TIFFIN 

This dish is essentially a variation on the popular tamarind-rice dish called puliyogare that is made in many parts of the south of India. I got this particular recipe from Gayathri Kongovi, a friend’s mother, who lives in Bangalore. She and her longtime cook Kamlamma were kind enough to prepare a number of traditional Kannadiga dishes with me one cool Bangalore morning many months ago. This recipe is distinctive both for the particular blend of spices it uses and for the fa

I wanted to start our Dhal of the Month series with this recipe for Huli Tovve not because it’s the dhal I’m most familiar with, but, rather, because, despite using many of the same ingredients and techniques as the dhal I ate growing up, its flavor is so distinctive and different from anything I ate as a child. The name "huli tovve" just means “sour dhal” in Kannada, and that’s really what stands out about this dish, which is typical of Kannadiga Brahmin cooking with its int

Pakoras, vadas, bhajjis, bondas—the variety and number of fried street foods in India fairly boggles the mind. One of my fondest childhood food memories is of the woman who had a fried food cart near our house. She and her husband manned the stall in all kinds of weather, but, through a perverse trick of appetites, the siren call of freshly fried bhajjis and pakoras was always strongest in the middle of a rain storm. Every time there was a storm, my sister and I would run dow

An abecedary of Indian food. Indian food, like all food, is subject to misconceptions and generalizations. Diners only familiar with the steam-table fare of greasy-spoon Indian restaurants will assume that all Indian food is slicked with liberal amounts of ghee (or, more commonly, oil). Others who’ve had the opportunity to eat at kabab houses assume that the meat cookery of the northern states of the country represent the acme of Indian cooking. Breakfast hounds will aver tha

I got this recipe from Parinitha Manudeva who, along with her husband, run the Devangi Athithya, a bed and breakfast in Thirthahalli, a small town along the Tunga river in the forested mountainside near Shimoga, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. The cuisine of the area is robust and full of flavor, making liberal use of spices, fruit from the nearby forest, game meat, and river fish. A local specialty of especial pride are the kaadu koli, or forest fowl, that you can

Although I say this about every Indian cuisine under discussion, I have to state, with renewed vigor, that the Bengalis really do have one of the most interesting regional Indian cuisines. The low-lying Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, the largest of its kind in the world, has bestowed a bounty of rice on the region, and the abundant rivers have shaped the cuisine so that river fish and other estuarine seafood make their way into almost every aspect of the cuisine. In addition, the

THE NOVELIST AND BENGALI FOOD MAVEN TALKS ABOUT RITUAL, MODERNITY, AND VANISHING FOOD TRADITIONS INTERVIEW: ROHAN KAMICHERIL met Chitrita Banerji the week before Thanksgiving at her Cambridge home, where we shared a pot of fine tea and she plied me with homemade Bengali snacks—sandesh, the milk sweet so popular in Banerji’s native Kolkata, and postor bora, fried croquettes made out of white poppy seeds and rice flour. The bricked-in alleys and mews outside were deserted from

Winter blues getting you down? Don’t fret: just join us on Sunday, December 4 for a South Indian brunch at Archestratus Books and Foods in Greenpoint. We’ll be putting out a spread that features the best of the South Indian kitchen. A beaker of spicy rasam, a tamarind and pepper-spiked broth, will be sure to chase your cold-weather blues away, along with poori-saagu, South India’s answer to fried dough (with a side of spiced potato), chow chow bhath, the savory-sweet breakfas

Basale soppu goes by many names. It’s often called Mangalore spinach or vine spinach or, in the US, on the rare occasion when you can find it in non-Indian stores, it’s generally sold as Malabar spinach, after the stretch of coast on the West side of India that includes Kerala. In India, though, its names are even more numerous and diverse: in Gujarati it’s called poi ni bhaji, in Telugu it’s known as bacchali, and in Konkani it’s called vauchi bhaji. Whatever you call it, th

Breakfast is one of the most criminally undersung aspects of Indian cooking. Indian breakfasts are rarely, if ever, sweet. They use of a truly staggering variety of grains, vegetables, and spices, and they occur in a mind-boggling diversity of forms. They’re also incredibly regional, so that you you’ll hardly ever see people eating the same thing for breakfast from one state (or city) to another. Uppittu (or upma as it’s often known in the north of India), is an incredibly ea

One of the many unexpected delights of cooking Indian food is the chance to incorporate dishes, almost in their entirety, into more familiar staples. This galette is one of my favorite examples. In essence it’s just a pie crust with some wilted greens bound together with a little egg. But in place of the regular greens, I use an Indian-spiced mixture of spinach, ginger, garlic, herbs, and spices. The addition of just a few warm spices and some dill gives this dish incredible

What exactly is Indian food? I ask myself this question often. Perhaps I should find this surprising, considering I’ve spent most of my life eating Indian food and most of my adult life trying to understand it. But I don’t. What I do find surprising is that so few other people ask themselves the same question. Most people have a pretty firm idea of what Indian food is. It’s often an idea formed by eating in restaurants or at home, perhaps from reading cookbooks, or from trav

An abecedary of Indian food, in no particular order. Ajwain--or as it's variously known,omum, om beeja, ajowan, bishop's weed, or carom seed--is one of the lesser-known Indian spices. Lesser-known in the West, anyway. In appearance, it looks uncannily like cumin (or any number of other seed spices, for that matter). In fact, though, ajwain isn't a seed at all, but the fruit of an annual herb that belongs to the Apiaceae or Umbelliferae family (the latter classification gets i

As we get into the dog days of summer, the temptation to resort to an all-salad diet is strong. There's fantastic produce at the markets, there's nothing you want to do less than turn on a stove, and, frankly, there's few things better than a lunch or dinner that comes together in five minutes or less. As much as I love all that fresh produce, though, I can't help but want to throw something a little less virtuous into every salad I eat. Sometimes it's some fried halloumi, ot

Indian pickles are a wildly different beast from their Western counterparts. They’re fiery concoctions made out of a variety of vegetables, fruit, or sometimes even fish and meat. Take your average kosher dill pickle, add about 25 different spices to it, a quart of oil, and let it ferment in the sun for a week and you might just end up with something approaching an Indian pickle. It’s a good thing, I promise. As weird and obscure as they seem, Indian pickles do have something

A poem should be written on the uses of leftover rice. There’s something wonderful about how something so humdrum can get turned into such a variety of delicious things. While there are endless varieties of rice, each with their own distinctive taste and texture, for most cooks plain white rice presents a convenient blank canvas on which to experiment with a variety of flavors and textures. Indians, and south Indians in particular, consume a great deal of rice, and, consequen

It is a rare dish that can take you to another place and time. Every time I make a batch of my mother’s sorpotel, an unctuous stew of slow-cooked pork, piquant with vinegar, spices, and a dash of sweetness, I am filled with a nostalgia for the places that the dish has been, and the changes it has gone through before arriving, finally, in my kitchen in New York. Sorpotel appears in different forms in many parts of the southwest of India—some people like it with more vinegar,

Mulligatawny, like many Indian dishes that made the migration to the wider Commonwealth through colonial rule, is probably better known in its British guise, as a thickened soup, often fortified with lentils and festooned with elaborations as far-ranging and peculiar as port and apples.The original mulligatawny was probably a much simpler affair, though. The name comes from two Tamil words—mullaga (meaning pepper) and thanni (water). The first mulligatawny was likely a Britis

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than two weeks since our Tiffin Club in Zürich with the marvellously talented Marlene Halter, but the time has just blown by since then. We took a one-week excursion south through Piedmont and Liguria just after the dinner, (about which we’ll be posting soon, so stay tuned), but now we’re back in New York and raring to go, though we wanted to make sure to share some images and reminiscences of our very special Bangalore-New York-Zürich dinn