The Tamil culinary tradition believes in the principle of ‘arusuvai’ or the six different tastes – sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, salty, astringent (pungent), which helps to make a dish healthy, tasty and complete. The Mango Pachadi and the Vepampoo Rasam cooked during the New Year is a classic example of ‘arusuvai’.
The marketplace was love at first sight for me. Being an avid foodie, a market which had splendorous food shops spread over more than two hundred outlets was a strong point of attraction for me.
The complexity In Burmese food is found more by focusing on each mouthful rather than expecting it to immediately overwhelm the tastebuds.In short, flavours of Burmese cuisine are subdued and nuanced with the flavours that are salty, sour, bitter, spicy, or even sweet.
One such beautiful festival of ‘Thanksgiving’ is Pongal. It is a spring festival celebrated in the south of India specially by the Tamil community to offer a ‘Special Thanksgiving’ to the Sun, the earth and the cattle.
Thailand and the saga of street food is a different story altogether. Our journey began in Pattaya and ended in Chatuchak Market in Bangkok. The luscious aroma of street food is almost everywhere. The street in front of the Night Market, seaside roads and the beaches and the famous Jomtien beach was a walk on the paths of food heaven.
American author Sarah Josepha Buell Hale apparently played a role in popularising turkey as a Thanksgiving dish. In her novel ‘Northwood’, she devoted one whole chapter describing a Thanksgiving meal with turkey roast. She writes: “The roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly station, sending forth the rich odour of its savoury stuffing, and finely covered with the frost of its basting.” Sarah Josepha Hale also campaigned relentlessly to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday in the USA.
Bengali cuisine is marked by certain typicality…first, there are no set masalas for preparing a particular dish, and second, vegetables have to be cut in a particular way for every dish, be it chochchori (a mixed vegetable preparation) or dalna (curry).
The hilsa or ilish is the star of Bengali cuisine on both sides of the Indo-Bangladesh border. An elaborate festive spread is considered incomplete without the Ilish.
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