Because I went to school in North India and had to eat things like paneer and rajma, I am accustomed to people making fun of Gujarati food. One Dusshera, when our school took us on a trip to Ahmedabad, a delegation of boys went to see the cook at the guesthouse we were staying at and handed him an empty jar. “Please put all the sugar you were going to put into our food into this jar,” they requested him. “We hate sweet food and so just give us the sugar, we’ll make coffee with it.”
I’m surprised the cook didn’t give the delegation a couple of tight raps because apart from the rudeness, the boys were displaying pure North Indian ignorance. Gujarati food is not just sweet. Like all great cuisines, it relies on the interplay between sweet and sour flavours (what the Chinese regard as the yin and yang of cuisine) and in any case, the sweetness usually comes from gur, not from refined sugar.
That experience taught me two things. One: North Indians can be very limited in the flavours their palates can handle. That’s why they miss the subtleties of, say, Thai cuisine, where sweetness is one of the basic flavours in main courses. And that’s why they are foxed by the European tradition of pairing sweet (often fruit) flavours with meats: duck with orange; pork with apples; foie gras with a balsamico reduction; etc.
A feast in one plate: Gujarati cuisine is thali-based and usually has fresh vegetables, sprouted pulses, mithai, poori, papad and God alone knows what else.
And two: the rest of India (and perhaps the world) knows very little about Gujarati cuisine. The average Punjabi may abandon his primitive paneer masala to try a Gujarati dish but its sophistication will pass him by. A delicately flavoured cauliflower sabzi, for instance, will strike him as no more than the Punjabi version with a little sugar added.
When people ask me to recommend a quintessential Gujarati dish, I always suggest the kadhi. In North India, kadhi consists of thick robust gravies. In Gujarat, our kadhis are thin and when cooked expertly, can show off sweet and sour flavours.
The same is true of the classic tuvar dal. In North Indian restaurants, dal has come to mean a thick, viscous black substance that is packed full of dairy products. In Gujarat, the tuvar dal is as complex as, say, a great Tom Yum soup in Thai cuisine. It will have four or five flavours and yet each will live in perfect harmony with the others.
Delicate delight: I yield to nobody in my admiration for a good steamed idli. But a dhokla takes steaming to another level entirely.
But these are dishes from Gujarati home cooking and hard to find in restaurants. So the one easily available dish that captures the complexity of Gujarati cuisine is bhelpuri. By now, you should know the story of its origins. Chaat was taken to most parts of India (except the South) by guys from UP (and perhaps Bihar). When they got to Bombay (as it then was), the local Gujaratis had very little time for all the papri chaat-type rubbish that they still serve in Delhi.
Delicate delight: I yield to nobody in my admiration for a good steamed idli. But a dhokla takes steaming to another level entirely.
But these are dishes from Gujarati home cooking and hard to find in restaurants. So the one easily available dish that captures the complexity of Gujarati cuisine is bhelpuri. By now, you should know the story of its origins. Chaat was taken to most parts of India (except the South) by guys from UP (and perhaps Bihar). When they got to Bombay (as it then was), the local Gujaratis had very little time for all the papri chaat-type rubbish that they still serve in Delhi.
Soon Gujaratis had taken inspiration from the UP chaatwallahs (or bhaiyyas as they called themselves) and created paani puri (a variation on the batasha of UP; they call them golgappas in most of North India now) and had added such typically Gujarati touches as sprouted pulses and small chickpeas. Even the paani took on a more complex dimension.
But then they went further and taught the chaatwallahs a thing or two. Bhelpuri was not an adaptation. It was invented in Bombay and combines all the strengths of great Gujarati cuisine: a mix of sweet (the khajoor chutney), sour (a little kuchaa kairi or aam went into it) and hot (the red chutney). The texture was a work of genius: crunch (sev), softness (the boiled potato) and bite (the kaanda or pyaaz). It was neither dry (because of the chutneys) nor wet (like all that papri chaat-type nonsense).
Even now, a well-made bhelpuri is a work of art. Many Gujaratis still make it at home but you can get the real thing at Bombay’s Soam (and perhaps Swati; I am not so sure about Vithal any longer).