Image showing Basket full of vegetables .Make Easy Indian vegetarian recipes

Easy Vegetarian food Recipes From India

Welcome to Indian Vegetarian Recipes -Quick & Easy

Rice Recipes & Vegetable Curry Recipes

. Food is one of the major essentials of life, which has had to be labeled with regional or national names for the simple reason that, in the early stages of human development, the food of a region was perforce restricted to local products. In India, particularly, food has been, and remains to this day, a great dividing factor. Social Science tells us that the evolution of rational man from the barbarous to a civilized state is characterized by an extension of the circle of social activity, i.e. “by the widening of the symbiotic circle of thought and activity”. In such society its collective consciousness is the only creative force leading to the highest forms of human endeavour. It was only after contact with the progressive west, and the development of transport in the last few decades, that trade and travel began the movement of products and peoples from one region to another. In spite of this material advance, the castes in India multiplied from the original four to over four thousand.

A rising standard of life for all classes can have little meaning without relevant reference to food, and without some kind of practical criterion with which to measure a higher national minimum, if we are to succeed in our efforts today to enjoy the first of the Four Freedoms-Freedom From Want. A book of this kind can help all classes and castes to know what good food is practicable in any part of India (or elsewhere) and how to produce and enjoy it.

Caste and religious restrictions prevented the growth of anything like a national diet, which can be characterized as Indian, to make that term comparable with the GOOD FOOD of France or Italy or Sweden, which this series of books aims to give to the world. Mr. Gandhi repeatedly declared that a common countrywide diet was a “necessity for our national well-being and for our political unity”. Yet the strictness of caste barriers permeated even the highest educational circles. In my own University, the college I went to had a “hostel” which catered for ten eating “Sections”, each with its own separate kitchen and dining-room labeled:

1. European 2.Non-vegetarian Hindu 3. Non-vegetarian Malaya-lee-Hindu 4. Tamil-Telugu-Christian 5. Syrian Christian 6. Brahmin 7. Thiyya 8. Nayar 9. Non-Brahmim Vegetarian 10. Cosmopolitan.

The second last being for those students who could only eat Brahmin-cooked food but could not eat it with Brahmin students in their dining-room. And all this was for the students of just one part of India! In spite of this indulgent catering for caste, an official report stated that “…some students’ health suffered because they could not eat the food provided, as it was so different from their own”. Even today there is no one recognizable diet for the average citizen. In fact there is as yet in India no average Indian existing, independent of his caste or his linguistic group.

Indian Food

The isolation of the mass of people in scattered villages, and their extreme poverty increase the differences between the diets of the various economic groups. So the foreigner is easily bewildered by the strange anomalies of the country side, e.g. RASAM in Tamil areas AMTI in Maharashtra, not to mention the more elaborate sweets and savouries used in ritual or festive meals.

So different is the taste of a dish when cooked by different castes (who may happen to speak the same language), that any generalization is quite impossible. This is not just a matter of how different were the pies “mother used to make” but a question of there being pies AND pies. In Britain, do you have to cross the Tweed to eat a Haggis, or travel to Cornwall to taste a Cornish Pastie, or fly to Wales to enjoy a Welsh Rarebit? In situations like this, I stick to a recognizable basic name for that dish, and then I christen a fresh every variation of it with a suffix or an adjective e.g. Puri and Pilgrim-Puri or Potato-Puri, Ruffin for the Indian version of Muffin, etc.

There are so many different ways of making even tea and coffee, differences more vital than those noticed in France with tea leaves that lie pathetically in a muslin bag. In the home of one of my students in the north, I was once offered spiced coffee with exciting new eatables. The coiffee looked like nothing on earth and the effort I had to make to drink this revolting stuff, while gratefully, yet vaguely, expressing appreciation of the lavish hospitality, has remained quite a memory; more so, because this was a special kindness to me as a southerner. Though we grow tea in the south, we grow our own coffee too, and even export it. Out Brahmin brew will not yiled place even to the most carefully prepared café au-lait of France. If you could see the breath-taking beauty of the coffee blossom on our hillsides, you would, indeed, enjoy drinking that coffee even more. In this part of India, it is customary to invite you to tea, that conventional British afternoon affair, but, if we love you enough, it is coffee that afternoon affair, if we love you enough, it is coffee that will be served to you. In Bombay and north of that, tea is the more usual drink at all hours, and what strong tea they can drink too!