I love cooking and learning about cuisines of other cultures. The majority of the Indian recipes I come across include tomatoes and potatoes, which were part of the Columbian exchange. This made me wonder what the cuisine of India was like before "western" influence?
Edit: According to the angry and hate-filled PMs I've been receiving, there is some confusion. Apparently, many Redditors believe I am referring to Native Americans. I thought I was clear since I mentioned the country (India) and asked about the influence the New World had on their cuisine.
Just in case it isn't clear, I am looking for information on the cuisine of the country of India PRIOR to the Colombian exchange.
Follow-up: Indian cuisine also heavily uses chilies, which are likewise a New-World plant. What did they use for spiciness before the Columbian exchange? Or was Indian food just much less spicy than we're used to today?
Pre- Columbian Indian food has remnants which still exist in Indian cuisine.
First of all, I would like to point out that Indian cuisine has a rather large section of recipes which do not involve the use of tomatoes and potatoes. However, making a standard gravy with tomatoes is fairly easy and potatoes are great for increasing the volume of any dish, which is why they are used extensively.
Secondly, Indian cuisine is vast, with recipes from each part of the country and often differing from family to family. There are several texts offering historical perspective but very little of it is in easily accessible languages. For example, ancient Tamil food is mentioned in Sangam literature, and the Tamil used in Sangam times (300BC-300AD) is significantly different from the Tamil used in modern times, which I am familiar with.
I will be largely drawing from works of the eminent food scientist K.T. Achaya^[1],[2]. He has perused through historical texts in different languages and often quotes sections from these texts. An article by the Hindu^[3] summarises his work better than I can, so when I am quoting that article verbatim I will use block-quotes to make it clear.
The defining quality of 'Indian' food. While chilies came with the pre-Columbian exchange, other spices already existed in the Indian subcontinent.
Long peppers (piper longum) were used in Indian cuisine. Known as pippali in Sanskrit, they have mentions in the Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda, as well as ancient Roman (Pliny) and Greek texts^[4] . Several recipes still exist with pippali - pickles and other dishes which exploit its supposed health benefits. Here's one such recipe, used primarily in a post-partum diet ^[5] . The dish nihari still uses pippali as its main spice.
Chillies were an effective replacement for long peppers primarily because of cost and ease of growth; Indian climate and soils allowed them to grow very effectively. I should point out that chillies have become hotter over the years due to selective breeding to make them more bang for the buck. So the 'heat' quotient of Indian cuisine in a Scoville sense has increased gradually over the years, rather than in massive steps.
The use of other spices such as black pepper (piper nigrum), ginger, cardamom, cloves, cumin and mustard has been well documented in both Indian ancient texts and that of the Romans. There are several Indian recipes today which make use of these spices; for example the famous garam masala is prepared by roasting black peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, bay leaf, cumin etc.
Harappan Civilization
The Harappan civilization was known to have rice, barley, wheat, oat, amaranths, jowar, sesame, mustard, chickpeas, masoor, mung and horsegram (kulti, ulavulu), dates, pomegranates, and perhaps bananas.
Vedic era
The Rig Veda mentions rice, cereals and pulses - masha (urad), mudga (moong) and masura (masoor), spinach, melons, pumpkins and gourds and in particular lotus stem, cucumber, bottle-gourd, water chestnut, bitter gourd, radish, brinjal, some aquatic plants (avaka, andika), and fruits such as mangoes, oranges and grapes. Spices such as coriander, turmeric, pepper, cumin, asafoetida, cloves, sesame and mustard were well known, and at least the first four ones are thought to be Indian in origin.
Of the vegetables and pulses mentioned, several are still used today. For example, dal is a popular dish which uses boiled pulses. Gourds and pumpkins are used instead of potato to increase volume, and mashing them helps create a gravy base which does not require tomatoes.
Harappan Civilization
The use of meat has been documented since Harappan times, as bones help us trace the use of specific animals.
Vedic Period
Meat eating was prevalent. Pigs, boar, deer, bovines and peacocks were eaten, though chicken (which, though originated in India) was not that desirable. They seem to have been forbidden or discouraged from eating eggs of any kind and in any manner.
Lords Rama, Lakshmana and Devi Sita ate a vast menu that contained fruits, leafy vegetables, rice and meat. Achaya quotes a book stating that Rama and Lakshmana, while in exile at Dandakaranya, hunted animals for the pot, and that a favourite of Sita was rice cooked with venison, vegetables and spices (the dish called Mamsabhutadana).
Turning to Mahabharata, a graphic description of cooking at a picnic has been provided on roasting large pieces of meat on spits, cooked with tamarind, pomegranates and spices with ghee and fragrant leaves. King Yudhisthira is said to have fed 10,000 scholars with pork and venison, besides preparation of rice and milk in ghee and honey with fruits and roots (Payasam).
It was after this time that a change in our food habits occurred. The Dharma Sutras, Manusmriti and related texts of 500-300 BC began forbidding and proscribing food items based on their 'temper' (sattvik — peaceful and ascetic, rajasik medium, energetic that can be either positive or negative, and tamasic or coarse, rough and not all that nice), and prohibiting as many as 54 items (in particular a variety of animals) from the `proper' kitchen.
The teachings of Buddhism and Jainism against meat eating had taken hold by this time, and a turn towards preferential vegetarianism began to be expressed in Hindu texts as well.
Continued in part 2
I had a related question, if that's fine to ask. How and when did New World foodstuffs diffuse through China, particularly given the (unsuccessful) attempts by the Qing to close off the nation to the West?
Really curious about potatoes, as one of my friends from the quite inland Sichuan introduced me to 'spicy and sour stir-fried potatoes' as a traditional (and delicious!) dish from her province.
Found something interesting you might want to check out, as it's in correlation with your question, and was asked about three years ago. Cheers.
This is a complicated answer as India is a very heterogenous country with multiple cultures, multiple histories, multiple cuisines, multiple trade networks, etc. The answer is further complicated by the fact that there has been extensive migration and trade throughout India's history. Nonetheless, I will try to do some justice to the answer but please note that some details could very well be wrong. My source is primarily the book, "Indian Food (A Historical Companion) by K.T. Achaya. Besides this, i would also recommend watching the food series, "Raja Rasoi Aur Anya Kahaniyan". It is available on Netflix, translates to "Royal Kitchens and related stories". Each episode focuses on the food history of a particular region of India. The focus in on royal food, but you also have to realize that India was almost always ruled by kings and kingdoms and the royal kitchen really denotes the food and food culture of that kingdom and province. Further more, royal kitchens were not just about feeding the royal family, but also feeding workers, soldiers, and many other people.
Indian cooking that is popular in UK and the US is primarily Punjabi food. Chicken tikka masala, butter chicken, naan (please don't call it naan-bread - that is like saying bread-bread), tandoori and grilled kababs, the various meat and vegetable curries usually based on a tomato-cream sauce. Most of these dishes are rarely ever eaten outside of Punjab, and even in Punjab and the "North" of India, this is considered restaurant food and not daily food.
The other thing to note is that it is mostly this restaurant food and "exported dishes" that contain a lot of tomatoes and potatoes and New World vegetables. Food that is eaten daily even in Punjab would be saag such as sarson ka saag (curry made with mustard leaves and garlic), matar paneer (peas and cheese curry), daal (lentils), chole (chickpea curry), kala chana (bengal gram or garbanzo bean curry). Many or most of these dishes do not actually contain English vegetables or New World vegetables.
In most cases, you will also notice that New World veggies are mostly a substitute for other native ingredients. For example, matar paneer (peas and cheese) now has a variation, which is aloo matar (peas and potatoes). In the Lucknow episode of Raja Rasoi, one of the Nawabs (Mughal era prince) talks about potato based dishes being mainly variations or considered "novelties". Interestingly, he also talks about potato being considered an "inferior" vegetable. The again, the Nawabs were known to be quite a snooty bunch.
On a side note, if you want to experience truly sophisticated food at par with French cuisine, you should look Awadhi cuisine. They also pushed the envelope in terms of food for the sake of food, and food having drama and surprise, and not just about flavor, aroma, texture, richness, and presentation.
If you look at the Harappan urban civilization which was later subsumed by the 3 major tribal immigrations (the Aryans being one of them), food was mostly wheat and barley (and later rice started dominating), along with milk and ghee (clarified butter) and yogurt/buttermilk. Meat was extensively consumed including cow, boar and pig, horse, alligator, fish, and so on. Meat was either roasted on fire or was fried or boiled. Besides ghee, sesame oil and mustard oil (and coconut oil in the South) were extensively used. Spices were mostly turmeric, cinnamon, long pepper (pippali), and sour citrus (jambira). Later, black pepper, ginger, cumin, cloves, vinegar, other sours, and asafoetida (from Afghanistan) became more popular. Vegetables were mostly lotus root and stem, cucumbers, various types of sweet and sour and bitter melons, berries, lots of gourds, leaves such as methi (fenugreek), various flowers. In the South, besides this, lots of yams and starchy root vegetables were also heavily used, including sweet potatoes. Besides the grains mentioned, millets were also heavily used, such as jowar, bajra, and ragi. Much of this is widely used today as well, especially if you go outside the big cities where wheat has become more fashionable.
In the South, besides all this, unripe bananas, jackfruit, and several other bitter and tart citrus varieties were also used. As well as raw and ripe mangoes. Even today, if you see most South dishes such as "kozhambu" use little to none New World vegetables. Black pepper, which was the South's prized commodity was almost exclusively used (and still is today) as a spice. Tamarind (and sometimes vinegar and kokum and kachampuli) is used very extensively as souring agent. Tomatoes are considered a poor substitute. Again, meat is used heavily. And meat was almost always cooked with a sour vegetable or in a sour tamarind curry with black peppers.
Hello everyone,
It's a food thread again, which means that everyone who's had food at some point in their lives (which is most people), wants to take a go at answering it. The problem is, you're in AskHistorians, and we expect answers to be seasoned with deep historical knowledge, leavened with sources, and maybe include just a dash of humor. We've already had a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments. As such, they were removed by the mod-team.
Please, before you attempt to answer the question, keep in mind our rules concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed. Rule breakers are liable to be banned and/or used to test our new AH-branded Bass-o-Matic.
Additionally, it is unfair to the OP to derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to modmail, or a META thread.
Thank you for understanding.