Spicing: the homemade art in India

In India, the balance of spices in a dish is often given more weight than anything else. In India, the yearly tradition of pickling begins at this time of year. The flesh of chopped small green mangoes is seasoned with salt, turmeric, and spices like fenugreek, asafoetida, fennel, kalaunji, and a pinch of red chili powder.

The achaar will then be allowed to pickle in oil and sunlight for a few days before it is ready. The flavor of this mango pickle is influenced by the combination of spices that women add using their seasoned intuition rather than exact measurements, making it comparable to that of many other households in Uttar Pradesh.

However, in these days of convenience food, it is also possible to find a roughly similar blend sold as a generic “achari masala,” which can be instantly added to pickles, vegetables, and meats by cooks who are uninformed about a fundamental aspect of Indian cuisine: how spices are used in particular ways depending on the season, the region the recipe is from, and, most crucially, the ingredients.

When my mother pickles red chillies in the winter, her spice mix changes: rai or brown mustard seeds replace fenugreek.

Since the main ingredient – chilli – is bitter, there is an instinctive understanding that you cannot add bitter fenugreek seeds to the mix. Instead, there is amchoor powder for tartness, coriander for a whiff of sweetness, crushed cumin and rock salt to balance the flavours and provide heat suitable for the winter chill. These specific ways in which we use our spices makes Indian food tough for beginners to cook. Anyone can follow recipes and pick up packaged masalas but creating regional and seasonal flavours requires a deep understanding of how spices are combined to balance tastes.

Like classic combinations in other cuisines – rosemary-potatoes, avocado-chilli and tomato-basil – Indian cuisines too have their own classic combinations.

This is something that is usually overlooked because as chef Manjit Gill says, “There are recipe books but no book that teaches the principles of Indian cooking.” Home cooks instinctively cook up traiditions combinations, which are based on Ayurvedic principles even if this knowledge itself is lost.

Combinations like potatoes with fenugreek seeds, green mango or okra with fennel, eggplant with onion seeds and fish with ajwain (carom) are all classic flavours of Indian cookery which every home cook instinctively knows.

If you study these at a deeper level, you realise they have come about as a result of balancing the heating-cooling doshas and as a result of balancing the heating-cooling doshas (ascribed to each ingredient in Ayurvedic texts) and as a result of balancing tastes (sweet, sour, salt, bitter, astringent and pungent). In theabsence of this understanding, a cook may douse a preparation like eggplant (bitter) with garam masala laced with pepper and successfully kill it.

Garam masala is employed in India as a garnish to enhance the flavor of foods. “Indian cuisine incorporates spices at various stages of preparation. To begin with, less volatile and powerful spices are employed in a crushed or whole form before being fried in oil to extract their flavor. Green cardamom and other more fragrant varieties are added at the end for a frothy aroma. According to restaurateur and chef Marut Sikka, “this generates a sort of pyramid of smells. ” The skillful blending of tastes that is the hallmark of Indian cuisine is what he is describing, much like the creation of a perfume.

According to Sikka and Gill, garam masala may have been developed as a trick to cover flaws in simple cooking, since it is always added at the conclusion and not at the beginning of a meal.

The masala, which was originally made with a mix of “hot” spices with a preponderance of pepper, may have also been created solely for heartier winter dishes like meat stews in order to keep the body warm. Interestingly, conventional households in Old Delhi use distinct homemade garam masala in the winter and summer. “Summer masala doesn’t include all ingredients. The warm taseer (effectiveness) of cloves, nutmeg, and mace makes them unsuitable for use in the summer.

The curry powder muddle

The Western world has never fully grasped the mix of spices. Henrietta A Hervey’s 19th century cookbook for English memsahibs (madams) provides a window into the complete chaos surrounding these. Hervey provides recipes for three curry powders: Madras curry powder, Bombay curry powder, which represent the three presidencies during the British raj. The British are credited with inventing curry powder, as we all know. And by reading the recipes, one may see that the British understood very little about regional foods.

The Madras curry powder, for example, lists three-fourths of a pound of saffron as an important ingredient. The logic doesn’t apply here because saffron is not native to south India. In conclusion, the recipes are fairly similar, with only slight variations in the amounts and the inclusion of cinnamon in the Bengal dish.

Luckily, curry powder isn’t used much in India. And since each house and area in India employs its own blend of spices, there is still a great variety in cuisine. The bottle masala used by East Indians and the goda masala and sambhar powders are two examples of practicalities.

The home cooks, who began creating and storing their own spice blends, continue to use their unique recipes, which change from house to house. But the packaged retail versions will not just steal India’s culinary diversity but also the understanding of spicing that is ingrained in the Indian psyche. As a result, one of the main obstacles to the widespread presence of Indian cuisine at the global level is demystifying the use of spices and educating the public about its nuances and complexities.