Achaya - The Story of Our Food

THE STORY OF
OUR FOOD

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THE STORY OF
OUR FOOD

K T ACHAYA

Universities Press (india) Private Limited

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Universities Press Private Limited 2000
First published 2000

eISBN 978 81 7371 835 9

e-edition:First Published 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests write to the publisher.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

Behind any of the foods that we eat every day, lies history and geography, botany and genetics, processing technology and high romance.

The ingredients of the food themselves have come to us from so many parts of the world. Some of them have travelled across continents and across oceans. For thousands of years, food plants have made their way to India to be adopted, adapted, nurtured and cherished here. Visitors to our country from ancient times, whether Greek or Chinese, Arab or European, have expressed their astonishment at the wide variety of food that they found in India, and its sheer profusion.

We still cook our food in ways developed by our predecessors. The ethos of food preparation, and the attention to cleanliness and purity are, in large measure, an Aryan inheritance that goes back three thousand years. For the last one thousand years, another culture, that of the Muslims, entered our country and gave new and richer dimensions to Indian cooking.

Frying pans, kadhais and tandoori ovens go back thousands of years. So do mechanical appliances for pounding, grinding and the pressing of sugarcane juice and vegetable oils.

In the last five hundred years, from Mexico and South America, came food materials that we now take for granted, like the groundnut and cashewnut, potato and tomato, and yes, even the chilli! All of which today no Indian household can do without.

This little book has been written to help you share some of the excitement that lies behind the food of India, and the magnificent culinary legacy we have inherited.

Bangalore Dr. K. T. Achaya

May 2000

1 OUR EARLY ANCESTORS

Man in India

It is obvious that monkeys and men resemble each other. Millions of years ago, a common ancestor started on the road to becoming man, walking upright, and developing a larger brain and logical thought. About 2 million years ago man emerged in his modern shape and form, called Homo sapiens. Possibly this occurred in Africa, followed by migration in various directions. We learn all this when fossil bones of these early ancestors of man are discovered.

They also left various implements which come to light at times. The large apes, from whom man is descended, were and are vegetarians, but these tools tell us that early man soon became a hunter of animals. The earliest tools were huge, blunt stones called chopping tools which were in use about half a million years ago. In the next stage of his development, man started collecting food for his use. The tools then changed to pointed oval stones which were employed as hand-axes and digging tools, and as knives and scrapers of flesh from skins. In the next stage man stopped foraging for food, and started to grow his own. Small, sharp stone chips called microliths, fitted to wooden handles, were used for a variety of purposes. They were used to cut down crops, to chop up meat and vegetables, to tip arrows shot from bows, and so on. Animal bones are found in every archaeological site that has ever been excavated in India, but later, as man progressed, meat-eating was combined with the use of agricultural crops. The earliest Indian culture was the Indus Valley civilization, the cities of which flourished on the banks of many rivers in Punjab, Gujarat and Rajasthan from 2500 BC for about a thousand years. The bones found at these sites showed that beef, mutton, turtles, small Indian alligators (gharials), and river and sea fish were all eaten in addition to foods like wheat and barley. While the bones of the domestic fowl have been found at these sites, some sort of taboo against eating it has persisted right down the centuries. But we do know that every chicken in the world today is descended from the Indian jungle fowl, which was their original ancestor.

Pictures tell a story

We can also deduce what early Indians ate from the paintings that they left behind on walls of the caves in which they lived. About 40 km from Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, a series of such rock shelters have been discovered on the Vindhya Hills at a place called Bhimbetka. These caves have been continuously occupied from about half a million years ago to just 2 500 years ago. The walls of the caves are covered with paintings which experts tell us were drawn as far back as 20 000 years ago. Is it not rather wonderful to feel that something painted by an ancestor of ours so long ago can still be seen on the walls of these caves?

What did they paint? And how? The very earliest paintings are in green and dark red colours, which were made by grinding up rocks of these colours with some liquid to produce a paint. The paintings show men and women dancing and hunting, usually drawn in outline but extremely expressive. Many animals are shown being hunted, obviously so that their meat could be eaten. These include the elephant, wild boar, tiger and rhinoceros. Surprisingly, even the giraffe and ostrich are shown very clearly. This is interesting, because today these two species do not exist at all in India, so we even learn something of the history of animals in our country from the paintings at Bhimbetka (see Fig. 1).Hunting scenes, painted slightly later, show hunters using barbed spears, pointed sticks, bows and arrows with a variety of animals as the victims. Meat of many kinds was thus eaten, probably supplemented with wild fruit, vegetables and greens which could be collected from neighbouring forests. In fact, even today, many of our tribal people live in exactly the same way. They catch all kinds of animals, even small mice, lizards, crocodiles and snakes to supplement the many edible fruits, leaves and roots which they collect from forest trees and plants. Both the tools left by our ancestors, and the pictures that they painted, tell us quite a lot about the kind of food which was eaten long ago.

Words, too, are ancient

We have one more source from which to trace the foods of our forefathers. All languages evolve and grow. Some of the words which we use today are thousands of years old, and when such a word is located, we can be sure that the object existed thousands of years ago.