Opinion | Indian Food Has Run Into A Problem: The Inescapable Red Curry

Can we Indians please get over the onion-tomato-ginger-garlic sauce that we put into everything we eat? Think about it. If Indian food, and I mean food from all geographical directions - North, North-east, East, South and West - was to be defined by a single curry, something often referred to as a "mother sauce" in Western culinary jargon, it would be the good ol' red curry made with onions, tomatoes, ginger and garlic. This base sauce is sometimes turned orange by adding cream to it and other times turned green by adding some pureed spinach. Even lentils are tempered with the same four ingredients because any other tempering often turns the lentils into "hospital-type dal".

Everything Tastes The Same

I'm quite sure that half the market for Eno or Digene in India can be credited to this mother sauce because our stomachs have literally become allergic to it. We eat it day in and day out. We even put it in our eggs in the morning. That famous street side dish, 'anda ghotala', is also a variant of this concoction, blended with boiled eggs and served with fried eggs on top. "Ghotala" literally translates to scam, and such dishes indeed are a scam - and products of sheer lack of imagination.

There's something to be said here about the snob of all cuisines - French food. At least the French tend to glorify every ingredient using sauces made with completely different flavour compositions. So a beurre blanc (literally translates to white butter) is a simple butter sauce emulsified with vinegar and wine, and boiled with shallots. In fact, each of the mother sauces of French cuisine — Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnole, Hollandaise and Sauce Tomat (Tomato) — is defined by a distinct profile that goes with various proteins and carbs. While béchamel's main star is milk, velouté's star ingredient is chicken stock thickened with a roux (all-purpose flour that's cooked with butter). Similarly, velouté uses beef stock with brown roux. Hollandaise uses raw eggs with lemon juice to create an absolutely divine, velvety texture and refreshing flavour, while Sauce Tomat clearly is an ode to tomatoes, which are cooked with herbs and reduced to a delectable thick consistency.

The derivatives of these sauces with multiple other ingredients run into hundreds of other variants, each distinct from the other. For example, sauce Charcutière uses the mother sauce espagnole with dry mustard and onions. Sauce Mornay uses the mother sauce béchamel, with onions, cloves, Gruyère cheese and Parmesan.

Rescuing Indian Cuisine

It's not that Indian cuisine was always so monotonous. Not in the least bit. It still isn't. Only, it's the on-the-go cooking (the "scammy" type) that has made this onion-tomato-ginger-garlic concoction the mainstay of all "dishes".  Things were not supposed to be like this. The original urad dal, also known as 'kali dal' and which is now served as 'makhani dal', was always slow-cooked to perfection with only caramelised onions added for tempering. The famous 'junglee maas' of Rajasthan was a glorification of the mighty Mathania chillies grown locally in Jodhpur to elevate game meat hunted by the royals of yesteryears. The only other ingredients in this dish were ghee and garlic to remove the gamey smell of meat.

Even the opulent biryani did not look anything like it does today: layers of red-curried meat or chicken, again with the same mother sauce, served with white rice. There are two origin stories of biryani, and neither of them mentions the meats cooked to a curry with tomatoes, onions and ginger garlic. The 'Birian' that came via Persian (much before the Mughals) traders was simply a one-pot dish made with rice, meat and spices, cooked underground in an earthen pot in a coal-lined pit. This spice-infused rice later became 'Biryani' in India.

The other story of Biryani has its origins surprisingly in Sangam literature, which speaks of a dish called 'oonchoru' dating back to 200 BCE-200 CE. This dish of Chera Kings was made with rice, ghee, meat, turmeric, pepper, coriander and bay leaf. Even if we were to look at the Mughals for Biryani, the only recipe mentioned in Mughal texts is from the time of Bahadur Shah Zafar, which again spoke of rice infused with spices, with no mention of layering.

Northeast Stands Out

Why the mother sauce of India has peeved me so much is because the spectrum of flavours remains almost identical. The sauce becomes pav bhaaji with the addition of vegetables, but it also doubles up as kadhai chicken, shahi paneer, and butter chicken, depending on what you add to it. They all are, at the core, just the same.

The only region in India that looks beyond this style of cooking is the Northeast - and Southern India to some extent. In the former, we find a good degree of experimentation with ingredients, and fermentation processes are used to create umami flavours. Like the Iromba of Manipur, in which fish is fermented and then flavoured with fresh bay leaves, onion, cumin, chillies, and chives, or a Mui Borok of Tripura, in which the stars of the curry are local herbs, bamboo and vegetables with just fish stock used as the base. But then again, Assam's Fish Tenga, or even the popular Thukpa from Tibet that's eaten in Sikkim and Darjeeling, go back to the same four ingredients. In the South too, nothing can escape the 'Big Four', though one does find dishes like the yoghurt-based Moru curry occasionally.

I think we Indians clearly need to put our foot down and say "enough is enough" to this all-pervasive 'mother sauce'. We must try going back to our roots, where monotony was never the norm. 

(Zainab Sikander is a political analyst and columnist covering Indian politics since the last decade. She's an avid traveller and a bona-fide foodie.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author