Multifarious dishes that international food channels flash on the TV screen appear strange, interesting, intriguing or even disgusting — depending upon the viewers’ preferences, ingredients used and tastes speculated. Yet, regional preparations in a country like ours with many cultures are not less confounding!
Foreigners wondering how painstaking it is to ‘inject’ each coil of jilebi with sugar syrup or, at the ‘art’ behind sticking single beaten rice with pieces of fried gram dal and sesame seeds in the popular Goud-Saraswat-Brahmin sweet dish panchkajai, may or may not exist. But the way I gulped the sugary milk meant to dunk the chiroti in, leaving the crispy delicacy literally high and dry, during my initial stint with Karnataka cuisines, is not!
Which dish should pair with what, which goes solo, which are the side dishes or which should be sparingly consumed, are a few posers that a heavily-laden regional thali presents to an outsider. The Rajasthani thali in a Rajasthani restaurant that my family took me to, on my last birthday would elaborate my point. The batti-dal-churma combination, the dozen-odd bowls with dishes of various consistencies, colors and flavours were just bewildering!
A joke has it that an old villager who was fascinated with the masala-dosa but did not know it by name walked into a city hotel and placed his order for a “the pregnant dosa” much to the amusement of others around! The same fate awaits a guest at a sit-in-traditional feast of a different region as he can’t distinguish the dishes by their names like his counterpart at the buffet table. The former has to peer into the serving pot brought in for a second serving to match its contents with that on the platter to decide about an extra serving!
Fancy names of food items like chandrakala, dabeli, basundi, mohanthal, kunda etc to name a few, make strangers confuse them with people.
Eating a regional dish is also a bit confusing! Patrodo, a Konkani favourite, is a steamed roll of spicy paste-smeared colocasia leaves while, khotte kadubu, steaming idli batter in jackfruit leaf baskets is a breakfast item. Once my nephew brought home his friend and at the breakfast table, instructed him to peel off the jackfruit leaf covering and eat the idlis. The lunch menu brought in the patrodo and the friend started peeling off the layers of steamed colocasia leaves from the slices raising peals of laughter!
All said and done, a family that eats together, does stay together. Likewise, a country that shares diverse food cultures grows healthier, happier and stronger through culinary integration.