By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written in 2001
Nowhere in the world does one find as much diversity in restaurants a in the US. New immigrants continue to add their own unique culinary flavor to whet the appetite of US restaurant goers. Even in Pittsburgh, not a touristy city in the US, we have all varieties of Chinese, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Greek, and other restaurants. But have you seen a good English restaurant, or any English restaurant for that matter?
I have this theory on how the English colonized the world. Forget the steam engines of James Watt, the spinning gizmos, guns, cannons, and the Industrial Revolution that textbooks say helped the English to colonize the world. One fact that no textbook talks about is that the English were running away from their insipid, unappetizing, tasteless, dull food. They were ready to go anywhere — the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, China, and even the New World and Australia — looking for anything tasting better than their food. Not surprisingly, wherever they went, whatever they ate was better than what they had at home. Mesmerized by the food they smelled, tasted, and chewed, they stayed put.
Only then Jim Watt, cannons and guns entered the scene.
In the wake of the end of British occupation of India, in the shriveled British empire in which not long ago the sun never set, Indian restaurants are as ordinary as the Chinese ones here. Indian food items and spices in English grocery stores are no more “ethnic.” They are mainstream. So, it was inevitable that university-types would study the effect of spicy food on people’s mood, at least English people’s mood.
Times of India’s Nabanita Sircar (October 25, 2000) reported that one Prof. Grey of Nottingham Trent University studied the effect of spicy food, in particular the effects of korma, tikka masala, and rougan joosh on English people’s mood. What did he use as a control?
You guessed it, the insipid, unappetizing English Fish & Chips.
What did he find? Here are the excerpts:
* “The heart rates of those consuming fish and chips were raised by 3.2 beats/minute, but those eating tikka masala registered a rate of 4.4 beats, korma showed a rise of 4.9 and rougan joosh led up to 6.7.” To the spicy Indian dishes, if he had also added the lal or hari mirchi — the Indian versions of Jalapeno and Habanero peppers — the heart rates of his subjects would have gone through the roof.
* “Eating a curry gives you a natural high much more powerful than anything you get with traditional British foods. Our bodies physically crave curry in a way they do not seem to with other dishes.” Doesn’t the learned professor know that compared with Fish &Chips, anything edible would give a natural high, albeit a mild one
* “The effect curry has on pain receptors in the tongue is indeed an arousing experience.
After a candlelight dinner in an Indian restaurant, when the English lad lays his date, and she sues him for date rape, the boy now has a new defense similar to our Twinkie defense here: Temporary insanity of passion on account of the spicy Indian korma or the rougan joosh. But isn’t it a biological fact that all acts of insanity on account of passion are temporary?
* “Anticipation of the effect of the spicy food) can be as good as the product itself.”
It is not only with food that anticipation is as good as the product itself. If the professor recalled his own younger days, talked to people in love, or read the romantic poetry from different cultures — India has large compendiums on this — he would recognize that anticipation is sometimes even more satisfying than the acts or events themselves.
Recently, I was on the road for several days on work. Variety being the spice of life, I tried to diversify my daily culinary encounters, trying Chinese, Italian, Thai, Mexican, and even Indian foods to break the monotony, even as I stayed within my vegetarian boundary.
Believe me, after days of my tryst with exotic food, I started craving for my simple sahakari and mildly spicy sambar, rasam, roti, vegetables, dahi, chaval and achar. After pasta, pad thais, baigan bartas, garlic eggplants, and burritos leading me to dyspepsia, simple home meals seemed to me as the ultimate luxury. Thinking of their aroma was as stimulating to me as the rougan joosh was for the Englishmen.
If the learned British professor who studied the effect of spicy food on Englishmen’s mood checked with his Iranian or Indian associates, or talked with the Indian restaurateurs in London, he would have saved all the grunt work that goes into any research.
For, my Bengali and Kashmiri friends tell me, in Persian joosh literally means a stimulant. And in the poetic Persian, the meaning can be imaginatively stretched to also suggestively mean an aphrodisiac.