Indian cuisine

"Ibn Battuta’s description of the preparation of samosa would make one’s mouth water even today: “Minced meat cooked with almond, walnut, pistachios, onion and spices placed inside a thin bread and fried in ghee.”"

"Pāṇini, ArthŚā, BṛSam and Vṛkṣ(S) define the word [for wheat] as a type of grain distinct from barley and rice [...] Additionally, NāmaMā makes a curious remark: it is a mlecchabhojya, 'a food of barbarians‘."

"The savage, by his chace and the perpetual war in which he lives with the elements, is enabled to devour almost raw the flesh of the animals he has killed. In more civilised nations, the plowman from his labour is enabled to digest in its coarsest preparations the wheat he has sown. Either of these foods would destroy the common inhabitant of Indostan, as he exists at present: his food is rice. To provide this grain, we see a man of no muscular strength carrying a plough on his shoulder to the field, which the season or reservoirs of water have overflown. This slender instrument of his agriculture, yoked to a pair of diminutive and feeble oxen, is traced, with scarce the impression of a furrow, over the ground, which is afterwards sown. The remaining labour consists in supplying the field with water; which is generally effected to no greater a toil than undamming the canals, which derive from the great reservoir. If in some places this water is drawn from wells, in most parts of India it is supplied by rain; as the rice in those parts, when the rainy season is of two or three months duration, is always sown just before this season begins. When reaped, the women separate the grain from the husk in wooden mortars, or it is trampled by oxen. Instead of hedges, the field is inclosed with a slender bank of earth. A grain obtained with so little labour, has the property of being the most easily digestible of any preparation use for food, and is therefore the only proper one for such an effeminate race as I have described. There is wheat in India; it is produced only in the sharper regions, where rice will not so easily grow, and where the cultivator acquires a firmer fibre than the inhabitant of the plain. It was probably introduced with the Alcoran, as all the Mahomedans of northern extraction prefer it to rice, as much as an Indian rejects a nourishment which he cannot well digest even in its finest preparation."

"Water is the only drink of every Indian respectable enough to be admitted into their assemblies of public worship, as all inebriating liquors are forbore through a principle of religion; not that the soil is wanting in productions proper to compose the most intoxicating, nor themselves in the art of preparing them for the outcasts of their own nation, or others of persuasions different from their own, who chuse to get drunk. They have not equally been able to refrain from the use of spices and these the hottest, without which they never make a meal. Ginger is produced in their gardens as easily as radishes are in ours; and chilli, the highest of all vegetable productions used for food, insomuch that it will blister the skin, grows spontaneously: these, with turmeric, are the principal ingredients of their cookery, and by their plenty are always within the reach of the poorest. A total abstinence from animal food is not so generally observed amongst them as is imagined; even the Bramins will eat fish; but as they never prepare either fish or flesh without mixing them with much greater quantities of spices than Europeans suffer in their ragouts, animal food never makes more than the slightest portion of their meal, and the preference of vegetables, of which they have various kinds in plenty is decisively marked amongst them all. The cow is sacred every where: milk, from a supposed resemblance with the ‘amortam’ or nectar of their gods, is religiously esteemed the purest of foods, and receives the preference to vegetables in their nourishment. If the rice harvest should fail, which sometimes happens in some parts of India, there are many other resources to prevent the inhabitant from perishing: there are grains of a coarser kind and larger volume than rice, which require not the same continuation of heat, and at the same time the same supplies of water, to be brought to perfection: there are roots, such as the Indian potatoe, radish, and others of the turnip kind, which without manure acquire a larger size than the same species of vegetables in Europe, when assisted with all the arts of agriculture, although much inferior to those of Peru, of which Garcilaffa della Vega gives so astonishing a description: there are ground fruits of the pumpkin and melon kind, which come to maturity with the same facility, and of which a single one is sufficient to furnish a meal for three persons, who receive sufficient nourishment from this slender diet. The fruit-trees of other countries furnish delicacies to the inhabitant, and scarcely any thing more; in India there are many which furnish at once a delicacy and no contemptible nourishment: the palm and the coco trees give in their large nuts a gelatinous substance, on which men, when forced to the experience by necessity, have subsisted for fifty days: the jack-tree produces a rich, glewy, and nutritive fruit: the papa and the plantain-tree grow to perfection, and give their fruit within the year: the plantain, in some of its kinds, supplies the place of bread, and in all is of excellent nourishment. These are not all the presents which the luxuriant hand of nature gives as food to the inhabitant of India…The sun forbids the use of fuel in any part of the year, as necessary to procure warmth; and what is necessary to dress their victuals, is chiefly supplied by the dung of their cows."

"Should any European enter their houses, they imagine them to be the polluted: neither will they eat or drink anything that has been touched by Europeans, or even Moors, who they hate – and not without reason, for they are a lazy, haughty people, oppressing without mercy where they have any power."

"The food of those who can afford it is partly of meat, mutton of goats or sheep, which sells at about three pence per pound. Beef is not procurable, as the Sikh ruler punishes the death of a cow capitally. The chief food of the people is vegetable; turnips, cabbages, and radishes, the Sinhara, or water-nut, and rice. The turnips are purple, or reddish, and speedily become woolly: the radishes are mostly white and strong: the cabbages do not head, but the leaves are frequently stripped. Besides these, lettuces, spinach, and other common vegetables are in extensive use, boiled into a sort of soup, with a little salt, or even the leaves of the dandelion, dock, plantain, and mallow; and the catkins of the walnut are employed as food, seasoned with a little salt, mustard, and walnut oil... Another principle article of the food of the common people, the Sinhara, or water-nut, grows abundantly in the different lakes in the vicinity of the capital, and especially in the Wular lake, which yields an average return of ninety-six to a hundred and twenty thousand ass-loads a year. It is fished up from the bottom in small nets, and affords employment to the fishermen for several months. It constitutes the almost only food of at least thirty thousand persons for five months in the year. After being extracted from the shell the nuts are eaten, raw, boiled, roasted, fried, or dressed in various ways, after being reduced to flour. The most common preparation is boiling one ser of the flour with two quarts of water, so as to form a sort of gruel, which, though insipid, is nutritive. The Sinhara, in the shell, is sold in about a rupee per load... Another article of food derived form the lakes is the stem of the Nymphaea Lotus. In the autumn, after the plate of the leaf has begun to decay, this has acquired maturity, and, being boiled till tender, furnishes a wholesome and nutritious article, which supports, perhaps, five thousand persons in the city for nearly eight months."

"Of the poverty of these people, however, I had no idea till I this day saw the bread they eat. It is the grain of a kind of holcus, and looks like clover-seed: the flour, bran, husk and all, is made into thick coarse cakes, like those for elephants, and these are not baked as the elephants’ bread is, but laid on the fire and scorched or toasted there, so that part is raw dough, part ashes. To such a people potatoes must, indeed, be an exceeding and obvious blessing."

"Beef is as much a forbidden food in the Punjab as pork is in Hindostan to the natives; and to kill a cow across the Sutlege would subject the perpetrator of the deed to almost certain death."

"Bullets for the kar sevaks, biryani for the Kashmiri militants."