Can we Indians forget about the onion, tomato, ginger and garlic sauce that we put on everything we eat? Think about it. If Indian food, and I mean food from all geographic directions – north, northeast, east, south and west – were defined by a single curry, something often referred to as “mother sauce” in the Western culinary jargon, it would be the good old red curry made with onion, tomato, ginger and garlic. This base sauce sometimes turns orange when you add cream and other times it turns green when you add a little pureed spinach. Even lentils are tempered with the same four ingredients, because any other tempering often turns lentils into “hospital-type dal.”
Everything tastes the same
I am pretty sure that half of the Eno or Digene market in India can be attributed to this mother sauce because our stomachs have literally become allergic to it. We eat it day after day. We even put it in our eggs in the morning. That famous street dish, ‘anda ghotala’, is also a variant of this concoction, mixed with boiled eggs and served with fried eggs on top. “Ghotala” literally translates to scam, and those dishes are indeed a scam and products of sheer lack of imagination.
There’s something to be said here about the snob of all cuisines: French food. At least the French tend to glorify each ingredient by using sauces made with completely different flavor compositions. then a white butter (literally translates as white butter) is a simple butter sauce emulsified with vinegar and wine and boiled with shallots. In fact, each of the mother sauces of French cuisine… Bechamel, Velvety, Spanish, dutch and Ketchup (Tomato): It is defined by a distinct profile that accompanies various proteins and carbohydrates. While bechamel the main star is milk, veloute The star ingredient is chicken broth thickened with a roux (all-purpose flour that is cooked with butter). Similarly, velvety use beef broth with brown color roux. dutch uses raw eggs with lemon juice to create an absolutely divine velvety texture and refreshing flavor, while Ketchup It’s clearly an ode to tomatoes, which are cooked with herbs and reduced to a delicious thick consistency.
Derivatives of these sauces with many other ingredients are found with hundreds of other variants, each one different from the other. For example, sauce Butcher use the mother sauce Spanish With dry mustard and onion. Mornay sauce uses the mother sauce bechamelwith onion, cloves, Gruyere cheese and parmesan.
Rescuing Indian cuisine
It’s not that Indian cooking was always so monotonous. Far from it. It still isn’t. It’s just that it’s the on-the-fly cooking (the “hustler” kind) that has made this onion-tomato-ginger-garlic concoction the mainstay of every “dish.” Things weren’t meant to be this way. The original urad dal, also known as “kali dal” and now served as “makhani dal,” was always slow-cooked to perfection with only caramelized onions added for tempering. Rajasthan’s famous “junglee maas” was a glorification of the powerful Mathania chilis grown locally in Jodhpur to enhance the game meat hunted by royals of yore. The only additional ingredients in this dish were ghee and garlic to remove the gamey smell from the meat.
Even the opulent biryani was nothing like what it is today: layers of red curry meat or chicken, again with the same mother sauce, served with white rice. There are two stories about the origin of biryani, and neither of them mention meats cooked in curry with tomatoes, onions and ginger garlic. The ‘birian’ that came through Persian traders (long before the Mughals) was simply a one-pot dish made with rice, meat and spices, cooked underground in a clay pot in a charcoal-lined pit. This spice infused rice later became “Biryani” in India.
The other story of Biryani surprisingly originates from Sangam literature, which talks about a dish called ‘oonchoru’ dating back to 200 BC-200 AD This Chera Kings dish was made with rice, ghee, meat, turmeric, pepper, coriander and laurel. Even if we were to look to the Mughals for Biryani, the only recipe mentioned in Mughal texts is from the time of Bahadur Shah Zafar, who again spoke of rice infused with spices, not to mention layering.
Northeast stands out
The reason Indian mother sauce bothers me so much is because the spectrum of flavors remains almost identical. The sauce turns pav bhaaji with the addition of vegetables, but also works as kadhai chicken, Shahi Paneerand butter chickenIt depends on what you put into it. Essentially, they are all the same.
The only region of India that looks beyond this style of cooking is the Northeast and, to a certain extent, the South of India. In the former, we find a good degree of experimentation with ingredients, and fermentation processes are used to create umami flavours. Take Iromba from Manipur, where fish is fermented and then flavoured with fresh bay leaves, onion, cumin, chillies and chives, or a Mui Borok from Tripura, where the stars of the curry are local herbs, bamboo and vegetables with only fish stock used as a base. But of course, Fish Tenga from Assam, or even the popular Thukpa from Tibet eaten in Sikkim and Darjeeling, use the same four ingredients again. In the South, too, nothing escapes the “Big Four”, although from time to time you find dishes such as the yoghurt-based Moru curry.
I think we Indians clearly need to stand up and say “enough is enough” to this ubiquitous “mother sauce”. We must try to return to our roots, where monotony was never the norm.
(Zainab Sikander is a political analyst and columnist covering Indian politics since the last decade. She is an avid traveler and a true food enthusiast.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.