Once upon a time, aeons ago, when curly parsley was all you could find scattered indifferently over restaurant dishes and fresh thyme and rosemary were nowhere to be found and trying to follow a simple recipe from a magazine or a newspaper (both of which you held in your hands in their paper forms) involved trekking to five different stores and being met with puzzled looks: once upon that time, listen, there was no cilantro to be found in all the land.
Brooklyn wasn’t Brooklyn as we (think) we know it now, Jerry and Elaine were talking about “hanging out” in coffee shops as this new and strange thing people had just begun to do, and only a year later Ross, salivating over Rachel from a distance, sat nervously across her on that couch in Central Perk. Sure, Frasier and his brother Niles had been meeting up in Café Nervosa but in Seattle, and who knew what could come out of that place, once called the “Pesto of cities” by George because it seemed so…just everywhere?
Unlike, you see, cilantro, which was nowhere. Maybe in parts of New York, sure, in some parts of the city, and California, sure, why not, and possibly parts of Texas — although even there it was not as popular in bygone times, according to one angry correspondent of The Texanist who called it “Satan’s weed.” I recall finding a few sprigs in a supermarket once, and how the bagger picked it up and loudly commented on its smell. Cilantro is divisive: you either love it or you hate it, as The Texanist points out.
What really finishes off a certain kind of chicken curry I like to make is that generous sprinkle of the herb at the very end. I mean, yes, yes, the sauteing of the spices and the ginger and the garlic and all the rest, but it really doesn’t come together without a conclusive and hearty handful of that freshness.
Indiana, where I lived in the 90s, was largely unfamiliar with the herb and a quest for it in the area’s grocery stores usually meant a depressing encounter with the brownish-green remnants of a single bundle, quietly dying an undignified death next to the celery. And it was truly a quest: every now and then someone would let the rest of us know that a new batch had been spied at Smitty’s or Marsh, the area supermarkets, now long gone, and we’d get into cars and hurtle across town to grab what we could.
Today, cilantro is everywhere. It’s almost never out of stock in Hyde Park, Chicago, where I live (although, annoyingly the stores never seem to order enough tarragon and sage). Similarly, Indian food (or at least in its North Indian iterations) is now as ubiquitous as pizza in Chicago. And it’s not the usual dishes like Chana Masala and Butter Chicken but more experimental and exploratory styles. There’s now more South Indian food, with a completely different flavour profile than what most people are used to (some call it “bitter,” I call it heaven). TikTok and Instagram are becoming rich archives of recipes and techniques, featuring lesser known cuisines of India that are largely unfamiliar even to the average Indian. This seems to be the Golden Age of Indian food.
Which is great news, mostly. But all of this has also meant the masalafication of everything: adding traditional Indian spices to nearly everything from pancakes to eggs to matcha tea. It began with desserts, as I recall, and the combination of heat and spices like cardamom and nutmeg with sugar proved to be enticing. One of my favourite brownie recipes was passed on to me by my friend A. who got it from someone else and it involves a dash of green curry paste and red pepper flakes. At the time, over a decade ago, this wasn’t the kind of recipe you could find easily and I was greeted with puzzled and slightly suspicious faces when I made them for gatherings but now, of course, it’s hard to find even chocolate, especially the expensive kind, that doesn’t include all kinds of spices.
But have we reached peak masalaification? I’m delighted that it’s much easier to get actual chai spices now (although I’m not happy about the rise in prices as hipsters discover coconut oil and nigella seeds and other secrets of Indian cuisine), but if I see one more “chai-flavoured” anything, I may have to go back in time and put an end to the trade routes. There are recipes for pancakes with masala spices and it leaves me begging people to just eat a dosa or an uttapam instead. You can now buy ghee with masala added and I can only ask, why, why, why?
Some might hiss at me, “You know you could just choose not to eat any of this, right?” Can I, though? And is there a danger that we might swing in the opposite direction and decide that a dish needs to be more interesting with the addition of a sprinkle of cardamom or nigella and that not liking something that has Indian flavours added to it amounts to an unwillingness to try new things or, horrors, MAGA-like tendencies? I’m fairly certain I have more than a couple of friends who don’t like Indian food and who dodge eating it with various pretexts, afraid to seem xenophobic — but I don’t see their dislike as either a moral or cultural failing.
A lot of Indian food in restaurants is awful, even now. In an excellent New York Times profile of Christopher Kimball, Alex Halberstadt notes the cooking pioneer’s distaste for Saag Paneer, which he referred to as “goop,” and, honestly: when Saag Paneer is done badly (as it so often is), “goop” is a generous term. The restaurant business is difficult and expensive, no matter what the cuisine, and the ubiquitous Indian buffet, created as a cost-cutting measure, with its unimaginative and poorly made offerings and generic taste, probably did a lot to nearly kill Indian cuisine and perpetuate a very particular flavour profile — spicy but without complexity, greasy and overdone — as the desirable kind of Indian food. And we needn’t fetishise home-cooking either because, as I’ve said before, in “On Cultural Purity,” your grandma’s recipes might be awful and the generational trauma of bad cooking should just end with you.
As a teen, I was once served Hyderabadi crab curry by a friend and neighbour’s mother, and quickly felt my face erupting into flames. I begged for water. She refused, insisting I should let the taste work its way through. I tasted nothing: I could only feel a forest fire raging through my mouth and shutting down all my senses. Giving not a damn about social niceties and driven by a pure, raw instinct to survive, I ran from the table, out their door, up three flights of stairs to my family’s apartment, pushed a parent from his sink and tried to drown myself. To this day, I don’t see the point of overly spicy food if I can taste nothing but heat (and am I really tasting anything as I die from the inside, my inner voice asks, shrieking all the while). It took me decades to try Hyderabadi food again (yes, it can be delicious: please don’t come after me).
Sometimes people just don’t like a certain kind of cuisine. I can’t think of one I don’t like and if I’m not impressed by a dish it’s usually because it’s been badly executed, not because it’s inherently bad as a concept. But not everyone has the time or ability to access a particular kind of food often enough to try different styles of preparation. If your first and perhaps even second experience with Indian food is that green goop and “tandoori chicken curry” (basically: leftover and tired tandoori chicken turned into a new dish and served to unsuspecting customers at the buffet), you’re not likely to try it again.
But I digress, perhaps. Kimball once presided over Cook’s Illustrated magazine and America’s Test Kitchen and was well known for his general suspicion of anything that wasn’t all-American by his standards (and by American, he meant: from New England). When prodded by staff to at least try something else, he would allow for the occasional “foreign” dish, like Pad Thai. The results seemed anaemic, like food made by a robot using precise measurements and no heart. Today, his new enterprise Milk Street delights in food from all around the world. It’s not unfair to wonder if Kimball’s turn to international cuisines isn’t driven by the market, but it’s also hard to miss his new-found enthusiasm for ingredients and techniques he has clearly researched in his many travels to various cities across the globe. Gone is his disdain for food from outside America, and in its place is an unmistakable delight in a new world of flavour.
TikTok and Instagram are filled with cooks showcasing recipes and techniques that might otherwise not be available to those who can’t travel and experience the flavours themselves. There are goras making truly authentic food from all corners of India, and there are Indians who make it their job to cook every single kind of biryani. It’s a brave and brand new world of culinary exploration, and we can find immeasurable delights in all of it.
But to return to the point where I began: the masalaification of everything. Sometimes, I just want a classic brownie that’s perfectly plain and still satisfying (and I’m fully aware of the weight of the racial histories of food). Or a delicious pancake that has the perfect ratio of fluffy centre to slightly crispy edges, and that’s not too sweet. Would the addition of garlic and spices make it more interesting? Eh, maybe. But this morning, I’m really just looking for a particular kind of comfort.
I’m not worried that local diners and restaurants will suddenly erupt with Bollywood-style food that leaves me wishing I was back in 1950s America. I love the foodie world we live in right now, even as restaurants of all kinds struggle to survive. I hope my friends who’ve been hesitant to try Indian food after initial disappointments can be persuaded to try it again, but it’s fine if they’d rather not. I’m more concerned that “masala” has become a synonym for new, exciting…better, in food and the world in general. It’s just as hard to make a perfect cheese omelette as it is to make a complex curry. It’s not the ingredients that make a dish special but the execution. This explains, for example, why some of us spend tens of dollars learning how to make the perfect poached egg or getting a pancake right, and why some of us still struggle with making even a halfway decent paratha that doesn’t land like a discus at the summer Olympics, or why the order in which you throw spices into the oil for a tadka actually matters a great deal. My own rule in trying out a restaurant for the first time is simple: order at least one dish that’s incredibly basic, like the hot dog at a new diner or the Masoor Dal at an Indian place. If the restaurant can’t execute the most fundamental dish to perfection, any of their fabled fancy “signature” dishes will be just fluff aimed at Instagram.
I’m not opposed to masalas, and I worry about the time when Indian flavours will no longer be fashionable enough for me to find them more easily. But there is one ingredient I wish I could find more readily: fresh curry leaves. They’re impossible or hard to find in my area or in “regular” stores, and I’ve seriously considered buying a curry leaf plant, an endeavour that’s likely to end in tragedy because green living things curl up and die the minute they cross my threshold. I’m hopeful that the rise in popularity of South Indian cuisine (which uses them more) might mean plentiful curry leaves everywhere.
Let curry leaves become the cilantro of the herb aisle.
Further reading:
“On Cultural Purity.”
“Hyde Park: Where Food Goes to Die.”
“Cheap Restaurants Are the Canaries in the Coal Mine.“
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