Twitter was awash last week with merriment and rueful bafflement when a user posted a photograph of the menu of an Indian restaurant, Biryani House, in Maryland, US. It was reported how the menu requires any consumer placing an order to fill in the spice level preferred in a dish -- in this instance, paneer butter masala.
The spice levels? ‘Zero spice, American mild, American medium, American spicy, Indian mild, Indian medium, and Indian spicy.’ Two points here. One, ‘Indian spicy1 is meant to be off the charts, gut-burning spicy. Two, ‘Indian mild', going by the gradation, is spicier than ‘American spicy’.
Which, in the West, is one of the fallacies attached to the notion of Indian food. Responding to the tweet, another user wrote, ‘I was ordering takeout at an Indian place in Massachusetts & my brother asked for spicy. The guy on the phone said White people spicy or Indian spicy?’
The West treats Indian food as a homogenous entity. It must inevitably be spicy. It has to be a curry (most commonly chicken butter masala). That is accompanied by the usual fixins: the ubiquitous ‘dhal’ (always spelt with an ‘h’), ‘poppadum’, and chutney. This is not Indian cuisine in any sense. It is a sort of bastardised version of north Indian food.
There are, of course, fine dining Indian restaurants in cities such as London and New York They offer the authentic stuff. But these restaurants are the preserve of the extremely wealthy and the freebie merchants. For the average punter, the local pub, local ‘Indian’, or local curry house familiarises diners with a uniform, nuance-free, misleading concept of Indian food.
It is a great pity that the West is not acquainted with the vast diversity of cuisines from each of India’s regions. What you get in, say, Tamil Nadu is unrecognisable from what you would find in Nagaland or West Bengal. And even within each region, there are so many ways of cooking the same item. The mustard (shorshe) fish, a staple in Bengal, and one of the few items from that region with which people from other parts of India are familiar, can be steamed and wrapped in banana leaves (paturi), cooked with or without potatoes, made into a thin gravy or a sticky one.
Read more at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/epaper/delhicapital/2023/apr/23/sunet-sundaychatter/oh-blimey-not-another-local-indian-serving-curry-dhal-poppadum-chutney/articleshow/99697922.cms