Rainbow On A Thali

Salt can make meagre fare like roti and raw onions palatable. The more we eat this magic ingredient, the more we crave it. Though home-cooked food also has sodium, we managed to ward off its ill-effects till a few years ago. In fresh home-cooked food, salt was added only to complement the natural taste; and we actually celebrated the taste of the many ingredients in our kitchen. Nobody used the ‘one taste fits all’ strategy now adopted by our food industry. Our food basket had more choices and we made the most of local biodiversity.

Traditional food is all about the individual and what she likes to eat. The staple thali has a mix of chawal, roti, dal and sabzi. A variety of accompaniments—pickles, chutneys and papad—are by the side, and you take only bite-sizes. The dahi (curd) is best enjoyed bland. Salt is never used to mask the bitter taste of karela. If the food tastes bitter, the thali has a sweet for you to dig into. A green chilli is always at hand to tweak the taste a little. Instead of an overemphasis on salt, a variety of spices are used to titillate the tongue. Coarsely prepared home food allowed people to play with salt just the right way. A few salted vadis to the daal or the sabji imparts different amounts of salt to each mouthful, providing the satisfaction of consuming salt without actually having too much of it.

Instead of depending on just two flavours—the sugary and the salty, as our processed food industry does—traditional food employed a combination of tastes: the salty, the sugary, the bitter, the sour and the umami. In Tamil Nadu, a chutney prepared during festivals combined all the four tastes, drawing the bitter taste from neem flowers, the sweet from gur and sourness from tamarind. In Garhwal, a chutney prepared out of bhang-jeera seeds had both salt and sugar in it. Even our snacks were healthier. We had the chana murmura, which was subtly salted; popcorn was popped in rock salt,  which imparted a mild saltiness to the corn; puffed makhana wasn’t always flavoured and bhel puri combined a variety of flavours that complemented each other.

We were also not so dependent on refined salt. The Indian kitchen stocked a variety of condiments like kala namak (black salt) and sendha namak (rock salt). These granular salts impart bursts of flavour. Unlike table salt which is mainly about sodium, black salt has more potassium. Ayurveda says it’s a great digestive aid.

India has a wide variety of foods to fit any mood. Perhaps we need to get back to treating salt as a condiment, just the way it was in our traditional fares.

Vibha Varshney is a co-author of First Food: A Taste of India’s Biodiversity published by CSE; E-mail your columnist: vibha [AT] cseindia [DOT] org