made the spices expensive. This was the whole basis of trying to find a new sea route to India – disintermediation – a way to bypass the taxation. Once these routes were found, and the New World accidentally discovered, the price of spices went down precipitously because of the lack of taxation and the fact that alternatives were found to grow spices in the newly discovered Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic), various islands in Indonesia, etc.

After that we come to a cliché of human nature. Anything that the hoi-polloi discovers is anathema to the upper-classes just like the old money on Fifth Ave. would disdain the Brooklyn hipsters. And so, spices fell out of favor with the upper-classes in Europe in favor of a "purer cleaner taste" — reverse snobbery at its very finest.

The critical point is that these ideas never did fall out of favor in the places where the spices were grown where the distinction between "expensive" v/s "cheap" simply didn't exist. Spices were always cheap across the growing areas and the swathe populated by traders traversing routes that were not subject to taxation. Places like Sicily are more like the lands that "time forgot" — they had no strategic value and they kept the formats even though their neighbors did not.

This is what explains meats cooked in cashewnut milk with heavy spices in classical Awadhi cuisine even though the cashews are New World – they would've been almonds originally — or the love of almond granita in Sicily. Sicilian dishes like sardines cooked in a sweet-sour sauce or the very Persian "Jeweled Rice" (javaher polow) are all modern-day embodiments of medieval cooking.

The past bleeds into the present — and in a very aggressive format. It's just hard to see until you squint just right.

Vegetables

Vegetables are bland in flavor. There, the CC has said it.

Before a lynch-mob comes marching in, hear me out.

Vegetables are diluted in flavor by the water in their cells. So is meat, for the record. Hence, the concept of "aging beef" which allows the water to escape and making the meat more intensely "meaty".

There are a standard set of tricks across the globe to make vegetables more "vegetable-y" but since chez CC, we tend to be of the analytic bent, let's dig in further. We're also going to go further into domains not imagined by all these vegetable cultures.

All world cuisine relies on one or both of these tricks:

1. Dessicate the vegetables to make them more intense.
2. Dessicate the vegetables and then replace the lost water in the cellular structure by more "interesting" stuff.

There is no "third destination".

There are three standard ways of dessicating vegetables — roasting, frying and sun-drying. Each is standard across the globe although the CC would argue that frying is a cross between [1] and [2] in that it replaces the water with a light coating of fat which is irresistible to the human tongue.

Now, that you understand this, you will realize how bullshit the verb insaporire  ("to infuse with flavor") in Italian actually is. You're doing nothing of the sort. You're dessicating the vegetables by pan-frying them for a long time. No flavor is actually being "infused' because nothing is entering the system. You are pulling water out and the flavor is already present in the amazing vegetables to start with.

Yet, the Italians are onto something important. Pan-frying the vegetables does indeed intensify the flavor and this is the criticism that the CC would lay on the modern world and it's "fast food" concepts. You need to be slow and fry them languidly on a low heat for longer you think possible. The CC routinely catches himself trying to speed up before the analytic brain kicks in and says, "ten more minutes, mofo!" and the food is always the better as the Italians would have it. A great minestrone would have the vegetables pan-fried for the better part of 30 minutes.

The greatness of sun-dried vegetables should be obvious. So should be the concept of fried vegetables — everything from pakoras and tempura to fritto misto.

They are all precise ways of dessicating vegetables.

(Now, you understand why kale chips work, right?)

Once you've dessicated the vegetables, you are can re-infuse the cellular structures with other stuff. Everything from spices to meat and fish broths. The genius of Indian vegetarian cooking can be encapsulated in the fact that they combine steps [1] and [2] in one neat step. The vegetables are dessicated at the same time infusing them with the taste of intense spices. You see the same logic in an Italian minestrone which relies on vegetables being dessicated via pan-frying and reconstituted in an intense tomato broth. (Before the discovery of the New World, the Romans used meat broth to the same effect but the tomato is both cheaper and more intensely umami.)

Armed with this analytic conceit, we're no longer constrained by the arbitrariness of culture. If you want carrots to be more intensely "carrot-y" then dessicate them at a really low temperature and then reconstitute them in carrot juice!

In fact armed with this trick, you can make zucchini taste of meat or tomatoes or whatever you please.

The vegetable world is your oyster!

The Adaptation & Appropriation of Dishes

The CC really wanted to include this article under that of The Naming of Dishes but there was a lot more to be said about this subject than just the naming portion so he decided to spin it off into its own little post.

The world has always been global.

We've had traders and merchants traveling the seas trading across countries and continents. It's not uncommon even today to find Roman coins in India when land gets dug up for some new project. The largest collection of gold artifacts in the world was discovered in Surigao in the Philippines in 1981 as part of an irrigation project. Its connections to ancient India of the 10th century is quite well established (Source: Ayala Museum.)

Along these trade routes flowed something else besides spices, grain and gold — recipes and techniques for recipes.

The most famous of these routes is undoubtedly the Silk Road over land but equally important were the three sailing routes. One across the Mediterranean from Alexandria (modern-day Egypt) hopping counter-clockwise, hugging the coast, all the way to Rome and also from Cyrene (modern-day Libya) and Carthage via Alexandria to Rome. The other was the route from the modern-day Gulf of Eden hugging the coast of the modern-day Middle East all the way down the western coast of India to Calicut (modern-day Cochin). And finally the extension of this route around the southern tip of India hugging the eastern coast of India to Burma and from there on to Thailand, Indonesia and the far East.

The most powerful of impulses that the traders appealed to was that of the "exotic". Anything remotely exotic is lapped up by any population as long as it is not too far off from their own conception. Whether these are colorful clothes or dishes or spices hardly mattered to the traders just as long as it could be sold for a profit.

Not knowing anything about a foreign culture — remember travel was hard before the last 75 years or so — local dishes with some exotic ingredient are just the ticket for a sharp businessman with a marketing strategy.

Exoticism sells. Nobody from emperors to laymen are immune.

This is not just a theory. We have evidence.

Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India in 1876 and the British went crazy over "anything Indian". There were "Indian-themed" parties and "Indian food" marketed by the East India Company. This is also the birth of the infamous curry powder — a non-existent concept in Indian cooking. This powder marketed globally is now ubiquitous in such far-flung places as France, Thailand, Singapore and Japan all thanks to the marketing of the East India Company.

In the 1950's and 1960's there was a worldwide craze of "Hawaiian". Needless to say the folks from Italy and India and Vietnam or even most of the United States for that matter had never been to Hawaii but "Hawaiian Salad" was all the craze globally. The exotic element was pineapple. Take a typical salad with a mayo-based dressing and toss in some pineapple to get the afore-mentioned dish. Needless to say this had about as much to do with Hawaiian cuisine as chalk has to do with cheese. There were "Hawaiian cakes", "Hawaiian cocktails", you name it! All with pineapple. It was all marketing, of course. (Yes! The "Mad Men" had their hands all over this. We have the ads to prove this.)

The relatively recent movement towards "authenticity" is not more than about 30-40 years old. Sure there were pioneers even in the 1930's towards an honest and detailed assessment of global cuisine but its mass adoption is a relatively recent phenomenon.

This trend towards exoticism isn't relegated to dishes. Ask yourself if you really know what entrée means. It means "appetizer" in French from the verb entrer — to enter. Same goes for hors d'oeuvres which means "first course" in French but has taken on the meaning of "appetizer" in English. (Appetizers would be des toasts — "nibbles" in French.) Clearly some things got lost just getting across the English Channel and if that's the case, you can just imagine how much got lost when recipes migrated longer distances in older times.

Every culture appropriates dishes. Whether it is the Sicilian adaptation of Arabic eggplant recipes or the Malaysian appropriation of Indian recipes (roti canai — canai probably comes from Chennai but the concept is, quite likely, from Kerala), or the Japanese versions of "spaghetti" and "ma po tofu", it's universal. You also have wholescale adaptations like the Hakka-originated "Indian-Chinese cuisine". Not to mention chop suey and the like which are American adaptations of Chinese dishes.

Italian cuisine is a particularly special case. There's the Italian-American branch but that, at least, can be understood as the reaction of new immigrants to a foreign land and its native resources. What no Italian would recognize is Japanese "spaghetti napolitan" (sic) or Filipino "spaghetti" (made with banana ketchup!) or even Indian "masala spaghetti".

It's lost in translation but why?

To truly master a cuisine, you must first internalize its grammar. And every cuisine has an unmistakable grammar. A set of rules, techniques and ingredients that work in a specific set of combinations and in a very narrow context (historically) to create a meal. Only after you know this grammar backwards and forwards can you truly break free into true creativity. Science helps.

Needless to say, mastering different grammars is insanely hard work. It's far easier for cooks to get a superficial understanding of some foreign cuisine, just use the local grammar of cooking instead of mastering a foreign one, and make something vaguely in that style. It would've been even more the norm in older times since travel and authenticity were so hard. In time, the dish gets appropriated into the local cuisine and becomes "native".

So how does one distinguish incompetence at rendering a foreign cuisine from a slapdash effort from a  deliberate rethinking/reworking?

The answer lies in a similar one from the world of art.

In order to break the rules, you first have to understand and master them.

Not many people know that Picasso was a master draftsman and painter. His early paintings where he copies the classical works and even the Impressionists and out-flanks them are not well known. It's only after complete mastery of older techniques that that he broke new ground both aesthetic and technical. The same goes for Matisse.

It always pays to master different grammars. Picasso "borrowed" shamelessly from African art, and almost all painters of that era borrowed extensively from Japanese art. So it goes with any artistic endeavor.

The bias should be towards mastery of grammar and technique. The "going beyond" follows as a natural consequence.

The Science and Art of Indian Cooking†

Indian cooking is synonymous with its use of an immense array of spices. In fact, that's what makes Indian cooking unique^‡. The sheer amount of technical apparatus that is brought to bear on the subject of spices.

Chez CC, we tend towards the obsessive and completist bent so let's expound on it.

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start — as Julie Andrews once sang.

What constitutes a spice?

It's a dried seed, dried root, dried bark, or dried vegetable/fruit whose primary role is for flavoring food. They rarely have nutritional value although most spices have considerable anti-microbial and anti-fungal properties which are an important reason that they are so heavily used. The other reason would be pleasure, of course.

There are at least 20-25 spices in the Indian repertoire and that's just what the CC can think of off the top of his head. There are at least 20-25 relatively more obscure ones. (Obscurity, needless to say, being relative.)

Simple combinatorial mathematics tells us that the number of combinations of these spices is going to be vast^§ particularly when they are combined with other ingredients like nuts, souring agents, oils, etc.

There are eight basic techniques (and a bunch of auxiliary ones) that you need to master to really get a feel for the complexity of the subject.

On the first axis are the state of the spices. They can either be:

• Whole, or
• Ground.

On the second axis are things we can do to the spices. We can keep them:

• "As-is".
• Dry-roast them.
• Fry them in oil.
• Soak in liquid overnight.

You can do the combinatorial math yourself: 2 x 4 = 8.

Classically speaking, if you were to take a class on Indian cooking, there would two techniques that would be emphasized — bhunaao and tadka (a.k.a. chaunk, baghar, etc.)  Except that both of these are best understood as variations of exactly one of the eight. They are whole spices fried in oil. We'll come back to a discussion of these important techniques but it's useful to point out right now that both the two classical techniques fit into exactly one of the eight categories. Whole spices fried in oil.

There's seven more that we need to discuss in detail and that's even before we get to the variants of one of them. (Brevity only works if the subject can be distilled down into a brief summary.)

The biggest distinction is whether the spices are left whole or ground up into a powder.

When they are left whole, they will flavor the dish but they are meant to be left at the side of the plate when eating since they turn inedible. They give up their flavor to the dish but they are disposable. Smaller spices like cumin, caraway, sesame, etc. are edible but the larger ones are not. They won't do any harm just that it's not fun to chew them.

There is a reason that spices are stored whole. Spices mainly consist of a vast array of aromatic molecules which  is what we love about them. The moment they are ground, we are increasing the surface area by an incredible amount and the volatile molecules start escaping. Even worse, the complex organic compounds start oxidizing. That's why pre-ground spices basically taste like dust. All the good stuff is long gone. There are a few exceptions like ground dried green mango (aamchur) and ground chili peppers (laal mirch) but they are the exception not the rule. (Really experienced Indian chefs will tell you that fresh red chilies have strong citrus notes but the dried and ground ones do not.)

The greatest gift of modern times to the art of Indian cooking is the simple coffee grinder. It makes easy work out of the hardest part which was pounding the living daylights out of spices in a mortar and pestle to get them to a powdered form. (Ironically, we lazy-ass modern-day soft-as-silk cooks can make far superior food compared to our rugged "hard-working" ancestors. Take that, bitches!)

Whole spices as-is generally apply to the smaller spices — cumin, caraway, nigella (kalonji), ajwain, sesame, fennel, etc. You get the taste the spice as it actually is.

Ground spices as-is is a common occurrence in desserts e.g. cardamom, nutmeg, etc. You will get a much stronger hit of the spice because of the surface area. You also see this in savory cooking with spices like dried ginger (saunth)  and dried green mango powder (aamchur).

One of the two great techniques of Indian cuisine is dry roasting the spices. It intensifies their flavors. You dry roast the spices on a skillet in the order of size in order to prevent them from burning. As each spice is done, you set them aside to use individually or together as the case may be. This is a complex transformation and changes the nature of the spices. Cardamoms take on an intensity beyond the normal. Small seeds like cumin, caraway (shahjeera), and fennel will turn darker and far more intense. Black pepper will puff up and become even more aggressively black-peppery and cloves change shape and take on a dark fierceness. Mace (javitri) and dried cinnamon leaves (tej patta) turn pale brown and stronger in flavor.

The CC can't think of any dish that just uses the dry-roasted spices (but his knowledge is not infallible.) They are almost always ground to a powder. Almost all the masala's that you get commercially follow this pattern. They are dry roasted and ground. Learning how to do this in the right proportions is the single most important feature of Indian cuisine.

Soaking spices in liquid and using them is another technique. Traditionally, there are only two soaking agents — water and milk. Soaking mellows out the more aggressive notes of the spice and gives them a very subtle and rounded flavor. The milk used is almost always full fat since a lot of the compounds will dissolve in fat but not in water. The grinding is mostly done so that the larger more inedible spices can actually be eaten. (Yes, technically speaking, this is a paste not a powder. The CC gets it but the classification still makes sense.)

The same technique is used for nuts which while not technically spices are frequently treated by Indian cooks as being under the same umbrella. Both soaked nuts and soaked finely-ground nuts feature heavily in Indian cooking.

Why do the spices and nuts transform? Many of the spices and nuts are actually seeds so when you soak them in liquid, you are starting out the sprouting process which is a complex transformation and you get a different set of complex volatile compounds to work with.

While the spices soaked in milk would be ground with the milk, the nuts soaked in milk e.g. walnuts are drained and the milk discarded. The milk takes away the more aggressive bitter notes of the walnuts and makes them sweeter and more rounded.

One of the great technical pastes is that of poppy seeds soaked overnight in just a bit of water. The resulting paste is just absolutely superb. Stir-fry with a few other spices (cumin, whole red chilis) and almost any vegetable and you have a rocking dish.

The second great technique of Indian cuisine is to fry the spices in oil or ghee. Two things happen when you do this. You get the same effect as dry roasting because of the way frying works. In addition, the volatile compounds, which are generally soluble in oil, make the oil intensely flavored. When the dish is cooked with water in it, the emulsion of the oil and water brings out the spice flavorings. (Note that this would not be possible with just water because the organic compounds are typically insoluble in water.)

This complex change in chemistry means that this technique has a bunch of variants. One is to pan-fry the spices in the barest minimum of oil and then grind them to a powder. These various powders can be stored but not for long because the oil has a tendency to go rancid in the intense Indian heat. However, it will store in a dry cool place for about a year or the refrigerator which is the typical usage pattern of these ground masala's. (You will often see the use of nuts or dried coconut all ground with spices in masala's of this nature.)

The second is to pan-fry it with some oil until it just starts to stick and brown. This is the classical technique of bhunaao which is one of the most important arsenals in the repertoire.

Classical bhunaao is tricky. You use both whole spices and powdered ones. Generally speaking, the powdered ones are also dry-roasted first although this is not a given. You need high heat at the start to get the oil really hot but then you need to turn it down when the powdered stuff goes in and you need to stop right before the mixture burns by adding wet stuff. Experienced chefs add either a tablespoon of water to make it stop burning or wet ingredients like chopped onions. It's not as hard as it sounds but it does take some experience.

The last technique is to intensely heat up a small amount of oil in a specialized ladle. Whole spices are added to it and when they fry the entire mixture is plunged into a pre-made dish which is generally quite watery. This means that there's this wild theatrical aspect to watching sizzling oil and a hot metal ladle go into water which can be quite dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. This is the classical technique of tadka. The spices sizzle and pop dangerously in the oil but the final dish will be intensely flavored by the spices and the oil.

These techniques are not mutually exclusive. Many complex dishes rely on combinations of these three techniques. You may first fry a few whole spices in oil then cook the dish, and add some dry-roasted ground spices when cooking and finish off the dish either with a tadka or with more dry-roasted ground spices. The complexity of the layered flavoring comes from the interaction of these simpler techniques.

Indian cuisine has a seemingly infinite^¶ aspect to it because of the sheer number of spices, combinations and techniques. However, almost all of it is reducible to just these eight ideas. The number of combinations is vast mathematically but it's possible to get a handle on the subject by approaching it in analytic fashion.

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† The CC was sorely tempted to title this post The Eightfold Way but he refrained.

‡ All the other techniques of drying, roasting, frying, grilling, steaming. boiling, par-boiling, and baking are universal. These eight techniques were already enumerated in classical Sanskrit literature. The complex usage of spices is what sets Indian cuisine apart from the rest of the world.

§ Not kidding. We're looking at something like 2⁴⁰ (= 10¹²) combinations. Not all combinations will be tasty but even accounting for that we're looking at something like 10⁹ combinations.  As long as you live for a million years eating Indian food thrice a day, you'll get to try them all. Even in a practical way, there are at least a thousand combinations which will take you three years to get through. The "vast" part is not being exaggerated.

¶ Obviously, it can't be infinite.

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Panha (Green Mango Drink)

In this insane heat, you need a drink to cool you down. This is a classic Indian drink found all along the West Coast of India.

The two spices added (cardamom, fennel) are quite cooling. The salt is needed to balance the sweet-sour taste and also to act as a restorative in the insanely hot summers when you're sweating out all that salt.

The recipe below basically makes a concentrate. You add ice and dilute the drink with some cold water and drink it. Even though it's not traditional the CC really loves to add seltzer water instead of ice water.

The saffron is non-negotiable. You need it for both the taste and the color. The drink should be this really beautiful yellowish-orange color.

Ingredients

2 raw mangoes (frozen is fine)
1 cup jaggery (substitute by brown sugar)

2 tbsp. cardamom
1 tbsp. fennel
1/2 tbsp. black salt

1 large pinch saffron

Recipe (Panha Pulp)

Note: Raw mangoes are found in the frozen section of most Indian stores.

Cut up the mangoes if you have fresh ones. Otherwise combine the frozen mangoes, the jaggery (or brown sugar) with some water and bring to a boil. Cook for about 12 minutes at medium heat until the mangoes are tender. (You'll only need about 6-7 minutes for the frozen ones).

Meanwhile, combine the cardamom, fennel and black salt and grind to a fine powder in a coffee grinder.

Take the mangoes off the heat and add the spices (including saffron) to it. Let it sit for about 2-3 minutes.

Put the mixture in a blender and blend really fine.

Pass the pulp through a fine sieve and store. This will easily last 2-3 weeks in your refrigerator. More if you freeze it.

Recipe (Panha)

Take 2-3 tbsp. of the panha pulp and combine with ice and cold water. Mix thoroughly and consume. You can add some more salt and/or sugar to taste.

Indian-Style Chinese Corn Soup

If you are not aware of the concept of "Indian-Chinese" food, you are in for a small shock and a treat to follow.

Chinese immigrants migrated from the Hakka region to Calcutta in the 19th-century when it was the de-facto economic capital of India under the British Raj. The laborers were the dark underbelly of the opium trade. Like all immigrants, the path to not being bonded laborers was to open food eateries. (It's the same today right now in modern-day New York!)

They brought with them their techniques but rapidly discovered that neither pork ("Muslim") nor beef ("Hindu") was going to work in the new situation. Additionally, the population wanted a different set of spices than what the immigrants were used to. However, adaptability is the name of the game as you might guess from the entirely analogous fact that there's no such Cantonese dish as "Chop-Suey" — it's a Chinese-American idea catering to vague Chinese ideas about American tastes in the 19th century from whence it spread nation-wide and thence world-wide.

And in the same vein, "Indian-Chinese" fusion cuisine was born.

It was a blockbuster hit from day one because the one fact about human nature that never changes is that we crave novelty.

Money makes the world go round so when the economic capital of India moved from Calcutta to Mumbai, the immigrants and the dishes followed. Now they are ubiquitous all over India.

This is a classic corn soup.

Corn is not Chinese, of course. Nor Indian. It's New World. Its global nature originates from the Spanish conquest of the New World after which it made its way to Europe and eventually along the Silk Road to most of Asia. There are multiple layers of fusion hooked up in this single dish.

It's emphatically not a high-falutin' dish. It's pretty low-brow.

The CC has wondered for the longest time how they got the tangy flavor in the vegetarian versions that they make?  How was it that you could get a superior version in any crap town in India than what he was making at home?

It took a while but it finally struck like the biggest "DUH!" of all times.

"Of course! They are using MSG."

We can now add Japanese 20th-century science to the fusion. Just to recap, we are now talking about Pan-American corn, Spanish conquest, Chinese immigrants and adaptation, Indian flavors and techniques, and Japanese food technology in a single dish.

It's umami that is making all the difference. So by substituting the MSG with the functionally-equivalent dashi, we have a winner with the exact same taste. BINGO!

Why does the recipe work in the first place? What makes it successful?

It's corn soup that's nutritious with a "hit-me-again" umami taste that's off the charts. You can add any protein to it. It's cheap, easy to make, and easy to sell. It reheats well. You can make it ahead of time. It's basically street food is what it is. The only thing stopping it from being street food is the fact that it's a soup — too hard to serve on the street.

So as the CC unambiguously pointed out above, it's low-brow but he means that in the best non-pejorative sense of the word. This dish is simply awesome.

There are a few standard variants — you can add shredded chicken or shredded crab or prawns; and/or a beaten egg.

If you have never had this, you are totally missing out.


Ingredients

Paste

1/2" ginger
3 cloves garlic
4 green chillies
2 scallions (both white and green parts)

1 can "cream-style" corn
1 cup fresh corn (frozen is fine)

5-6 cups dashi

1 cup carrots (diced fine)
1 cup green beans (cut into very thin rounds)

1 tbsp. corn starch
6 tbsp. ice water

salt
white pepper

To Serve

1 scallion (diced into fine rounds)

cilantro (finely chopped)

3 green chillies (diced into fine rounds)
1/2 cup vinegar

soy sauce

Recipe

The recipe is straightforward. It's the side servings that require a little explanation.

There are four conventional ones — soy sauce, finely diced cilantro and scallions are self-explanatory. The last is the super-spicy chillies plonked in a neutral vinegar (rice vinegar works!)

You can add as much of each as you like including the fact that you can just add the vinegar minus the chillies.

First prepare the paste. Just use a food processor to grind the ginger, garlic, green chillies, and scallions together.

Heat up some oil. Fry the paste languidly for about 6 minutes. Add the carrots and beans and let it fry for 3 minutes. Add the creamed corn and the dashi. Add salt and white pepper to taste.

Bring to a boil. You can skim off the fat if you like. Let it cook for 10 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, add the corn starch to the ice water and let it mix. It will not "dissolve". You are making a suspension. Whip well and add to the mixture.

Serve with the fixin's!