Fried potato. Boiled potato. Scalloped potato. Alu chokha. Alu maakha. Dauphinoise potatoes. Potato wedges. I problem you to call an ingredient extra versatile than the potato. Just like the “splendid” Indian daughter-in-law, it adapts to any state of affairs, bonds with each member of the family and relative, and by no means steals the highlight. I’ve hardly ever come throughout an ingredient that cuts throughout the nation – and continents – the way in which the potato does.
Each state in India makes use of the potato in its delicacies. Whether or not it’s the deep-fried spiced Kashmiri dum alu or North India’s alu sabzi or Bengali alu maakha – potato mashed with mustard oil, dried purple chilis, and salt, eaten with rice – or alu tikki or vada pao in Maharashtra and alu sandwich in Gujarat, it’s uncommon to come back throughout a state that doesn’t cook dinner potatoes.
Not like cottage cheese or tofu, this vegetable has a definite but unobtrusive flavour. It’s so good you could fry it and sprinkle it with a little bit of salt. It soaks up the flavours of different elements it’s cooked with with out affecting their style in any respect. Add to this the truth that it’s cheap.
In France, pommes may be loved in a number of methods, as in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. It’s actually the vegetable that binds us collectively.
In fact, in Bengal, we take this tuber-love to a different stage as a result of moderation has by no means been a Bengali trait, particularly relating to all issues gastronomical. We add potatoes to most dishes — fish curry, kosha maangsho (slow-cooked mutton curry), blended greens like pumpkin, parwal, cauliflower, and most significantly, our biryani. Calcutta biryani is among the few biryanis that features a large half of a potato, boiled within the meat inventory. It’s so fascinating that biryani joints like Shiraz will promote you an additional alu in your biryani at Rs 15 a pop.
This vegetable has a definite but unobtrusive flavour, not like cottage cheese or tofu. It’s so good you could fry it and sprinkle it with salt. (Picture: Freepik)
Given the Indian love for potatoes, one would suppose they had been indigenous to India. They don’t seem to be. The Dutch introduced potatoes to India, having first launched them to Europe from their settlement on the Cape of Good Hope. It’s recorded that round 1830, potatoes had been being grown on terraced slopes in Dehradun by Captain Younous and Mr Shore, the identical gents credited with growing Landour and Mussoorie.
Initially, solely Europeans and a few Muslim households in India consumed potatoes. In Maharashtra, the phrase batata for potato traces again to early confusion with candy potatoes, which Jesuit priest John Gerard known as batata in his 1597 English botanical writings. There’s nonetheless some confusion in historic paperwork on whether or not the potatoes talked about in information in India – from dinners given in Ajmer by Asaf Khan to Sir Thomas Roe in 1615 – had been candy or true potatoes.
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What is for certain, although, is that there isn’t a changing the potato in Indian kitchens and Indian plates now. From puri alu to batata vada to alur dum to even serving potato peels fried to a crisp – the alu is right here to remain and rule the vegetable roost. And I, for one, am not complaining concerning the recognition of this frequent denominator within the nation.
Subsequent week, I’ll write a couple of distinctive ingredient in Bengali meals—the fish head—and share some recipes.
