India (Part I) - Eating

I’ve never read Eat, Pray, Love, nor have I seen the movie, but I sincerely believe that it has been mis-titled. It is my impression (one I’ve only gotten from commercials, so forgive me if I’m wrong), that the “Eat” portion occurs in Italy, “Pray” in India, and “Love” in Bali.  My experience of India, however, was “EAT!”

Bincy and her fiancé Snehal picked us up from the Ahmedabad airport at 3:30 in the morning.  After a seemingly short drive to Gandhinagar, we arrived at Bincy’s house.  Once at Bincy's house, Eddy and I were greeted by Bincy's mom, Suma, and tiny cups of piping hot chai. Indian Chai is different (and certainly more delicious) than any tea I have ever tasted.  The spices are crushed pretty much directly from the plants then added to buffalo milk, which is creamy and rich.  A tiny, espresso sized cup has more flavor than a Starbucks Grande Frappacino (or whatever crap it is Francine drinks), and certainly is healthier.  This was my introduction to India: welcome to your new home, drink up!

And eat and drink we did!  Bincy had to spend 2 whole days at the salon, getting manicured and pedicured, hair treatments and skin treatments and who knows what else, so Eddy and I were left to our own devices. Our first days were quite simple: sleep, eat breakfast, sit around, eat lunch, nap, tour around for an hour or so, eat dinner, sleep.  Suma decided that she was going to cook all of the traditional Gujarati dishes for us, but she only had 3 days to do it, so each and every meal was a feast.  There was rice, and pancakes, and roti, and parrotha and puri, for the breads, served with every kind of curry, fish and meat (chicken and a dark meat, maybe buffalo?) and vegetable, all with different arrays of spices.  Everything was cooked from scratch.  The chili peppers were fresh from the vendor, every spice was hand crushed from the plant/seed by Suma herself.  And the breads were made by soaking the rice and/or lentils (depending on what type of bread it was) overnight with yeast powder, then frying each slice individually over a fire.  As far as I could tell, each dish was distinctly different, united only by the fact that every one was spicy as hell. 

I will admit that I am a sissy when it comes to spice.  However, I pride myself in being willing to try almost anything, and after hearing how much work went into each dish, resolved to finish everything on my plate. The first night, they served the fish curry, meat curry, dal, rice, and some fluffy white potato pancake that I still have no idea what it’s called.  Each serving seemed to be the size of a small mountain, and before I could get halfway through the first few dishes, Suma would be there to spoon more onto my plate.  Did I mention I was eating with my hands?  The potato pancakes were easy – just scoop a tiny bit of curry on, then stuff a huge into my mouth.  The rice I had more trouble with.  The trick is adding enough of the curry to get the rice to stick together, then balling it up and shoveling it into your mouth without dropping it everywhere.  Sounds easy enough right?  Now, here was my dilemma; the curry was spicy.  Really, really spicy.  A single bit set my mouth on fire, and yes, spice seems to understand the powers of summation.  The more curry I used, the easier it was to get the food into my mouth, but the more my mouth would burn, and the less I would be able to eat without diving for my water glass.  However, if I used less curry, I ate more slowly and thus gave Suma more time to pile second, third and fourth helpings onto my plate.

This was where Eddy came in.  Eddy quickly mastered the art of eating with his right hand, and was sopping up the curries with remarkable ease.  True, his face turned fire engine red, but he could shovel that food like a true Indian.  So, being the gentleman he is, we devised a system in which I (not so covertly), would pass him the spiciest bits under the table.  This was a source of much hilarity for our hosts, and Bincy soon began introducing him as “Eddy-who-can-eat-like-an-Indian” to her family.  I then became the “Angel of the House” because I was so sweetly giving my food to my “husband”. Hah.  If only they knew.

The system worked quite well for a while.  After a few days, a caterer from Kerala (the southern state where most of Bincy’s family is from) took over, so that Suma could concentrate on Bincy and the seemingly hundreds of friends and family members who had arrived.  Kerala cuisine is very different from Gujarati – it is less spicy (or so it seemed at first), uses more rice and less bread, and seems to use coconut in everything.  This would have been all fine and dandy, except that now the food was served by the men, so the portions became even larger.  Every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner, was a 3-course feast, and guests had to eat in shifts because there were so many of us.  Bincy and her “honored guests” ate first – we were included in this group – then the friends, and finally, the multitudes of relatives.  Because no one else could eat until we finished, I vowed to speed up my eating (imagine how slowly I eat with utensils, then incorporate the elements of spicy food and eating with my fingers, and you’ve got yourself a 2 hour lunch, easy).  Speed proved to be my downfall.

On the day of the wedding, neither Eddy nor I were feeling very well, so I decided to get a lunch plate that we would share.  A few bites later, it became apparent that Eddy would not be able to eat any of it.  Sitting with a mountain in front of me, my knight in shining armor battling his own inner dragons, I realized that it was up to me to eat the entire plate.  I began slowly, and things were going well.  The yellow curry was quite sweet, the dahl was delicious, and there was plenty of rice and water.  As I ate, I gained courage and speed, mixing the curries together quickly in hopes that if I finished quickly, I could fold my plate over before the men came back to deliver seconds.  And then, I found it.  A huge, fresh, green chili, the kind whose seeds I had been scrupulously avoiding.  I put my tongue inside of it.  My eyes welled up, my nose sprung a leak, and my mouth caught fire.  I spit it out, shoveled the remainder of my rice into my mouth, and downed 2 glasses of water.  The Indians all saw me, and laughed.  By my second helping of rice, I knew it was a lost cause.  I folded my plate, ran into the house, and threw up.

Unfortunately, that was my last experience with what I now consider to be the real Indian cuisine.  True, there was a lot of food at Bincy’s reception, but I was still too shaken to try anything that Eddy didn’t pre-screen for me.  After the wedding, Bincy’s family started letting me serve myself (although they still made fun of my Natalie-sized portions), and sweet breads and lentils became a more common occurrence.  Then, it was off on a train to Delhi, which in 9 hours served a snack, tea, dinner, dessert, another tea, and breakfast, with tea.  Once in Delhi, we ate the complimentary breakfast of tea, toast and boiled eggs at our hotel, and ate “dunch” (dinner/lunch, since we couldn’t possibly stomach both) wherever our guidebook or guide recommended.  Food in Delhi was still delicious, but it tasted like the food you can find in Indian restaurants in Seattle.  We tasted our first naan in Delhi. 

In many ways, my time in India, especially my time with Bincy’s family, was defined by food.  Obviously, much more happened (don’t worry, I will post about the wedding, as well as all of the incredible sights along the way), but the food represented what was probably the most important aspect of India to me; family.  There are incredible sights to see pretty much anywhere you go in the world, and while India may have more than its fair share, I honestly don’t think I know enough about the history of culture of the subcontinent to truly appreciate everything there is to see.  For me, what was most special about India was getting to live with a family, Bincy’s family, see their world and share in Bincy’s very special day.  And while the food itself may have been a trial for me, the moments surrounding the food were incredibly special.