My girlfriend recently bought me "Curry Easy" by Madhur Jaffrey and I've been making some of the recipes from it but would like to know the Indian or traditional names for some of the recipes. All the recipes are listed like "Roasted Moong Dal with Mustard Greens" for example.
Does anyone know the proper names of these:
Cucumber salad, North Indian style (peeled + chopped cucumber with seasoning, lemon, mint leaves and chilli powder)
South Indian potato curry (potatoes, spices, curry leaves + coconut milk)
Karhai broccoli (wok-fried broccoli with asafoetida, cumin seeds + mustard seeds)
Ideally I would like a traditional/proper name for all in the book but not sure if that's possible 🙂
Best Answer
What do you mean by "traditional/proper"?
A lot of Indian food is named simply after the ingredients in it - cucumber salad would probably just be cucumber salad.
Sometimes they are named after the type of cooking method or vessel they are made in. Your Karhai broccoli is an example of that; the karhai (or karahi) is a type of pot used in Indian cooking. It's similar to a wok and usually looks something like this:
If you're looking for the single definitive name that goes with each recipe in that book, you won't find one. The "traditional" name for each dish would just be the recipe title translated into whichever Indian language is most prominent in the region the dish came from. But the translation isn't going to be a "proper" name because it will still be generic; there are so many regional variations on common dishes (variation in ratio of vegetables or meat, or in types and amounts of spices, etc.) and so many languages spoken in India that no dish has a single name or way of making it.
Take any dish that is a staple of Indian food and search for that dish name + "recipe". I guarantee you'll come across nearly infinite variations. (Try something like "aloo gobi" - the translation of these Hindi words is literally just "potato" ("aloo") and "cauliflower" ("gobi"). I've seen hundreds of recipes for it, and no two are exactly the same, but they do contain common ingredients.) Depending on where you are in India, they are sometimes called by English names, too; you might go to a restaurant and see "cucumber salad" on the menu with no explanation of what type of cucumber salad it is.
P.S. "Roasted Moong Dal with Mustard Greens" is a hybrid Hindi-English dish name already (another common trend in urban India). "Dal" just refers to a dish made with pulses, which are usually cooked until soupy/mushy or occasionally pureed. "Moong" is the type of bean used; you sometimes see it spelled "mung" or written "mungbean" (one word) - you can take a look at the Wikipedia page for a more exhaustive list of varieties on the nomenclature.