The real unheard Indian cuisine.

Hi guys, being a culinary arts student I thought it would be a great idea to share my knowledge about what was the real Indian cuisine before India got invaded by various rulers, as this is a topic which many people don’t know, I thought it would be a great idea to enlighten people about it.

So now I will start with clearing up the biggest controversial topic of India that is meat eating and beef eating in ancient India.

Historically, all Indians used to eat all sorts of meat including red meat (written in Indian scared writing ‘Rig Veda’) till Gautam Buddha rebelled against this tradition of beef eating. But the only female species of the cattle was consumed that too during rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status. There are some misconceptions that Indians were thought to eat meat by the Mughals which is absolutely not true furthermore there were quite a few Mughals rulers like Aurangzeb who were actually vegetarian.

 

Now to the next topic,

Did you know that Indians have only been eating chicken or fowl meat from past 200 years? Yes we Indians were introduced to chicken by the Britishers and only have been eating chicken after that, yet going to claim that tandoori chicken is purely an Indian dish? ;) So basically if Britishers didn’t give us chicken then we won’t have tandoori chicken, sad right? Also matter of fact the style of tandoori worked really well with meats like chicken due to its high heat properties of cooking which gave us such numerous tasty dishes.

Also there are many vegetables and spices that we think are ours but it isn’t. I will start by naming a few and who brought it to us.

Portuguese- Tomato, Potato, Chilies, Bell peppers, nutmegs, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and peppercorns.

Britishers- cauliflower, tea and orange carrots.

Thinking how we would get pav bhaji and samosa without these ingredients?

Now I will be telling you about some ingredients which we had before any invaders came to India.

Bottle gourd, bitter gourd, snake gourd, okra, eggplant, cluster beans, lotus stems, radish, fenugreek, spinach, mustard, gooseberry, sweet potato etc. are all vegetables that are used extensively in contemporary Indian cooking and yes even mushrooms. (According to various ayurvedic texts)

In the most ancient Indian cuisine spices like long pepper known as pipli was used for hot tastes, and nutmeg, asafoetida (heeng), turmeric, ginger powder, dry mango powder, tamarind, camphor, and cumin were used. But now long pepper is rarely used in few recipes like potli masala from the Mughlai cuisine.

So guys I will sign off from here, thank you for reading my blog, hope you like it, if you want to know anything related to any cuisine you can let me know, thank you.

Abhishek Naidu.