Among all the things to have happened to the field of Indian gastronomy which could have adversely affected the task of pairing food with wine, nothing has been as drastic and yet passed as unnoticed as the side plate. That’s right; an inanimate round piece of crockery has done more damage to the pairing paradigm for Indian cuisines than anything else, chillies included! Allow me to elucidate.
Traditionally, and I don’t know how far it dates back but it’s safe to say it is old enough to be deeply ingrained into the fabric of Indian customs and rituals, we had food in one go. There were no starters per se and even the desserts were all served on a leaf, or later, one big thaal , or a slightly smaller thali . If this round dinner-plate with raised edges may be considered a clock, then the meats, if any, were placed at 10 o’clock. The veggies started there and ran up to say 2 o’clock. At the 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock positions were the pickles, salads and other condiments, placed right next to the yoghurt or the sweet, and finally, at 6 o’clock, was the most important place, the space marked out for keeping bread.
Bread is almost a dirty word today, usually spelled “C-A-R-B-S”. But in the agrarian society that India always was (and away from the metros, still is) carbohydrates were the life-giving juice for the hard-working farmers, the most important part of their meal to help them sustain their daily toil. It was thus considered a staple and no bite of food taken during a meal was devoid of bread. The curries and veggies accompanying had to be spiced up a little extra in order to accommodate for the blandness of bread so that each bite, which would be either dipped into a curry or used to scoop up a dry dish, would naturally be balanced in its spice. That food, ladies and gentlemen, that food, a sommelier could match with wines.
Shift focus to today and what do we see? Bread now lies on a side plate, something that we proudly incorporated from the West. The main plate now has different foods all over it and, like in the West, we think it fine to eat them with a fork and knife, pausing every now and then to break some bread and mop up the gravy. Rogan Josh isn’t the same as Steak Diane, neither is Laal Maas a synonym for Le selle d’agneau; the latter in either case can be had by themselves, but you just don’t brave the Jodhpuri Mathania chilli solo on the shiny tines of a fork. It. Needs. Bread.
The result is that dishes now appear spicier and hotter as they are being ingested without the bready wrap to appease them. What happens next is that either (A) the chef is accused of being too generous with his spices or (B) a sommelier simply packs off a semi-sweet syrupy wine to soothe the flames and calls it a pairing. And just like that, thousands of years of gastronomic heritage are distilled down to a kinky penchant for spices best handled by sticking it with a shot of something sweet.
So, the next time you wish to conduct a sincere, and hopefully successful, experiment pairing Indian food and wine, ditch the side-plate and go old school. Ditch the cutlery too, if people are deft enough with their fingers to handle food and wine glasses with separate hands and without smudging the latter. Sure, there are a few more things to be kept in mind but just this little tweak could solve more than half the misery in the perennial debate of pairing Indian cuisines and wine.
