From The U.S. to China to India, Where are the Culinary Intersections?

by Gabriella Thompson

On the 5th day of the India trip, for dinner, we went to a restaurant that has a rooftop deck and we ate Indian and Chinese hybrid food. It was really good! There were some bao that were green and similar in style to Chinese bao. They came in a steam basket, but the flavor and the filling were more like the Indian food that we had. There was also some really good chicken; there was sesame chicken and there was a sweet chili chicken and they were both kind of crispy/fried and really crunchy and yummy. There were also veg and non-veg platters that were pretty good. The nonveg had some fish, and some stuff that I didn’t know what it was, and the veg had some corn and other stuff that I didn’t know what it was. (This became kind of a common theme on the trip; I ate a lot of food that I didn’t know what it was, but it was delicious!)

It was interesting to see the comparison between Indian food that I’ve had on this trip, Chinese food that I’ve had throughout my life and also on the China trip last year, and the Indo-Chinese food we ate. For example, the fact that they had separate veg and nonveg platters is definitely an Indian thing, and not a Chinese thing, because of the large vegetarian population. My impression was that the food was way less salty than the regular Chinese food and had a less large and diverse flavor palette than the Indian food I’ve had on the rest of this trip. (Important note: Obviously, both Indian and Chinese cuisine cover incredibly diverse ingredients and tastes and foods, and I definitely have not tried all of it, so this is totally my impression based on my own experiences). Indo-Chinese seemed like it used some Indian spices and more Chinese ingredients or Chinese styles if that makes sense. (Indian flavors, Chinese dishes).

Niyati, our host, gave us a little bit of a background on the Indo-Chinese food. It came from Calcutta, where there was a small Chinese population in an area that became Chinatown. The Chinese people decided that the way to make their food approachable to Indians was to adapt it to fit their palates a little bit more. This raises an interesting comparison between the syncretism that happened here, and the elements brought to Indian cuisine by the British, such as milk in their tea. Chai in India is mostly unimaginable without milk, but the British were colonizers. They were there to loot, plunder, and take what they wanted with zero regards for the lives and cultures of Indian people. By comparison, the people of Chinatown were there as settlers, not colonizers, and merely wanted to create a connection.

It also raises an interesting comparison between Indo-Chinese, Indian-American, and Chinese-American food. American food is a little hard to define, because America as an institution doesn’t really have a specific cuisine, except for burgers-and-fries type foods. I haven’t seen any hybrids with those, so my conclusion is that those foods hybridized with American merely accommodate themselves to what flavors Americans like to eat; mainly, really sweet and really salty, with not a lot of other flavor. Perhaps blander than Indian or Chinese food.

The food that we ate in India felt like it held a lot of significance; there was a distinct separation between North Indian, South Indian, Chinese, and the other types of food we had. We talked a lot about how the long history of civilizations in India affects the layers of architecture, clothing, art, and culture, but coming into this trip I didn’t anticipate we’d talk about the rich food history there. My theory is that food history isn’t something that we talk about a lot in America because we have a relatively short food history, for a few reasons. Chief among them, we started this nation with the genocide of Native Americans, so you don’t see a lot of traditional Native American food around, and we don’t have the length of culinary history that India has. America is also a country made up of people of a lot of different ethnicities and nationalities. The culture of European colonization has led to the way we think of food today. When I eat spaghetti, I don’t think Yum, Italian! I just think Yum, food! This applies to many foods European in origin, be it French bread, waffles from Belgium, sausages from Germany, or something else, but when I think of eating dumplings, or sushi, or tamales, or other foods from non-white countries I think of where they’re from. When I think of them, though, I don’t think of how they got here or when, I just accept that a diverse range of foods is what we eat. The strength of Indian history and culture has led them to a deep culinary history, while our immigrant culture has led us to one that’s wider but arguably shallower.