Tandoori is Indian!

Merchant

You don't see it generally in Indian curry either (though you do in many Tamil dishes)--but the presence of the leaf doesn't define the curry.

There's always the assumption that until "recently" (pick your time frame), cultures were hermetically sealed until some violent disruption (Dutch, British, and Portuguese colonialism; Partition; the Cold War; globalization; the Internet, etc.) mixed everything up.

All of India's many subcultures are the product of millennia of intermingling and extra-mingling. Africa, Arabia, and SE Asia have influenced what we now think of as Indian culture--food, clothing, etc. As long as ships have sailed, stuff has been traded and new traditions created.

A lot of what we think of as essentially Indian is in fact brand new--tea, for example, was unknown on the subcontinent until the British brought cuttings from China and started to grow it.

Conversely, vindaloo--despite what high-minded syncretic musings you can find on the Internet--was invented in Britain in the 1960s, when the first curry houses opened.

India's great contributions to world culture come from its ability to digest trends and traditions and morph them into something entirely original. Bollywood is one example. Buddhism and Sikhism were cleaved out of Hinduism (Buddhism then split and one strand took over East Asia). The whole outsourcing / call center industry is now uniquely Indian. The subcontinent dominates cricket (in the stands and dusty village lanes, if not on the test pitches). Even Hindi is a kind of modern patois, with smatterings of English and Arabic thrown in, plus all the other subcontinental languages.

Pick anything "Indian," and you can see that it's the result of thousands of years of cultural exchange, a real map of human initiative and imagination.

crvlvr

My previous post questioning the varacity of Sanghvi dissppeared.. Hmm..


While I more or less agree with Merchant's post, about foreign invasion and trade having an impact on India's culture and over the centuries (for example for more than 200 years farsi/persian was the offcial language in Moghul courts) I'd be a little more cautious about giving credit to the writers of history rather than India. for example Tea:

Of course, it was the British understood the commercial value of Tea and began growing it in a large scale.

There are other staples used in Indian cooking like chillis, pototes and tomatoes that are, AFAIK, not of Indian origin.

Tandoori chicken, like kababs, probably date from historical times given the fairly simple procedure -- all it took was a piece if meat and a fire. Ofcourse, any given spice blend used on the chicken could be from more recent times.

robotvoice

as a vegetarian, the content of this thread is not of too much interest to me, but the title is funny!

goangoangone

The vindaloo in British curry houses is usually just another hot (spicey) curry. The vindaloo in Goa supposedly came about when Portuguese sea captains had pork steeped in vinegar and spices to prevent putrefaction in the heat.

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goangoangone

You can cook anything in a tandoor. It needn't necessarily be meat.

Amyth

Yes, and one most popular thing is Tandoori Roti...

Chef belly flopping the dough inside a hot oven to make oven fresh bread(roti) is a common sight in any Indian restaurant. But did you know, in many parts of north india, especially Punjab the concept of “Sanjha Chulha” i.e. Common Oven(Tandoor) still prevails. All the womenfolk of a village or a colony get together and use a common tandoor to make freshly baked bread (tandoori roti) for their respective families. The common tandoor is economical, a great fuel saver and provides an excellent platform for otherwise sheltered women to exchange ideas and daily news irrespective of their caste and creed.
Talk about community living and tandoori days!

Nick-H

Commercial growing of tea, like silk, belongs to China and was a closely guarded industrial secret.

The British sent in spies (early Industrial espionage) to bring seedlings out of China, and that is where India's commercial tea growing began.

That's not to say that a wild version of the plant may not have been growing near the Buddha. Mythology is very flexible, and tends to be told in terms that are familiar to the teller.

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scarbobby

when i was young in london we used to get curry for school dinners,but it tasted nothing like my mums it just had a strange taste when i grew older i discovered this was curry english stylereading books from 19 century they had the ingredients which were very different to ours maybe through lack of spice availability but to be honest i do like chips with curry sauce english style after a few drinks

ddevadatta

I agree except that this is not the privy of India alone but is true of every region and country. This is a function of human enguniety and human nature. Countless examples can be shown here for example in the States. Canjun or Creole cooking in Louisiana, for example.

Humans adapt, change, borrow, engulf, in terms of their needs.

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beach

A nursery kid answered to question about the national bird...
“It’s the Tandoori Chicken”

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Nick-H

I'd put that a different way.

I'd say ...whilst still remaining essentially Indian

rangss

Until recently I thought that Vindaloo is a dish made of potatoes while the whole world has been paraphrasing Indian cuisine as Tandoori and Vindaloo.

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Dilliwala

Of course u wud! Seeing that it's clear u don't know the second thing about India, despite where your travels have taken u. I agree with amid 100%.
The cuisine here changes with no less a degree of variation than it does in Europe as one travels, it probably does to a greater degree. What do u know about Mizo cuisine, for instance? Or Arunachali? That's a trick question anyway, no such cuisines exist - not by that name -they'll be split up into respective regions. Which reminds me - there isn't such a thing as Indian cuisine anyway. If it's used to define what is cooked in the sub-continent, it's way too general, even "North Indian" or "South Indian" is a very wide brush-stroke. Know what the difference is between Malabari, or Karwar, or Chettinad, for example? I'll bet not. Nor the difference between Kashmiri (wazwan) or Awadhi, to take another example.
Only a Eurocentric Europhile cud seriously say India can be compared to Italy cuisine-wise (I'm being polite here).
And as for cockles (yes, I know what they are) - to put it bluntly, no self-respecting non-veg Indian wud eat them, once they knew what they were!

Nor do u have much idea, if any, of what kind of cultural mixing has taken place here over the centuries - just the Kullu Valley is a good example. But then with your jaundiced view-point I seriously doubt u'd be able to appreciate the differences. BTW, if u're ever in Delhi at the end of January, I can strongly recommend the Folk Dance Festival to u (5 days, all states). It'll be an eye-opener. Maybe. And then again only partial, most states get to put on only 1 dance, some 2 - out of the hundreds each state (or often, regions within a state) has. And regional variations, well - if I take the example of one small state like HP - the dances from the districts of Solan, Kinnaur and Kullu are so different that even Indians can't identify then as belonging to one state, if no announcements were made.
Time for me to make a biased statement now - each Indian state has more folk dances than each European country!

This is borderline supremacism (trying VERY HARD not to use that other word). I can't believe the mods let this pass.
The CLEANEST of households have some of the hottest/spiciest cooking. But u've probably never been to one, which wud quite explain your otherwise indefensible view.

machadinha

Umm, there was something about a missing tongue-in-cheek smiley there.

Let's keep it civil, gents, ladies. Keep your knickers on and all

btw The theory of hot spices being used to combat microbes in say street food that may stand around for a while, and more generally because they tend to cool you off after use in a hot climate (like a hot shower) anywhere in the tropics, isn't unique to Mickey here. I wouldn't turn this around to say that there's something intrinsically unhygienic about such cuisines no (quite the contrary), but that's just me.

In any case -- can we keep this gentle?

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incitatus

Actually this sounds like a product of ignorance of the use of spices.
Many -esp older- people in Britain believe that the use of spices is to cover up the use of tainted food or rotten meat.

As a matter of fact historically spices were used in Europe to flavour dried or salted meat which had very little flavour when reconstituted.
These people forget that no amount of spices can purge rotten meat of its poisons so their use would have been a pointless exercise.

And, indeed, Indian kitchens are often the cleanest rooms in the home!!
Traditionally there were rules on bathing and wearing clean garments before entering and using the kitchen.