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General Charles de Gaulle once said in exasperation about his own nation that it was impossible to run a country which produced over 300 different varieties of cheese.
Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao could well take a cue and explain away some of his many problems. All he really needs to do is to substitute "lentils" or "daal" for "cheese".
Even the admirable writer of Indian Food-A Historical Companion has not been able to estimate the varieties of lentils and pulses that are eaten in India, but they must easily be over de Gaulle's three-hundred mark. Indeed, no other country in the world has such a bewildering diversity of foods as India. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Bombay to Calcutta, India is the delight of any gastronomer.
The pity is that the rest of the world has savoured only a small part of this wonderful fare. "Indian" food for foreigners means basically one word: curry-probably the least meaningful word in Indian cooking. A request of "I'd like some curry" is guaranteed to throw any self-respecting Indian chef into an apoplectic fit.
And about the only kind of food Indian restaurants serve abroad is Punjabi, the least subtle of Indian cuisines. Even more bizarre-and this is something that this book has not explained-most of these Punjabi restaurants are actually run by Bangladeshis. I recall going to a street in Manhattan which was lined with "Indian" restaurants, all of them. I discovered later, were owned and run by Bangladeshis from Sylhet. In London, too, I was told emigrants from Sylhet owned a number of Indian restaurants. I still don't know why.
Such mysteries apart, Dr K.T. Achaya has done a commendable job of a daunting task, namely, writing the history of Indian food from the earliest, almost prehistoric days, to the present time. He is not the most exciting of writers but manages to cover a great deal of ground in painstaking and often interesting, detail.
Though one was aware that in ancient India, eating beef and drinking alcohol was quite common, Dr Achaya has given convincing proof of this (bad news for the BJP). What has also always intrigued me was precisely how vegetarianism came into India. Here too, the author provides the answer. The main thrust came not from Hinduism but from Buddhism (more bad news for the BJP), with its emphasis on the virtues of non-violence and reverence for all forms of life.
Another factor "was the sheer abundance and wide range of foodstuffs available even from Harappan times, by way of cereals, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables, fruit and milk, and the spices, condiments and sweetening agents that could fashion vegetarian meals of high nutritional quality, and gustatory and aesthetic appeal". Nowhere else in the world except in India, says the author, would it have been possible to be a vegetarian in 1000 BC. That's well and succinctly put.
Unfortunately, however, the author has been badly let down by his publishers, at least in the picture department. Except for the cover jacket, the photographs, colour as well as black and white, and drawings in the book are extremely poor and their layout sadly unimaginative. A picture of "dahi-vadas" looks like ice-cream and one of "puris" looks most unappetising. What could easily have been not just a coffee-table book but a dining-table one, ends up being neither. The idli is there; a pity that the sambar is missing.