I am part of a Facebook group called Food in Waterloo Region, partly because it is useful for knowing what is opening and closing around me, but mostly because I find the people in it fascinating. A large portion of the active members seem to be in their late thirties and beyond, and I enjoy watching how they eat around the region, what they become attached to, which restaurants earn their loyalty and which minor transgressions are serious enough to warrant a public announcement to several thousand strangers. There is something particularly comforting about watching people who did not necessarily grow up eating Indian food navigate the enormous number of Indian restaurants that now exist across Waterloo Region. They are no longer merely adventurous diners trying “Indian food.” They have preferences, regular orders and places they return to often enough to notice when something changes. They know which restaurant makes the chole they like and which one has disappointed them twice. They disagree about biryani, recommend one dosa place and dismiss another, know where they want their butter chicken from and are perfectly willing to argue about it. Indian food has quietly become ordinary enough to occupy a regular place in their lives, which may be one of the nicest things immigration can do to a city.
One day, a woman in the group was complaining about an Uber Eats order from an Indian restaurant she visited regularly. She had decided that she wanted something healthier with her meal and ordered an onion salad for about four dollars. When the order arrived, she opened the container and found nothing but a few slices of raw onion. Her complaint was essentially that she knew it was only four dollars, but what did they mean by calling this a salad?
I remember reading this and initially thinking there was nothing particularly remarkable about what she had received, until my brain caught up with hers and I suddenly understood what the word salad meant to her. She had ordered a salad. She had reasonably expected the onion to have undergone some further event before becoming one. Perhaps there would be cucumber or tomato, maybe herbs, dressing, lemon juice, seasoning, something that distinguished the thing she had purchased from the thing she could have produced herself by opening the refrigerator and locating an onion. Instead, someone at the restaurant had sliced an onion, put it into a plastic container, charged her four dollars and sent it across Waterloo in an Uber.
I had one of those wonderful little moments when something you have understood instinctively your entire life suddenly becomes strange because you have seen it through somebody else’s eyes. We were using the same word for two different ideas.
In much of the Indian culinary world, salad does not necessarily mean a composed dish, and it certainly does not have to mean a meal. Very often it belongs to the constellation of little things that live around the edges of the plate: a few slices of cucumber, some tomato, rings or crescents of raw onion, perhaps a green chilli or two and a cheek of lemon. They can be chopped together into kachumber, seasoned with salt and coriander and allowed to soften slightly in their own juices, but they do not have to be.
Three slices of onion can, with complete sincerity, be called an onion salad because their purpose is not to provide you with a salad course. Their purpose is to sit quietly beside everything else until a particular mouthful asks for onion.
I have started thinking of these things as chasers, although I do not mean that as an established category of Indian cooking and would not burden Indian food with yet another attempt to impose a neat taxonomy upon something that has survived quite comfortably without one. A chaser, as I think of it, is not really a type of food at all. It is a way of using food. It is the little thing you reach for in a tiny quantity, sometimes with a morsel and sometimes immediately after it, because your mouth has decided that this particular moment could use a little more of something. The dish itself is already finished. The dal did not emerge from the kitchen desperately waiting for cucumber to rescue it, and the kebab is not an incomplete recipe because there is mint on the table. These things are flair rather than correction, little opportunities for brightness, intensity, contrast, relief, excess or completely unnecessary additional violence that allow one mouthful to wander slightly away from the one before it.
A slice of cucumber, for instance, can be extraordinarily useful beside dal, rice and achar. After several warm, soft, heavily seasoned mouthfuls, you bite into something cold and crisp and full of water, and for a moment the texture and temperature of the meal change completely before you return to the dal. Tomato does something different, bringing its soft acidity and juicy tang, while raw Bombay onion brings that sulphurous, zingy sharpness that seems to travel upward through the nose, almost mustard-like when the onion is particularly assertive. A cheek of lemon is not necessarily squeezed indiscriminately over the entire plate; it can simply sit there so that you decide exactly where you want acidity and exactly how much. Even the green chilli can be eaten in increments, one little bite after a mouthful of food, although describing chilli as a source of relief would be dishonest because we have also developed the peculiar habit of chasing spicy food with additional spice, as though the first burning sensation had merely reminded us of something we had forgotten to do.
Kachumber takes the same principle and gives it slightly more structure. Onion, cucumber and tomato are chopped rather than sliced, coriander and chilli may join them, and salt begins pulling water from everything until the vegetables soften slightly and their juices mingle at the bottom. You can spoon some beside dal and rice, take a little with sabzi or tuck it into a morsel of roti, and every time it enters the meal it brings its own cold, raw, acidic little interruption. My mother used to take this already simple preparation and smoke it with coal, putting a small piece of hot coal into the bowl and trapping the smoke so that something built around freshness acquired this dark, deep note underneath its zing. One spoonful could suddenly bring raw onion, acidity, coriander, chilli and smoke into a bite that had possessed none of those things a moment earlier, and the contrast was precisely the pleasure of it.
There are chutneys too, although chutneys often behave more like dips and sauces than what I mean by chasers, and the distinction becomes slippery very quickly because Indian food has never shown much concern for keeping its condiments inside administrative boundaries. The same chutney can behave differently depending on what is being eaten and who is doing the eating, which is why the gesture matters to me more than the object itself. With kebabs, for instance, green chutney is so common that it is almost part of the expected architecture of the plate, but one of my favourite additions at restaurants has been even simpler: entire sprigs of fresh mint. You tear an individual leaf from the stem, put it onto a piece of paratha with a morsel of coal-smoked lamb and eat the whole thing together, introducing one sudden explosion of cold, green freshness into all that warm bread, smoke and fat. The kebab was already seasoned properly and the mint has not fixed anything. You simply decided that this particular mouthful would be delightful with mint.
If you want to see this philosophy carried almost to the point of comedy, however, go to a good Kathiawadi restaurant. Nobody does the supporting cast quite like the Kathiawadis. You can sit down having ordered nothing and watch what feels like half the menu begin arriving at your table anyway: papaya no sambharo, kobij no sambharo, kaida, keri, gol, ghee, gor keri, chhundo, athela marcha, lasan ni chutney, lasan nu athanu, tadela marcha, with the exact collection changing from restaurant to restaurant and household to household. By the time everything has been put down, it can look as though the tasting menu from The French Laundry has arrived by mistake, except nobody has ordered anything yet and half of what has appeared is chilli. To someone unfamiliar with the meal, this abundance of little bowls, pickles, relishes and raw things might look like an astonishing quantity of miscellaneous food. To everyone else, dinner is simply getting ready.
What makes that table so wonderful is not abundance for abundance’s sake, but the range of possibilities that has suddenly been placed around the main meal. There is sweetness from gol and chhundo, pungency and heat from lasan ni chutney, acidity and spice from pickles, crunch and freshness from sambharo, richness from ghee and the particular thrill of biting into a chilli that has been fried, pickled or otherwise persuaded to become even more compelling than a chilli had any obligation to be. None of these things competes with the shaak, dal, rotlo or khichdi at the centre of the meal, and none is there because those dishes are somehow deficient without them. They are more like a collection of little switches available to the eater, except there is no correct combination and no reason to leave the switches in the same position for very long.
You can be eating a delicious ringan nu olu with bajri no rotlo, perfectly content with the combination, when your hand moves almost without consultation toward the lasan ni chutney. You tear the next piece of rotlo, smear one edge through the chutney, pick up some olu and eat it. There was nothing wrong with the previous bite. Your mind simply decided that the next one would be particularly good with more garlic and chilli, and your hand had already begun acting on that information before you had bothered putting it into words. A few bites later you might brush the rotlo through some ghee, or break off a little pickle, or take something sweet, and then for several bites you may want nothing at all. You are not trying to arrive at the perfect ratio that should govern the rest of the meal. The pleasure is precisely that there does not need to be one.
That reflex interests me more than the condiments themselves because, if you grow up eating this way, eventually your hand seems to know what your mouth wants before you consciously formulate the thought. Nobody sits over a plate of food conducting a sensory analysis and concludes that the next morsel requires increased acidity. You reach for the lemon. You do not formally determine that the smoky softness of eggplant would benefit from a contrasting dose of pungency. Your fingers are already near the garlic chutney. The choice is so small and so instinctive that it barely registers as a choice at all, which is perhaps why these gestures are so difficult to explain to someone who has learned the dishes but has not yet learned the choreography around them.
What looks from the outside like a crowded collection of bowls and pickles is a vocabulary, and after enough years of eating from it you become fluent enough to stop thinking about the grammar.
Travel north and the vocabulary changes while the instinct remains recognizable. Sit down at a small chole bhature shop in Old Delhi and the transaction does not necessarily end when the chole and enormous fried bhatura arrive. There may be raw onion, amla ka achar, fried or fresh green chillies and other sharp little things available alongside it, sometimes sitting on the table and sometimes replenished without much ceremony. You tear the hot bhatura, scoop up the dark, spicy, dripping chole and eat, and then you bite into a chilli. The chole was already intensely seasoned, so the chilli cannot plausibly claim to be correcting a deficiency. You are intensifying an experience that was already intense, chasing spice with spice with the cheerful self-destructive enthusiasm of someone who has decided that a burning mouth is apparently evidence that lunch is going extremely well.
Elsewhere, the objects change again. Maharashtra has thecha, where chilli and garlic can turn a bite of bhakri into something considerably louder, while Bengal has the nasal, mustardy force of kasundi, capable in tiny amounts of completely redirecting the character of a mouthful. Across southern tables there are podis mixed with oil or ghee, pickles with tremendous concentrations of salt, chilli, mustard and sourness, and preparations such as Kerala’s inji puli, where ginger, tamarind, chilli and sweetness occupy a few spoonfuls of space while carrying enough flavour to announce themselves across an entire sadya. Andhra’s mango pickles can sit beside comparatively gentle rice and dal waiting for the moment when you decide that one mouthful should suddenly contain an unreasonable amount of chilli, salt and sour mango.
This is why describing Indian food through recipes alone can tell you almost everything about how something is cooked and still leave out something important about how the meal is actually experienced. A recipe for ringan nu olu can teach you how the eggplant is roasted and seasoned, and a recipe for bajri no rotlo can teach you the proportion of flour to water and how the dough is handled, but neither necessarily tells you about the moment when your hand, entirely of its own accord, drags the rotlo through lasan ni chutney. The recipe for chole bhature does not explain the person who takes a bite of green chilli after every other mouthful, just as a recipe for a kebab does not explain why someone might tear a single mint leaf from a stem and fold it into one bite but not the next.
These are not cooking techniques so much as eating habits, and eating habits are among the easiest parts of a cuisine to overlook because the people who possess them rarely think they need explaining.
Perhaps that is what I found so endearing about the woman and her four-dollar onion salad. She was already doing the difficult part. She was navigating another cuisine with enough confidence to have a restaurant she ordered from regularly, enough familiarity to make choices beyond the safest things on the menu, and enough ownership over the experience to complain when something seemed ridiculous. She was not standing outside Indian food looking in. Some portion of it had already become ordinary to her, something she could crave on a weeknight, order on her phone and have opinions about when it arrived. She had simply encountered one of those tiny places where culinary languages fail to translate cleanly.
From her perspective, salad was a dish, and four dollars should purchase more than an onion that had suffered several knife wounds. From the restaurant’s perspective, those raw slices already made perfect sense because the onion was never supposed to carry the responsibility of being lunch. It belonged beside lunch, waiting for the mouthful that wanted a little raw pungency, just as the chilli waits for the person who wants more heat, the cucumber for the person who wants something cold and crisp, the pickle for the person who wants sourness and salt, the jaggery for the person who wants sweetness and the garlic chutney for the hand that reaches toward it almost before its owner notices.
There is a particular kind of pleasure in a meal that allows for these small decisions, not the power to repair what the cook has made, because nothing needs repairing, but the freedom to give individual moments a little flourish of their own.
The food arrives complete, and around it are opportunities for mischief: something sour, something raw, something sweet, something crunchy, something cold, something painfully hot, something garlicky enough to remain with you for the rest of the afternoon.
One mouthful gets the chilli and the next does not. One edge of rotlo gets dragged through chutney while another receives ghee. You tear one mint leaf for one piece of lamb and leave the next piece alone. There is no grand culinary theory being performed at the table. There is simply appetite, memory, instinct and that certain little teehee of knowing exactly what would make the next bite more fun.
Perhaps understanding a cuisine eventually requires learning these things as much as learning the names of its dishes. You can know what chole is and still not know why someone keeps biting into the chilli beside it. You can know what rotlo and olu are and still miss the instinctive swipe through garlic chutney. You can order an onion salad and be entirely justified in wondering where the rest of your salad went.
Recipes are easy to translate. The harder knowledge lives in the gestures around them: what gets squeezed, smeared, bitten, crumbled, mixed, picked up between two fingers or reached for without thinking.
Sometimes the difference between knowing Indian food and knowing how to eat it is only a few slices of raw onion sitting quietly beside the plate.