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In the following workshop, you’ll explore some of the many spices that make Indian food so distinctive. You’ll watch a noted Indian cookbook author make a traditional fish curry. And you’ll see how the Indian-born chef of one of New York’s hottest restaurants applies French technique to the fish curry of his childhood.
“I love spice,” says Floyd
Cardoz, executive chef at New York’s Tabla
restaurant and a Bombay native. “I think it’s
the best thing you can add to your food.”
Indians have been lavish users of spices for centuries, not always for culinary reasons. The ancient Ayurvedic texts, which codified Indian herbal medicine, described the healing properties of many spices. Many Indians still believe that consuming spices will make their skin and hair healthier. The spread of Hinduism also spurred spice consumption because Hindus are vegetarian, and spices are thought to make all those beans and lentils more digestible.
Although
only a few spices are native to India—black pepper, cardamom and turmeric among them—many
are grown there today, especially in the tropical
south. Most spice farms are family affairs where everyone takes part, harvesting the crop by hand in most cases, sometimes with the help of professional pickers who go from farm to farm.
The coastal
state of Kerala in southwest India is a spice paradise.
There, writes Madhur Jaffrey, black pepper vines
clamber up mango trees and “nutmeg fruit hang like tennis balls.” The
spice-growing lands are terraced, with each elevation
suited to different crops.
The finest black pepper is the Tellicherry, grown in the northern part of the state. It is high in the essential oils that produce flavor and define quality. As Jaffrey suggested, the pepper plant is a vigorous vine that needs the support of a pole or tree. Picked green (unripe), the peppercorns may be freeze dried or brined for export; Kerala cooks also make a green peppercorn chutney. But most of the green peppercorns will be laid out on mats and dried in the sun, during which time they will shrivel and darken to become the black peppercorns we use. If left on the vine, the peppercorns will ripen to red, like bell peppers. Then they can be soaked and milled to remove the husk, yielding white peppercorns.
“The Europeans did not want a black color in their white sauces, so that’s why the white peppercorn was created,” says Indian
cookbook author Julie Sahni. “But
the real flavor, the real heat, the real excitement
is in the skin.”
Pepper Rasam (Spicy Lentil Broth)
Pachakari Thoran (Spiced Vegetables with Coconut)
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