Tandoori tales

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Strap: As more and more urban households take to roasted foods, a lowdown on treats foods from across the lengths and breadths of the country

Ravleen Kaur

Assigning potatoes to cinders at the end of the Lohri bonfire is a common childhood memory for most Punjabis. The habit continues to present day, not just out of nostalgia but for the earthy taste of the roasted potato when its charred skin is removed. Not to miss the tandoori chicken, without which no Punjabi party is complete. Moving to the North-East, people, off the cuff, roast any meat on a bamboo skewer called khorika in Assam and can have it without any accompaniment.

Roasting food was the first form of cooking that followed the discovery of fire, and remains to date, one of the most appetizing ones. While barbequing meat and vegetables is the Westerners’ favourite reason for picknicking, every region in India has its own famous roasted specialty. There are Kakori kebabs in Uttar Pradesh, undhiu in Gujarat, Khasi smoked pork of Meghalaya, pathar ke kebab in Hyderabad and litti chokha in Bihar, besides the pan-India popular chicken tikka and seekh kebabs.

Evolution of roasting

Technically, anything cooked in front of an open fire, when the food is surrounded by dry heat, is termed as roasted. When direct fire is applied, Maillard’s reaction, a chemical reaction between the amino acids and the natural sugar in food, sets in, caramelising its juices and giving it a comforting brown colour that renders it more appetising as compared to microwave cooking or boiling.

When fire was discovered, the main purpose it served was light, warmth and protection from pests and predators. “It must have been a long journey of evolution from the discovery of fire to its use for cooking. Our ancestors must have spent years learning to sustain the fire and tame it. But once they learned to put food to fire, there was no looking back. Probably, the earliest food must have been a fish held over the fire with an arrow,” says filmmaker and history scholar Sohail Hashmi. “There were no vessels or spices to begin with, not even metal knifes as the art of metal cutting had not been mastered by then,” he reasons.

“Once fire became manageable it inevitably bound communities together, because tending the flame required division of labour and shared effort. It socialised eating by making it an activity practiced in a fixed place at a fixed time by a community of eaters,” says Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez- Armesto, in his book “Near a thousand tables—A history of food.”

“Even snakes and tarantulas were roasted in Africa,” says Hashmi. The main reason is our hunter-gatherer background. “Our ancestors would just carry a ‘daanv’ (a long knife) to the forest. At meal time, they would kill a game, stuff the meat in a green bamboo, light a fire and cook it there and then,” said Minjo Basar, who belongs to Galo tribe in the Lepa Rada district in Arunachal Pradesh.

Wherever there has been game, there is roasting, says Ashish Chopra, who has studied tribal cuisines across India and is an expert on North-Eastern food. “They even found their marinating spices in the forest. If it is kachri in Rajasthan and kokum in Goa, it is garlic and Punjab and trans-Himalayas and chilly in the North-East,” he says.

Types of roasting

Chopra says culinary cultures developed as a result of need, not greed. The presence of a hearth in each community set up made it rather convenient to char the food directly in naked fire or hang it on embers. Many famous leaf wrapped delicacies in India like pitha in West Bengal and the parsi patrani machchi evolved out of the need to encase the food and save it from burning when consigned to fire. But the leaves contributed their own flavour to the food too.“The Central India adivasis like to roast mushroom in a bowl contrived out of sal leaf. All kinds of yam and fish are roasted in leaves, especially palash and banana leaves. Large varieties of yam are roasted directly on fire too,” says Aparna Pallavi, a former journalist and writer who has extensively worked on tribal food.

Pit roasting is a technique in which food is kept in a heated pit dug in the ground and then covered with charcoal. “We have been roasting peanuts and gram in a bhatti dug in the ground much before popcorn came here. The name undhiu, the Gujarati dish of mixed vegetables, is called so because it is made in a pot kept upside down or undhuin a pit,” says food historian Pushpesh Pant.

Another technique of roasting is hot stone girdle. Hot stones are used to either surround the food or a large rock is used as a pan. “Hyderabad’s famous pathar ke kebabis basically slow roasted mutton on a huge volcanic stone shelf. And kal in the kal dosa (a spongy variety of dosa) itself means stone,” he adds.

The hanging of food on fire by an arrow, bamboo skewer or a metal spit is termed as spit roasting that goes for all our tikkas and seekh kebabs. A combination of pit and spit roasting is the present-day tandooricuisine. He writes that the tradition of tandoor came to India from Central Asia. That food, when it came to India, got enriched with spices here and came to be called the ‘Mughaliya’ food,” he says. Hashmi strongly contends that the term Mughlai is a misnomer.

Roasting today

As much as we love our tikkas and tandoori chicken, we prefer to order it from restaurants than make it at home. Options like baking in an oven, barbeques, grills and gas fired rotisserie ovens are there but unlike the western world, barbeque is not our favourite way of socialising, even though the trend is on the rise in urban households.

It is possibly because a modern kitchen does not support a roasting set up. Elderly people who have tasted a challiand bhartha made with brinjals roasted in a chulha can vouch that it doesn’t taste the same as it does on an LPG gas flame but there seems to be no choice. “Most middle class houses still don’t have an oven. Keeping a braisier or a sigri at home requires an allocated space along with paraphernalia like charcoal, wood, etc.,” says Hashmi.

Like all slow food cooking techniques, roasting has suffered the onslaught of modern times when gastronomy is sacrificed in the interest of busyness. For want of time and unconcretised land, undhiu is now cooked in a pressure cooker. And due to lack of fuelwood, most restaurants now use gas-fired tandoors. “The flavour rendered by wood smoke is incomparable,” says Chopra.

Less fuelwood has meant even adivasis are roasting less now. “Whenever I go to an adivasi area, it is usually the elders who are roasting food, if at all and then the younger ones gather around them, which means they are curious to know more about it. But it is an effort, being constantly present to see that it does not burn. Also, I think, in order to assimilate themselves with the modern civilised society, the adivasis want to leave behind their tested methods of cooking,” said Pallavi.

Roasting, however, continues to flourish in the North-East. “With five biodiversity hotspots in the region, there are ample resources and it is a hotbed of tribal communities like Mishing, Nocte, Nagas who are still dependent on the forest. Most households maintain a hearth which comes handy for roasting,” says Chopra.

Health aspects

Roasting locks in the nutrients and flavours of the food that cooks in its own fat or juices. Both Hashmi and Chopra, however, say that balancing roasting with boiling and frying is only healthy. “Too much roasted food can lead to accumulation of carbon in the body, which is worse than nicotine and can be a potential cause of cancer. Fermented food, however, compliments roasted food and neutralises the carbon from smoke. A famous barbeque food chain serves kimchi, a pickled salad, along with their fare while in the North-East, they eat fermented bamboo shoot,” says Chopra. Choose as you like, and eat guilt free.