A quick post with food and stuff. Today’s vegetarian lunch: rice, chappatis, stewed turnip, a mysterious but tasty green vegetable, dal (lentils), shrimp cooked with vegetables, potatoes, mango juice (specially for me!), and, by my plate at upper left, Mr. Das’s canned rasgullah, which he wanted my opinion on. (Remember that his grandfather was the first person to can food of any sort in India, and that was rasgullah.) I pronounced it excellent, as it was flavored with Kashmiri saffron and filled with pistachios, a preparation that you don’t often see. Rasgullah holds up very well when canned, although rasmalai, being more fragile, would not.
After lunch, Shubhra, one of my hosts and an old friend, prepared paan, the traditional postprandial digestif, consisting of a betel leaf wrapped around various stuff. Paan is a long story (read the Wikipedia link), but I eat only meetha paan (sweet pan), which can contain date paste, cloves, cardamon, fennel seed, cinnamon, rose-petal jam, and many other things, depending on who makes it. Paan stalls are ubiquitous in India (some are quite famous), with most people getting the traditional variety containing only lime paste (the chemical, not the fruit) and areca (betel) nut. That variety is said to give people a buzz, and is the poor man’s cigarette. It’s also carcinogenic if you do it constantly, as do many Indians. (I tried it once and found it vile. Meetha pan does not contain areca or lime paste.) That traditional variety accounts for the red stains adorning Indian walls and sidewalks, which are the spit-out juices. If you remember the play South Pacific, you’ll remember the line, “Bloody Mary’s chewing betel nut; she is always chewing betel nut.”
You can now get paan in Chicago (they used to prohibit importation of betel leaves), and when I take visitors for an Indian meal up on Devon Avenue, the Indian community, I always offer them a meetha paan. Most people are taken aback, for you chew the whole leafy package, swallowing the tasty juices but spitting out the remnants, so it’s not terribly neat. But it is delicious, and the prefect after-meal mouth freshener. Most of my guests try it and like it, though disposing of the chewed fragments of leaf and seeds is tricky for n00bs, and I am greatly amused to watch. Here Shubhra puts a cardamom pod in each leaf:
We went to the market later to get a suitcase repaired, and I took a few snaps. A fruit seller (a pity there are no mangos, which are in season only in summer, when it’s too hot to visit):
A shoe repairman conditioned and polished a friend’s shoes. He has been sitting in this spot for years. Note that he still smokes a traditional hookah:
That looks like the last real cobbler in India.
Sorry.
The Wikipedia entry on betel provides horrifying detail on cancer incidence and morbity associated with chewing. The good news is that younger generations are not picking up the habit – and betel consumption is off 65% between 2000 and 2010, to give an idea how much more of the leaf has been produced for buzz rather than digestif.
My goodness, what we humans won’t risk for a little buzz!
I think WordPress may have eaten my comment: PLEASE don’t call a meal with shrimp in it vegetarian. I’ve gone hungry at several meals because people assume that vegetarians eat fish.
My wife fell in love with the Halls ginger and honey cough drops, and I found Limca to be a really good lime soda – not too sugary sweet. And now I want some gulab jamun. Shoot, now we need another honeymoon.
Though I am sure they are out there, for example you, no person calling themselves a vegetarian that I have ever come across abstained from eating all meat. It is typical that the term means no beef and pork, some do chicken, and I have never met one that did not eat seafood. The only people I’ve ever met that don’t eat any meat have always referred to themselves as “vegan.”
My point is, you are going against very clear conventions of language usage that have evolved over the past several decades and I don’t see why you think it is appropriate or even valid to admonish the OP about this.
The meal was described to me as vegetarian by the people who prepared that and ate it. That’s all I have to say. Let’s please not argue about how this term is defined. I know lots of people who call themselves vegetarians but eat fish.
A lot of the coastal communities in India tend to define seafood as “vegetarian”. As you go inland, this decreases.
“In Spain, ham is a vegetable.” – Alice Feiring
“You don’t eat meat!? I’ll right, I’ll serve lamb.”–My Big Fat Greek Wedding
That should be “All right, I’ll serve lamb.”
Fair enough – oddly, in the three or so months I’ve spent in India (more northern), I never saw anything advertised as ‘veg’ that had dead animals in it.
Darelle – for what it’s worth, I’ve never met anyone here (Holland for the last two decades) who described themselves as vegetarian and ate dead animals.
Vegans, as opposed to vegetarians, eat neither animal products (cheese, eggs, honey, milk) nor the animals themselves.
But in the end: words have meaning (and yes, people misapplying the label to themselves is also a problem). If I order a halal or kosher sandwich and get a ham and cheese, I’d be upset. If I order a vegetarian sandwich and get tuna fish, I’ll be upset – and still hungry.
So, again, my request: please don’t refer to food with dead animals in it as vegetarian (especially if you’re serving it to vegetarians).
Yes, I agree! Knorr’s used to make a “vegetarian” dried soup stock cube that included animal stock in the ingredients and once, dragged to that horrid McD*n@lds, I was stuck ordering a salad which I requested to be chicken-less as I didn’t eat meat, so they added bacon. yay ‘Merca!
I do find it strange that so many people don’t call fish or seafood “meat”. I blame the Catholics here in the states, but no idea what causes it elsewhere. I will note that although there is quite a lot of farmland south and north of KC, I’ve yet to see people harvesting bass or catfish with a combine…
and before I catch hell for my comment, I’m not trying to slag off your wonderful hosts, nor yourself, good Prof., just noting the frustration as a vegetarian, not a pescatarian, who finds themselves in this situation frequently.
The food you’ve posted from this recent trip looks fantastic and I’m quite envious! you certainly get the most out of your travels, gastronomic and otherwise, being an omNomNomNomnivor, which I would not, so, Cheers!
Yeah, if you’ve never been, you must go to India. It’s absolute shell shock to have page after page after page of things you can eat on the menu!
I think my wife and I were some of the only Western tourists ever to gain weight while on holiday there…
Thanks for sharing the South Asian noms! My mouth is watering! Hope you enjoy your trip.
Your India posts are making me terribly home sick 🙁
The mysterious green vegetable looks to be fenugreek (methi).
I thought as much.
I thought so too. I absolutely adore the stuff and go to a vegetarian Indian buffet where they do it with potato. If all the other dishes weren’t so good I could probably sit and eat plates of it.
I once had these wonderful large red chilis that were stuffed with a grain concoction of some sort (maybe bulgur wheat), and they were canned. The herb/spice mixture contained asafoetida. Does that sound like anything you’ve encountered?
Asafoetida smells horrible ( foetid?) but tastes delicious in small doses.Love fenugreek.
We are in the car ahout 5 hrs from home, with no good food in sight, except for these photos. My mouth is watering!
Hmm, perhaps analogous to skatole (3-methyl indole), an odorant found in small amounts in things like jasmine, but at an increment beyond some threshold its odor resembles excrement.
Asafoetida is usually cooked in oil/ghee before use in Indian food. tastes quite different then.
And much of interest on asafoetida’s Wikipedia page, not least of which is that two common names are “food of the gods” and “Devil’s dung”. Also antiviral, antimicrobial, and antiflatulent activities. And as an onion substitute by some Indian sect adherents who don’t eat onions (!).
In any event, I like the flavor as typically used. I guess I’m happy not to have smelled it in raw, concentrated form.
As always, i get terribly envious when I read the gastronomic posts! 🙂
And I’ll miss you over the next few days while you can’t get the internet (I’ve already read the next post.) Life won’t be quite the same! 🙁
Fascinating pictures, as usual!
I feel quite OK eating animals that are vegetarians.
Cannibal.