Spice Up Life

When I was a little kid growing up in India, we often moved between different states that each had atleast a different predominant language, a different cuisine and a different music, even though they all had many similarities too. I suppose I had a particularly sensitive sense of taste and did not like strong flavours. I could not stand the 'heat' of spices like chillies and cloves, the 'zing' of ginger, the sourness of tamarind, the 'sting' of mint and the strange bitterness of asafoetida among a whole lot of others. I could barely manage to enjoy a trace of them. Many in my family and friends circle jokingly wondered aloud if my soul was somehow misplaced when I was born or that I should have been born in Europe. I was deemed to have my soul switched at birth by some miracle with an European because of my intolerance for all the 'normal' traditional spices of India. They reckoned that there must be a kid somewhere in Europe craving for spicy food and making his mother miserable.

Their idea of European food in those days, over half a century ago, was that it was all bland - some boiled meat with boiled potatoes, steamed vegetables like peas, carrot, cabbage or beetroot on the side. We assumed they ate bread at all their meals. If someone wanted to add 'spice' to their food, they supposedly added a small sprinkle of salt and/or ground pepper to suit their taste, after the food was already cooked and served!!  It was always said so in a tone of wonder or whispered. That brought out a reaction from my grandmother or great grandmother.

 "How can they eat like that? Without any taste or even cooking without salt or spices?!!" She would sound scandalized.

"But they are all big, strong, energetic and healthy even in old age. They live very long," some knowledgeable elders told us.

"Well this kid would have done very well there!" they all said pointing to me. I agreed. I could barely stand much of saltiness, the heat of pepper or chillies and they were just the beginning of the variety of tastes. There is bitterness, varying degrees of tartness, strong smells and all together atleast about a dozen different ones encountered on any given average day in an Indian house. Festivals and feasts would make that twofold or threefold!!

The food that we had at home was made to cater to all our common and personal preferences by the genius of my mother, my grandmothers and father. It was fine, but if one ventured out or sometimes my mother made a dish in the more common local format, I would find it very difficult and complain.

It is a myth that all Indian dishes are spicy, hot and of rocket-fuel grade. There are plenty of quite mild and almost bland food with great nourishment, taste and a huge variety of vegetables, particularly in certain regions in the south of India. My family was very familiar with that cuisine too and we had a lot of it. Later in life, my ninety-year-old neighbour in Australia - a farmer who lived all his life in the countryside, whose family was from the UK, and who had never ever set foot in an Indian restaurant or had  'Indian'  food until he met me, was perfectly fine and relished the traditional food I shared with him. He could not even tell it was Indian since it did not seem to be more than half made of 'curry' as he put it. We were a totally vegetarian household growing up in the tradition of many generations, until my mother finally relented and started to cook some eggs - boiled or an omelette only, as a great step outside the family tradition of untold thousands of years when we were approaching high school. It was a great leap.

I was into reading a lot in those days and came across the food habits of Europeans in many of the stories and novels. I decided that perhaps my elders were right. The Europeans seemed to have it all very simple - just three different major 'spices', three basic tastes to consider or add to suit one's own palatte - salt, pepper and sugar (to seemingly complete the whole circle of tastes). I assumed these were sufficient, like the primary colours for colour television. Each in a form that can be added in minute increments. Apparently sugar came in cubes in Europe that was not common in India where I knew it in only powdered or crystalline form for a very long time. I would read about how people added the 'taste' or 'spice' afterwards, just before they ate. In my own idea of my knowledge of the world, I attributed the longevity and higher life-expectancy of people in European countries to this simple formula for spice in their food. It was apparently common to see a lot of people live to a great age of 70s and 80s, many into their 90s and some even past a century in Europe!! I knew that there were people that lived up to those ages in my own family, but I used to look at the national averages in the newspapers. I did not bother to check the causes of deaths in India - many were due to other causes including infections, insufficient access to medical care and many preventable causes. I was still a little kid.

Of course, I had on occasion come across mention of strange spices in European literature that I never then saw or recognized around me in India - ' Parsley, Rosemary and Thyme'. You can tell that we mostly read literature from the UK. We never read much about other parts of Europe like Italy, France, Germany or Poland unless it had to do with a story about World War II, from a British perspective. My knowledge was limited and I was quite ignorant of the wide variety that really exists around Europe. I read that they all ate a lot of olives, fruits and fancy berries that we had never seen in our life. 

I theorized that perhaps all the spices were killing us in India. Interestingly, looking back, those were the days in India when heart-attacks, heart diseases, obesity, diabetes, cancer etc were quite rare. Cholesterol was not heard of by us kids. Cancer was such a novelty that it featured in many dramatic movies with such implausible symptoms, diagnosis and cures written into plots that sound hilarious today. In those days, we kids believed it was all true!

If one observes, usually in a kilogram of Indian food, cooked in traditional homestyle, the total spice content may be around 10-20 grams at most. That is around 1-2 percent. It can often be less. So, I used to wonder, why not just remove it altogether? It should not make much of a difference to others, but would to me!

My mother would explain to me,"That's exactly the point! You don't need much of spice to give the entire food a completely different or intended taste. Each spice has something unique and important that it contributes. They have been tried and tested over the years. If one does it right, it does not have to be heavily spiced. It has to enhance the flavour of the base food without overpowering its original taste, texture and flavour. You need to learn to balance all the ingredients and spices. That is the trick. If done right, you will find it tasty and good for you.
Every single spice is useful in ways other than just cooking. Each of them is used commonly as household remedies from cuts, scratches, colds, coughs, indigestion to various deficiencies of vitamins and minerals. Spices give value to food." That was as much mother knew about modern medical terms.

It was true, before we ever had a medicine cabinet or a bunch of store bought medicines, in most Indian houses, the spices in the pantry were the 'medicine cabinet' - the first line of defence against common ailments. It was a first-aid box as well. We have seen them used for cuts, insect bites, colds, coughs, recovery from certain illness like jaundice. We had seen them in use as kids, but it never registered fully with us.

Today, we are discovering the benefits of each and every spice in common use in India. Many multinationals have attempted to 'patent' these and now sell the extracts from these common spices in plastic tubes and bottles marked up to generate a hefty profit. India has historically had the lowest cases of bowel cancer. Parkinson and Alzheimer's were hardly known. We now find antioxidants, cancer fighting chemicals and wonders in common ingredients that were collectively known as 'spices' in India being used to actively fight many diseases and ailments in Western medicine as well.

Now, I have grown to enjoy a variety of foods from all over the world. I can even have spicy Indian food, not too hot or overloaded with spice. Many of the dishes I see in modern 'Indian' restaurants, particularly overseas are collection of individual dishes that one would hardly eat all at the same time in India. They seem to be over 50% 'curried' or overwhelming spices with the base ingredients - grains, vegetables, or meat smothered in a high-octane rocket-grade sauce. It is a caricature of what people traditionally eat at an average home. One could reduce the spice level to a fifth of what is served and it would be closer to the mark.

There is something interesting about the real appropriate use of spice. It can really add a small and appropriate amount of vital nutrients that are missing in the main base of the dish, it can add vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and special beneficial ingredients while completely giving the whole dish a balanced mixture of various tastes and flavours. Taste, like life is not monochromatic - it is not just salt, sugar and pepper. It has varying shades of these, bitterness, sourness, strong flavours that are difficult to even describe.

It is a lot like the Indian view of life and any human issue - it cannot and should not be simplified into just a few basic values to base our decisions on 
- Does it benefit me or not?
- Can we do it and get away with it or not, if someone objects?
- Can we make it sound like we are doing the right thing?

We really need a richer mix of spices in our value systems
-Is it the right thing to do?
-How does it affect others?
-Can we compromise and add some 'bitterness' to the 'sweetness' so that it is right for the whole system and society and not just for our own taste buds?
-Can we all bear a bit of chilli (pain) to go with the honey and chocolate (sweet riches) to make it a more wholesome ingredient?

I note that the Indian culture and mythology is analogous to its use of spices. It does not see the world, values and the 'right thing to do' in simple black and white. There is not just - 'Right and Wrong', 'God and Satan'. There is not one column of all good values and one column of all bad values. Indian mythology deifies many 'spices and flavours' of values - Love, Hate, Anger, Jealousy, Lust, Greed, Attraction, Aversion, Passion, Calmness,Courage, Cowardice,Truth, Lies, Patience, Impatience, Selfishness, Selflessness, My interests and Others' interests. All of them are valid spices, to be used in a way to achieve a balance, a harmony, to ultimately 'do the right thing' in a particular situation. None of them is right or wrong all the time. It depends on the context and what is cooking.

I think that the philosophy of use of spices can be beneficial to all those that cook! As immature children we only like sweet or bland tastes. As we mature we develop an appreciation for more variety of tastes and smells that we would have disliked earlier - hot, bitter and sourness etc. Life is a lot like cooking.



Copyright  (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2015
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