View: Not all Indian food is cooked with one ‘spice'

Last week, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning humourist Gene Weingarten found himself in hot curry when he wrote an article despising various cuisines that included ‘Indian food’ because --wait for it -- all Indian cuisine is, supposedly, cooked with just the one spice: curry. Now there’s an illiterate statement if you ever saw one, which took The Washington Post more than a little while to correct.

Weingarten’s article was clearly meant to be facetious -- after all it is a humour column. But humour works best when a joke has some basis in truth, or fact. And this is where he failed spectacularly. Because while no one cares whether he likes Indian food or not, his claim that all Indian food is cooked with ‘curry’ shows a fundamental lack of understanding of Indian cuisine in particular, and the concept of spice in general. After all, to proclaim that curry is a spice is tantamount to saying that a burger is an ingredient. And that is where I have a bone to pick with him.

There is no reason why Indian food should be loved by one and all. I personally despise paneer (tastes like boiled erasers), shutki (dried fish) and ripe kanthal (jackfruit), which smells like corpses. Culinary palates are notoriously subjective, and there is no reason for anyone to love every cuisine.

One of the worst meals I ate was ‘Indian’ food at a restaurant in Brighton. The Bengali prawn malai curry was sweeter than kheer. One half of me is descended from east Bengalis, and no self-respecting ‘Bangaal’ uses sugar in anything other than dessert. Speaking of Bengali ingredients, if you cross over to Assam, you will discover that spices and ingredients there are considerably different. If you go to Kerala, there is not a single spice to be found in common with an eastern state like Bihar.

The problem with Weingarten’s dismay isn’t that he despises Indian food. If I thought that the tripe they serve in New York or Washington masquerading as Indian food was the genuine article, even I’d be regurgitating continuously. Weingarten clearly thinks his favourite restaurant, Rasika, which serves watered-down vindaloo, tandoori tikkas, Gujarati lasagna and ‘poppadum’ (papad or papadam for people with a cultural speech impediment) is representative of the range of Indian cuisine.

I once ate at a chic Chinese restaurant in Milan, and almost gagged because the chili chicken I had ordered was overflowing with the sickly sweet milk of pineapple kindness. But then I didn’t think that Milanese Chinese food was the real McCoy, and I did not write an article about it, making a bold claim that the staple ingredient of all Chinese cooking is pineapples.

Little knowledge, after all, is a dangerous thing. And yes, I do hold the Washington Post and Weingarten to slightly higher research standards than that other gourmand and satirist, Paris Hilton. Does Weingarten really not have even one Indian friend or acquaintance -- a neighbour, a neighbourhood store owner, his banker, his CA, maybe even his editor -- to whom he could speak, in order to confirm if Indian food does, indeed, use just the one spice, and to ascertain if curry is a spice?

He then made it worse by posting a Hail Mary tweet, which stated that curries are not one spice but are, of all things, spice blends! Oh Gene, stop it now. You’re killing the rest of us who enjoy satire. Curries are not spice blends, although it’s good to see he’s at least learnt that there’s more than one spice to flavour ‘Indian’ dishes.

As the Spice Girls once said -- while no doubt singing about Indian cuisine – ‘People of the world, spice up your life, every boy and Pulitzer journalist, spice up your life.’ While Indian cuisine in the US might stink, a little knowledge might have made Weingarten’s article seem a tad more palatable to us. Why, he might even have made us laugh.

The writer runs the Delhi-NCR catering service, Food For Thought.