The word curry is a topic sure to rankle desis; the debunking of this colonial category is the rare cause that can unite desis of all origins and persuasions in a chorus of righteous indignation. And rightly so: The reduction of the subcontinentÂ’s rich foodways to this one invented label has caused any number of ills, not least the viscous glop known as tikka masala, and more than a few upset stomachs.

But just because curry isnÂ’t authentically Indian doesnÂ’t mean it isnÂ’t authentically… something. TodayÂ’s New York Times has a review of a new book called “Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors,” by Lizzie Collingham — a book I’m excited to read, despite the kind of horrible cover art that has Manish breaking out in hives. It invites us to follow as curry spread around the world, picking up bits and pieces from each culture like some syncretistic religion. Curry may or may not be Indian, but it sure is global:

Samoans make a Polynesian curry using canned fish and corned beef. … Lots of diners would balk at curried chicken Kiev, but not Ms. Collingham. … One of her goals, in tracing the evolution of curry and the global spread of Indian cuisine, is to pull the rug out from under the idea that India, or any other nation, ever had a cuisine that was not constantly in the process of assimilation and revision.

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A San Franciscan named Nalin helped his roommate and six friends snarf down 100 hamburgers at one sitting in Vegas last Halloween. The greasy exploit is photoblogged here (via Boing Boing):

Throughout the weekend, Andy kept on saying: “We should go get a 100×100 at In-N-Out”… [The fast-food workers] were shocked. They said the biggest order they had before this was the 24×24… It’s one set of buns and ONE HUNDRED meat patties and ONE HUNDRED pieces of sweaty-oily cheese in between the buns. Clearly, the worst part of this experience wasn’t the meat… it was the sweaty cheese…

I think I ate about 20. I think Nalin ate about 20 as well (including the raw ones)… Number of people who barfed: 1… In-N-Out use to be one of my favorite things in the world. Now the thought of it makes me sick… [Link]

Beelzebub is the dæmon responsible for the cardinal sin of gluttony. Let’s hope Nalin isn’t Xtian Bro, as a mass moo assassin, you ain’t coming back a Hindu in your next life. And that next life might begin any day now — deadly sin is right. The good news is, you may be Takeru Kobayashi’s competitive eating nemesis.

I’m not sure why I’m surprised by this story. There’s nothing unusual about one tasty pair of buns surrounded by a hundred sausages and sweaty seas of cheese. That about sums up the college desi scene.

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Bukhara is a tandoori place in New York popular with many, including Bill Clinton. I’ve had one amazing meal there and one passable.

Samsas stuck to the sides of a tandoor

A NYT story on Central Asian restaurants in Queens decodes the origin of the name, the city of Bukhara in Uzbekistan. As a border culture, its food is an interesting mix of Indian, Persian and Chinese. Its samosa equivalent is stuck to the side of a tandoori oven like how roadside dhabas make chapatis.

Reflecting the influence of silk and spice trades, there are tastes of China and India everywhere. Every Bukharian menu offers a garlicky, chili-spiked Korean carrot salad, morkovcha koreyska, that is a legacy of Stalin’s mass deportations of ethnic Koreans from the far eastern Soviet Union to its western frontiers. At Tandoori Bukharian Bakery in Rego Park, a samsa – one of Asia’s many cousins of the Indian samosa – is deliciously spiked with cumin and baked against the walls of a clay-lined oven that Bukharians, like Indians, call a tandoor. [Link]

It probably got the samosa directly from Iran when the Persian empire absorbed the city. The restaurants sound a whole lot like hill stations in India:

A traditional Central Asian restaurant is little more than a stop for merchants and shepherds traveling the difficult road over the Pamir peaks; the ancient Persians called the region the roof of the world. These restaurants, called chai khanas, or tea houses, provided travelers in the most remote settlements with a place to warm themselves with pots of green tea… [Link]

There are Chinese influences on Bukharian food as well:

Farther north, bread and flour take over – especially lagman, hand-pulled noodles whose name evolved from the Chinese lo mein. Very popular among the Bukharians, lagman have been mastered by another Central Asian group, the Uighurs, who have a small community in New York… Uighurs are Muslim, and speak a language derived from Turkish… [Link]

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This is so cute — a non-desi journalist tries paan for the first time, with all the variness of a wegetarian trying a Chicken McNugget.

A rush of unfamiliar flavors flooded my tongue. After a few moments, I got nervous and spit it into my napkin. While I hoped that I wouldn’t later be punished by days in my hotel bathroom, part of me regretted the fact that I hadn’t had the full paan experience…

“What’s its appeal?” I asked. He looked at me as if I were crazy, like I was asking him why people liked chocolate. “It’s good. Everybody likes it…”

The first taste was one of overwhelming sweetness–from the rose syrup–and then I got a tang of menthol. The contents were crunchy, and the rose petal scent was strong. As I continued to chew and as the sweetness subsided, I began to taste the licorice flavor of the fennel and the warm spiciness of the cardamom…

It was strange and jarring, kind of how I remember very dark chocolate or Marmite tasting when I was a kid. But it wasn’t just the taste, it was also the mix of unusual textures–the feeling of chewing some mulch, twigs and gooey gel wrapped up in a leaf… [Link]

You can’t really use a clichéd food metaphor when you’re already reviewing food, but you just know this tai-pan has a plan B:

… it woke up my tired nose and jaded taste buds, like a walk through a crowded market in India… [Link]

The subtitle is ‘The new hot treat from India.’ This paandemic is new, didn’tcha know?

Related posts: Boing Boing discovers paan, Candy Cain

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Here at the Mutiny, we’re reduced to excerpting former guest bloggers on slow news days Because, y’know, they’re good. Spake Saheli on Snarkmarket about those who dislike Indian food:

It just reminds me too much of schoolchildren pointing and going, “eww, smelly Indian food.” It’s one thing if you don’t like the taste of cumin–you aren’t going to like Indian food. It’s another thing if you insist that it’s foul and anyone who likes it has issues. It’s not the idea that “Wow I really didn’t like this,” that I object to. It’s the implication that, therefore, neither will you, dear reader…

I hated fried bitter melon when I was a child, for instance, and now it’s one of my favorite foods. But I’d be insane to just dump a bowlful on your plate, you’d probably gag. I ate one at time, very slowly, over the course of many years until I liked it. And it’s a bad idea to force things on small children, b/c their sense of smell isn’t that well developed and is much more geared towards rejecting things. (Makes sense–keeps them from eating random stuff they don’t yet have the knowledge to reject.) [Link]

One of the bloggers adds that he dislikes Indo-Caribbean tamarind balls:

Tamarind balls were a particular sticking point. Our rejection of our parents’ delicacies was always taken as a full-on betrayal of our culturesMy Guyanese parents, aunts, and uncles all insisted they were an unparalleled taste treat; elder siblings and cousins sympathized with my disappointment. Our rejection of our parents’ delicacies was always taken as a full-on betrayal of our cultures, and met with sad diatribes about how Americanized we’d become.

Whenever we disdained one of her many Guyanese or British comfort foods, my mom would launch into wonderful stories about her childhood, how she loved tamarind balls, how she used to cry when her mother told her she couldn’t have any more of the sticky, spicy, sweet, sour snacks. And here we were, fêted with tamarind balls to our hearts’ content, and we refuse?! What could be wrong with us?… [Link]

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I failed to realize until only a couple of weeks ago that there exists an entire underground sub-culture of curry lovers. These people often hold normal 9 to 5 jobs only to come home to start a nightly party in their mouths. Many of them aren’t even [gasp] desi. Take for example the girls of Naughty Curry:

We at the Naughty Curry Kitchen do three (3) main things:

• We apply Indian spices and spicing techniques to ‘ordinary’ (for us) food, with an emphasis on being (mostly) simple, fast, and healthy or all of the above.
• We simplify or adapt traditional Indian recipes to fit our very special needs and our busy lifestyles.
• We experiment, ask lots of ‘what if’ questions, and tend to have lots of fun. And when something doesn’t quite turn out, we laugh.

Be bold. Come play with us.

Hell, they had me at “be bold.” Cooking of this nature is usually not talked about in mixed company. Old temple walls in India show people doing these kinds of things, but it is now taboo. The dishes they reveal are often downright subversive. Where else are you going to go to be taught how to prepare “G-spot mushrooms,” or “Dirty Masala Rice?” But…what makes someone turn to this type of lifestyle? It’s not natural. You don’t just fall into it. There is usually a moment of truth that leads someone down this path of liberation:

As for me [Courtney Knettel], I grew up in the Midwest U.S. of A. with a standard Oscar Meyer-Hamburger Helper childhood. Want to step up the flavor of those green beans? We’ve got three primary options: butter, salt, and cheese (and for those folks with a dash of flair: garlic salt and Lawry’s). Fortunately, my own imagination was expanded in my formative years under the influence of my Indian babysitter, who introduced me to what I called ‘magic sprinkles.’ Once I was ‘spiced’, I became isolated in my tastes. My family thought I was weird. (Actually, they still do.)…

By the time I finished my five-year college stint, I found most ‘ordinary American’ food to be, um, hard to swallow. Yet because I knew how to manifest my own spice-magic, I could quickly, easily and cheaply whip up my own sensational Indian-esque spin to my food. What’s more, I was increasingly attuned to a healthy way of eating, and spices, I quickly discovered, could transform vegetables into memorable experiences. At some point, I evolved into partaking of junk food, cheese and even meat only on occasion, and I don’t even miss it. Ergo, the spicing fixation that had once branded me a weirdo now infuses my life in ways that even I hadn’t imagined. [Link]

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It is getting out of hand. Not that I am complaining of course, but I think the Western media has finally caught on to Diwali mania. And in perfect IST fashion, the New York Times chimes in with their addition to the Diwali-themed articles, focusing on one of the most important facets of the Diwali holiday: mithai (Indian sweets). Yeah, many first and second geners claim to not like them, complaining of their over-sweetness or their unnatural colors. And then what is the deal with that silver stuff that covers so many of them (FYI it is actually real silver). The article, aptly titled “Festival of Lights, Parade of Sweets,” does a good job of getting into the nitty gritty of the role of mithai in Diwali and Eid and in South Asian society in general.

This week, in a coincidence of calendars, Hindus and Muslims from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are celebrating the most joyous holidays of the year. Hindus observe the festival of lights, Diwali, or Deepavali, which ushers in the new year; Muslims finish the holy month of Ramadan with Id al-Fitr, which signals the end of the monthlong daytime fast and a return to the sweetness of daily life. The two holidays, Hindus and Muslims here say, are utterly soaked in sugar. “You cannot go to anyone’s house at this time of year without a quarter-pound of something sweet,” says Padma Dasgupta, a writer in Jericho, N.Y.

Related post: Diwali Updates: Diwali Parking, India 2.0, Congressional Legislation, Sparklers, and Diwali Schlock Contest!

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