The Magic Of Indian
Spices
Dishes like
pilaus may have come to us from West Asia, but it was India’s spice magic that
raised them to another level entirely
Many years ago, I wrote
that some of the food of Central Asia and the Middle East was a rough draft for
Indian cuisine. This led to (understandable) outrage and claims that I had
ignored the contribution of foreign visitors of our cuisine.
What about kebabs, I was
asked? Weren’t they a Middle-Eastern invention? What about the samosa? Arabs
brought it to India and variations of the original samosa (under such names as
sambusak) can still be found all over West Asia. And then there was the big
one: pilaus. Didn’t I realise that the first pilaus came from Turkey and other
Middle Eastern countries? Why was I going on and on about biryani’s Indian
flavours when it was clear that the dish came to India with Arab armies? And so
on.
My answer has always been
that while I have huge respect for the cuisines of West Asia, they have always
struck me as lacking the depth of Indian cuisines. (Yes, yes: I concede that I
haven’t travelled through the whole of the Middle East and that, as an Indian,
I am not exactly an unbiased or disinterested observer.)
I do not dispute that
samosas, kebabs and pilaus came to India from the Middle East. (Though biryani,
I think, was our own creation.) But I believe that these dishes were raised to
the next level of complexity and sophistication because of India’s secret
ingredient. Spice. Any Indian who eats a Middle Eastern kebab or pilau will
find it bland and unsophisticated because it will not have the complicated
spice flavours that are the hallmark of good Indian food. My view is that yes,
these dishes came to us from West Asia but it was India’s spice magic that raised
them to another level entirely.
Great Indian food is all
about spices. Do you know of any other country where so many of the great chefs
will refuse to part with the secret spice mixture that goes into each dish?
It’s not just kebabs and
pilaus. Go to any traditional restaurant anywhere in India and you will never
be able to get the chefs to reveal what the exact proportion of masalas is.
When fancy restaurants hire traditional chefs, they are shocked to discover
that the chefs will make their masala mixes at home and will come to the
kitchen with little packets of ready-made spice mixes.
Nor is this restricted to
North Indian food. I once shot a TV programme at Muthu’s Curry, the famous fish
head curry restaurant in Singapore. It turned out that only a few members of
the founding family knew the exact proportion of masalas that went into the
curry. Each morning, a family member would come and make the curry masala in
secret. The cooks would have to use that masala and would never learn what it
was that made the famous curry so special. Take away the spices and most Indian
food loses its distinctive identity. The reason why a Turkish pilau pales
before a Lucknawi pilau is because the man who made the Lucknawi dish used
spices. Compare any minced meat kebab from the Middle East to a shami kebab
(let alone a galouti ora kakori) and the Indian kebab will always have a more
complex taste because the Indian kebabchi has used complex spicing. Many people
in the Middle East (and the West) disagree violently with me. Some suggest that
I am making too much of the spice factor. If a pilau has meat and rice, then
surely it is the same dish everywhere, even if the Indian version has a little
more spice, they argue. So I was relieved last week to meet up with Dr Ganesh Bagler
who has spent many years researching the science of Indian food along with many
enthusiastic and gifted students and collaborators. Dr. Bagler specialises in
flavour molecules. This is an area of great interest to the food industry,
though not one that interests most chefs. But the chefs who have studied it
(such as Heston Blumenthal) have come to some interesting conclusions.
Traditional
Indian chefs keep their spice mixes a secret: many make them at home and come
to work with little packets
When we taste say, a
strawberry, we are actually tasting hundreds of different flavour compounds
that combine to give the strawberry its characteristic taste. This fascinates
the food industry, which tries to isolate the molecules that make up these
compounds. Then it merges many of these molecules in a lab to create the
strawberry flavour that goes into say, your strawberry ice cream.
Some of these molecules
are at the heart of what we regard as strawberry flavour. For instance, if you
mix ethyl butyrate, cis-3-hexenol, furaneol and gamma-decalactone, then these
four molecules will give you the essence of a strawberry taste even though a
real strawberry has many more flavour molecules. (OK. No more technical stuff
after this, I promise.)
All ingredients can be
broken down into flavour molecules. Research suggests that most Western recipes
combine ingredients that contain common flavour molecules. For instance,
asparagus and butter go well together because they share many flavour
molecules.
Often these similarities
extend to ingredients that would appear to have nothing in common. Modern chefs
make dishes that mix strong blue cheese with chocolate, a combination that
sounds wrong at an intuitive level. In fact, the two ingredients share 73
flavour molecules and work well together. A more famous example is white
chocolate with caviar, which sounds bizarre. But Heston Blumenthal, who found
that the two paired well, had them analysed and discovered that they had many
flavour molecules in common.
We know, thanks to the
work of Yong-Yeol Ahn at Harvard University that while Western recipes are
based on combining ingredients with similar (or the same) flavour molecules,
East Asian cuisine is the exact opposite. In Korea and Thailand, for instance,
recipes focus on combining ingredients that have few (if any) flavour molecules
in common. It is the contrasting flavours that make the cuisine so distinctive.
As far as I knew, nobody
had done similar work in India. But Dr. Bagler has followed roughly the same
methodology as the Harvard team and has analysed Indian recipes. He has come to
several interesting conclusions.
The first is that Indian
recipes do not follow the Western pattern. We choose ingredients that do not
share flavour molecules.
Secondly, if you were to
list out the ingredients that determine flavour, there are many regional
variations in India. But one thing is common across the subcontinent. The key
determinants of flavour (like the four molecules that give the strawberry its
essential taste) are spices. Even a tiny bit of spice will determine how a dish
can taste. Take away the little dash of spice and keep all the other
ingredients intact and the dish will taste totally different.
Here at last is
scientific proof of what I have long believed at an intuitive level: Indian
food is about spices. The quantity of masala in a pilau may be one-fiftieth of
the quantity of rice. But the dish gets its distinctive flavour from the spice.
The Harvard team led by
Ahn concluded that a few foods become the key signatures of a cuisine. In North
America, these include dairy (milk, butter, cream), eggs and wheat. In Korea,
they are ingredients like beef, ginger, pork, onion, soya sauce and rice.
Dr. Bagler says that in
India, these key ingredients would just be spices. No matter which regional
cuisine he studied, spice (to varying degrees) became the defining factor.
Which takes us back to
the origins of pilau and kebab. When we say that the basic ingredients of the
Middle Eastern kebabs and the Indian versions are broadly similar, we are
right. But that, as research has now conclusively demonstrated, is not the key
determinant of taste.
It is the flavour
molecules that determine the taste. And the spice mixes in our kebabs and
pilaus are uniquely Indian.
But I wish I knew more
about the flavour molecules in Middle Eastern food. Does the cuisine – like
Western food – rely on recipes that combine ingredients with the same flavour
molecules? Or is it like Indian food where the opposite is true? The Middle
East has its own herbs and spices. How important are those flavour compounds to
the final taste? I looked at the research but found nothing about Middle
Eastern food.
But, thanks to Dr.
Bagler, we do have research about Indian food. And it tells us that there is no
Indian food without spices.
VIR SANGHVI HT BR 22APR18
