The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

An assorted collection of food words, one for each letter of the English alphabet. Every word in the list has something special to recommend it – the quirkiness of the dish it represents, the sound of the word as it rolls off the tongue, or a bit of both.

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There are times when we want to exclude onion and garlic from our diet – religious festivals, a lifestyle choice borne out of ayurvedic principles, or more earthly matters such as exorbitant prices.

The good news is that a “no onion no garlic” diet need not be one of frugality. Just because you aren’t eating onion or garlic does not mean you are doomed to subsist on bland watery boiled vegetables instead. Curries without onions and garlic can be so tasty, you will not even notice that a conventional ingredient is absent.

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It is one thing to know how to cook individual Indian dishes, quite another to combine the dishes harmoniously into an appetizing meal. Rajma masala and chhole masala are fantastic house party food, but would you serve them together? Not if you have a modest number of items on the menu. You love pooris as much as you love kadhi, but you would pair them with each other? Not if you want to kill the essence of both.

There are flavors that cohere and flavors that clash. You wouldn’t put multiple items of the same genre – such as gourds or dals – in the same meal. Pooris would possibly go with potato curry, kadhi would most definitely get served with plain rice.

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Mothers in Hindi movies may dish out copious amounts of halwa and kheer for their beloved betas but it is the men who rule the roost when it comes to playing food-centric roles on celluloid.

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When food couples with language, delicious idioms are born.

My mother tongue Hindi invokes the nature, tastes, colors and characteristics of food with great wit and insight in these idioms.