Two Indian Vegetable Dishes

My professor Helen recommended an Indian cookbook to me that someone had recently recommended to her, and I got to try out some of the recipes from it yesterday.  I think that any cookbook that tries to present the cuisine of an entire enormous and diverse region is going to encounter certain difficulties, and Indian food is no exception.  For one, most of the Indian food that gets served in American restaurants is the Punjabi cuisine of northern India.  Do you try to include the food of many different regions?  What about "inauthentic" dishes that bear the influence of still other cuisines, colonial and otherwise?  How much do you simplify the complex spice blends, and how often do you suggest substitutions for hard-to-find ingredients?  How much historical and cultural background, how much personal anecdote go into the intros and headnotes?  While housesitting recently, I spent a lot of time with another book, Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent, and it's a really impressive book with fabulous stories, photos, and recipes, but I'm never going to buy it: it's too big and too expensive.  Meanwhile, I start wondering about the way "ethnic" food gets framed by cookbooks: is it being presented by a totally authentic "native informant"?  Or by an Orientalist who's been there, experienced it all, and is able to distill, catalog, and report on this information for the audience "back home"?  (besides my last underdeveloped post on some of these issues, here's a post on veganideal that also addresses some of the same questions)  To be fair, I think the (Canadian?) authors of Mangoes & Curry Leaves do a really amazing job of sharing an incredible amount of passion, appreciation, experience, and knowledge while keeping an eye on their limitations as foreign visitors and as the authors of a book that can only be so long.  I also wonder about the politics of cookbooks that are co-authored, as Indian Home Cooking is, by an author who's originally from India and an American-born Caucasian.


In any case, Indian Home Cooking is an excellent cookbook that makes no pretense of being exhaustive, either across regional cuisines or within any particular one.  Instead, the author gives you the basic recipes and shows you how they might be adapted according to one's own ingredients or creative whims.  He typically makes very few simplifications or substitutions, but suggests how you might make them were it necessary.

The first things I made from this cookbook were two vegetable dishes that, I realized after beginning, were almost identical.  Oh well... these were just the vegetables I happened to have on hand.  I tried to differentiate them by adding nigella seeds to one, omitting coconut from one, using bay leaves in one but not the other, and adding garlic in one.  Both turned out quite well, but the amount of mustard seeds in the cabbage dish was a bit too much for my taste.  I also struggled to follow the directions, which have you frying the spices and coconut in oil for quite a while before adding the veggies--I ended up with burnt coconut and undercooked vegetables, which suggests to me that you need to cook at a lower temperature if you're going to follow this method.

The real highlight of my first adventure with Indian Home Cooking was a dal, about which I'll post next!

Stir-Fried Cabbage with South Indian Spices

(from Indian Home Cooking)

Ingredients

3 TB canola oil

1 TB yellow split peas

1 TB black mustard seeds

1 TB nigella (kalonji onion) seeds (addition)

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp red pepper flakes (substitution)

2 bay leaves (substitution)

*

1 small cabbage, cored and shredded (about 8 cups)

1/2 tsp salt

juice of 1/2 lime (or more)

Instructions

1. Fry spices in oil (do the split peas and mustard first, adding the rest after a minute or two).
2. Add cabbage and cook briefly, until slightly wilted.  Remove from heat, add salt and lime juice.  Serves 4.

*

Stir-Fried Mixed Summer Squash

(from Indian Home Cooking)

Ingredients

3 TB canola oil

1 TB black mustard seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds

1/4 tsp turmeric

1 tsp red pepper flakes (substitution)

1 clove garlic

1/4 c shredded unsweetened coconut

2 lbs squash, halved and sliced

1/2 tsp salt, to taste

Instructions

1. Fry spices and coconut in oil (do the split peas and mustard first, adding the rest after a minute or two).  Turn down the heat once you've added the coconut.
2. Bring heat back up to medium high, add squash, and cook until slightly soft.  Remove from heat, add salt.  Serves 4.