Biting through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America's Heartland

2. Two Brides

2 Two Brides M y part of the Mukerjee-Banerji narrative begins with spices. Women have always wielded ginger in my family: ginger as well as many other tiny pieces of larger things. I was too young to ask which spices my mother used in Kansas and my grandmother used during my first trips to India, but my nose selected what it needed. When you get down to it, what tied food traditions across centuries of births and deaths, two continents, and three primary languages in my family were aromatic bits and pieces. This was true across India. Just as Pittsburg’s popular fried chicken restaurants serve spaghetti as well as German potato salad as standard side dishes—disparate heritages together on the plate—an Indian kitchen reveals culture in its traditions. Historically, there was no tight connection among the people of the Indus; all were from princely states with their own foods, customs, and calendars. If there was a common denominator in their recipes, it was the imaginative use of spices, with each one bringing a special flourish to a dish. It was this medley of tastes that perked up plainer dishes and gave Indian food its unique character. India is more than a million square miles divided into thirty-one states and territories—not as big as the United States, but nothing to sneeze at geographically speaking. Terrain, local produce, history, and religion all play a role in the amazing variety of foods in India. The few dishes Westerners are 16 Two Brides used to seeing in Indian restaurants skim the surface of the food offered in one region. Some say Hindu Punjabis forced back across the border at the time of Pakistan’s partition from India started the first restaurants in India in 1945. Their beehive-shaped tandoori ovens, which heat to 1,000°F, cooked bread, meat, and fish with astonishing speed, and they remain the perfect technology , even today, for this feat. Now, a mix of Punjabi and Mughal cuisine has become standard restaurant fare both in India and abroad. Mughal descendants of Barber, who conquered India in 1526 and founded an Islamic empire that lasted until 1857, produced strong Persian influences in the food of certain regions in the north, my Bengali food included. The distinctive use of fresh and dried fruit, cashews, pistachios, and almonds in meat dishes as well as the use of a great many dairy products marked this cuisine. In my family recipes, this influence shows up in the dried raisin Mom inserted into each savory minced meat chop, the almonds in chicken biryani, the pistachios garnishing milk-based Bengali sweets. Another mark of Mughlai foods was the use of as many as twelve spices in a single dish, including the most expensive of them—saffron, cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves, all common spices in my mother’s kitchen, with the exception of saffron, which was harder to come by in Kansas. History was also clearly revealed in the food of Goa on the southwestern coast, an area held by the Portuguese in the past. Goans eat pork and duck, meats rarely seen in India outside the area, and introduced the use of the chili pepper to India. (So if you don’t like the heat in some Indian foods, you are actually traditional—preferring flavorful but not hot dishes.) Goans also use vinegar, another Portuguese legacy, not tamarind, as is common in other areas of India, as a souring agent in dishes like vindaloo and for their chutneys. The anglicized word curry might stem from kari, a South Indian word for “sauce,” or from tarkari, a North Indian dish—but that is most likely happenstance . Clearly the sahibs and memsahibs loved the flavors of India. When they returned to England, they had their cooks grind up a mix of spices to sprinkle on staid fare. The world now knows this as “curry powder,” and whatever is cooked with it is curry, not to be confused with curry leaves, which are sometimes used as flavoring, usually in whole form, in some Indian recipes. But a whole gamut of spices is needed to produce the banquet of foods in India, and the women of my family knew it: asafetida powder, cumin, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, mustard seeds, fenugreek, black Two Brides 17 pepper, ginger, saffron, nutmeg, turmeric, bay, and more. In cooking, they sometimes left the spices whole and sizzled...