One wrong turn by Columbus!

(In this first of a three part series, here’s an interesting account of the advent and integration of potato with the Indian food cloud)

On his maiden voyage to discover the sea route to India, when Columbus took a wrong turn, he not only reached new shores thereby altering the landscape of history, but also triggered an unceasing turbulence in the cuisine culture and eating habits of people across the globe.

Food recipes have lives

Food recipes have biographies that are dynamic and ever evolving. These are shaped by a multiplicity of influences, a few of which may be traced through the written repositories of cookbooks. Many centuries hence, this blog would be one such digital cookbook that future generations would refer to. The cuisine embodied by the recipes that they record, combine multifarious influences, bringing together the local and global. The cookbooks of the past few centuries traverse the realm of the urban Mughal bazaar, as well as Iranian, Central Asian and even European influences. Recipes such as the zerbiryan (the predecessor of biriyani), for instance, seem to have developed from Iranian influences, but were distinctly Indian in the details of their preparation. Comparing the recipes in Indo-Persian cookbooks with those recorded in their Iranian counterparts of the Safawid period, it is apparent that despite some common elements, the recipes in Indo-Persian cookbooks represented a unique and distinct culinary tradition. A study of the manner in which new foods and vegetables were incorporated into Indian dietary traditions provides an instance of culinary dynamicity. There was a particular process by which this integration of potatoes, tomatoes and chillies into Indian food traditions was achieved. Eventually, the incorporation of these vegetables into Indian diets led to fundamental transformations in existing culinary practices. That is exactly the reason, why cuisines must be looked at, and appreciated as a process rather than as a frozen body or a structure.

How much ever one may see these food blogs as a light, breezy attempt at sharing ordinary as well as extraordinary facts about food of our times, a few centuries later, this would be seen as a valuable historical source to study the food patterns that existed in the 21st century. What we write and publish here, is in fact, history in some sort, pickled and preserved. If we can write, we are unknowingly, historians of our times.

Sea lanes of communication(SLOCs) are extremely significant for the global economy to sustain or thrive. All navies of the world aspire to provide a safe passage to their assets along the SLOCs, and many wars have been fought to protect these channels of trade. When Vasco da Gama landed on the Indian shores way back in 1498, and unveiled a path to the Indian sub continent, he not only opened the channel of trade, but also sowed the seeds of a series of battles of supremacy, conquests and European foothold over a faraway land. What followed was an unintended amalgamation of cultures, music, education, architecture and what I will focus upon here – the new culinary inclusions in the Indian perspective.

Image: Vasco da Gama meets the Zamorin of Calicut after arrival on the Malabar Coast of India

16th century saw the spread of European supremacy to far off continents, and their influence brushed on to the cuisine culture and agriculture in the conquered territories. The spread of Potatoes, tomatoes and chillies in vegetables and pineapples amongst fruits transformed the cooking habits in Europe as well as Asia. These vegetables reached India through the Portuguese.

ABOUT POTATOES

The potato is native to the South American Andes, and reached Europe by the mid-sixteenth century. The potato emerged as an important staple in many parts of Europe, but is consumed only as a vegetable in India and many other parts of the world. Historical accounts suggest that the potato must have been introduced in India sometime between the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the eighteenth century.

Tracing the early trajectory of the potato in India, George W. Johnson, a nineteenth century writer in an 1847 document states that a basket of potatoes, weighing about a dozen pounds, was offered by Warren Hastings, to the Governor of Bombay, and was considered a very acceptable present. On acceptance, the members of the council were invited to dine with the governor, to partake of the vegetable.

Somehow or other, the potato was introduced into Gujarat, and in process of time, Bombay became well supplied with it; so well that the market had ever an abundance at a low price, and very good yield. This indicates that potatoes were available in India during Warren Hastings’ tenure as governor-general (1773-1785), but that it was rare and expensive enough to be considered a valuable gift. By the 1820s, the potato had become common in Bengal and was also spreading rapidly to other regions of the subcontinent. The monthly bazaar accounts of the Calcutta Great Jail in 1824 regularly mention the potato. The fact that the vegetable had become part of the regular purchases for prison inmates indicates that it was no longer a rarity, but an item of everyday consumption.

Saalan – e – aalu

Another significant reference comes from a book of early nineteenth century titled Qoot-i Laa-yamoot.

Excerpt from an early 19th century cookbook

“It belongs to the class of arwī, shakarkand etc. that the Christians have brought from their islands to the country of Bengal. Now it has become abundant in Hind [North India] as well. It has also arrived in the country of the Deccan, but has not become very common. The potato is very tasty. Cook it in water and when it has softened, remove the thin peel that covers its skin, and eat with or without salt. It is very delicious.” ~Qoot-i-Laa-yamoot~

The entry goes on to briefly describe some other potato recipes, notably, meat with potatoes and potato mash (bharta). This description gives details on the potato’s penetration into various parts of the subcontinent. For the Deccani author of this text, the potato was a novelty that he was evidently excited about. At the same time, his description suggests that it had already established a happy home in other parts of the subcontinent.

The ‘Book of Delights’

Niyamatnama, or the ‘Book of Delights’ is a late 15th century cook book, whose only known copy of the manuscript is held at The British Library in London. This is a historically valuable recipe book, since it is indicative of the food patterns prevalent in India, almost middle of the last millennium. More than being a recipe collection, it is a remarkable historical source. The Niyamatnama offers cooking methods for numerous foods and drinks that its patron, Sultan Ghiyasuddin Khilji who ruled over Malwa from 1469 to 1500, enjoyed. This cookbook includes no less than eight different recipes just for making samosas. Clearly, like many of us, Sultan loved this fried snack. The samosa is one of those dishes, like tandoori or curry, that is so popular that it can serve as a moniker for the entirety of “Indian” cuisine. The recipes in the Niyamatnama present us with a big surprise: not even one of the variants mentions potato, the quintessential ingredient we associate with samosa-fillings today.

The missing potatoes…

In the Indian context, Samosa without the potato filling in the pre-eighteenth century sources might appear as a paradox, but it isn’t one bit surprising. While potatoes had been around in the subcontinent from the 17th century, it was only over the next hundred years that a majority of Indians would have become aware of their existence. It was during the 18th century that potato-production was keenly promoted by the English East India Company’s employees as an alternative to the Indian staple, rice. Several other ‘staples’ of today’s Indian cuisine – tomatoes, chillies, cashews and groundnuts, as well as fruits like papaya, guava and chikoo – originated in the “New World” among the indigenous people of South America. The Spanish conquistadors introduced them to Europe in the 16th century. From there, these plants made their way to India via European traders and colonialists, particularly the Portuguese.

Cuisine is an integral part of the local culture, but this is one mould that would shift shapes and tastes with the sands of time, since it cannot be shielded from external influences. The Niyamatnama may not have known the potato but it does reflect an earlier global synthesis: the coming together of ingredients from Central Asia and Persia like cumin (jeera) and qeema or minced meat, with local ingredients like ginger, cardamoms and cloves, among others. Food recipes, therefore, will always remain a work in progress.

Absorption in India

Other references indicate that potatoes had been cultivated around the 1830s on the Shimla hills as well as the hills surrounding Dehra Dun and the Khasia, Jaintia, Garo and Lushai hills of Assam. Roxburgh’s Flora Indica (1832) records the potato as being “very generally cultivated over India, even by the natives for their own use”. Likewise, in 1893, another British writer recorded the potato as being cultivated and eaten all over India.Thus, the preponderance of evidence on the entry and absorption of the potato in India indicates that the earliest significant references to the routine cultivation and consumption of the potato date to sometime towards end of the eighteenth century, and the vegetable seems to have spread somewhat unevenly to different parts of South Asia in the early decades of the nineteenth century. It is probable that the potato arrived earlier in areas of English settlement such as Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. By the 1820s and 1830s, it had made significant progress in acclimatising itself to the soil and culinary traditions of various regions in the subcontinent.

Integration with Indian Cuisine

The fact that the three new arrivals on the Indian soil – potato, tomato & chilli – found acceptance in India thus begs certain questions: why and how did these become such a ubiquitous part of Indian diets, what were the factors that promoted their culinary integration, and what were the impediments that had to be overcome?

These questions are foods for thought that readers must ponder over, as I will address them in the last of the three write-ups.

Nomenclature

The process by which vegetables are given names reveals much about the process of their incorporation. These names may either derive from the languages of the cultures that brought these vegetables to new shores, or from certain characteristics that the new host culture perceives in the vegetables.

In the case of the potato, the name used (aaloo) derived not from any real or supposed genomic association, but from its culinary use. Without any prefixes or suffixes, the word aaloo normally denoted the plum in Persian texts. However, with various prefixes (eg. kachaalu), it referred to various kinds of yam. This suffix probably derived from the Sanskrit ‘aaluka’, a generic name for esculent roots. Yams, taro and sweet potatoes are indeed root tubers, but the white potato is a stem tuber. The former also belong to different genuses from the white potato. However, the similarity of their appearance and culinary use probably led to the potato inheriting their name.

Incorporation into the culinary practice

The processes by which a culture perceives and incorporates new foods may be condensed to certain fundamental questions: What do you resemble? What do you taste like? What do you replace? The unfamiliar was always rendered familiar by a process of comparison and incorporation. People sought to locate the new ingredient within a familiar cosmos of foods, so that it could be incorporated into their world. They sought to find something familiar that the new food resembled (what do you resemble?). Potatoes were compared to yams, taro or sweet potatoes. The methods prescribed by the Qut-i Laa-yamoot for cooking the potato mostly recall well-known recipes. Apart from a basic recipe for boiling the potato, it suggests that potatoes with meat be prepared in a manner similar to meat with arwi (taro). It also gives a recipe for potato bharta (mash). The evidence of Indo-Persian cookbooks reveals that mash or bharta recipes had a familiar place in culinary praxis. In this way, the flavours of these new foods were sought to be understood (What do you taste like?) and brought into play in well-known recipes. Tastes do change, and these new ingredients profoundly altered the flavours and textures of South Asian foods. The route through which this occurred was by way of cultural translation, a rendering of the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. It was through such processes that new foods were indigenised and incorporated into local culinary traditions.

The next post describes the advent and spread of tomatoes in the Indian sub continent

To be continued…

Have you read our food buzz this month?