variations on a theme: the best way to begin improvising
in this issue: mustard cabbage WITH PEAS! with CARROTS! wow COCONUT!
Let me paint you a picture of the future, a promise of empowerment: by the end of your education as an improvisational Indian cook, you’ll be able to walk into any reasonably-stocked kitchen, spend $30 on groceries and put together an Indian meal for yourself and your friends. You’ll open your fridge, see what’s there and make a quick weeknight dinner. When you read a recipe and find that you’re missing an ingredient, you’ll make effective substitutions. You’ll remix leftovers from meals at restaurants to make them tastier, healthier or simply to stretch them out. When you see a strange and beautiful vegetable at the farmer’s market, you’ll bring it home and figure out what to do with it.
You’ll do all that, but not just yet. Those scenarios are too unconstrained. The blank slate of a well-stocked kitchen presents too many choices. Shunryū Suzuki: in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few. To make progress, we must restrict the possibilities. How? We take an existing work and produce many variations on it. Later I’ll talk about some other reasons this is good pedagogy, but for now, enough talk! Let’s see some mustard cabbage variations:
mustard cabbage WITH PEAS!
Add fresh or frozen peas along with the cabbage. If you’re using frozen peas, break up any large chunks before adding them to the pan. You don’t need to get it down to individual peas, but icy rocks larger than a golf ball need to be split. Peas are pretty forgiving: they don’t need to be cooked for long, but can tolerate being overcooked for a while without becoming mush.
Notice that you need more salt to make this as yummy as your first batch of mustard cabbage. This isn’t something special about peas! You just added more stuff, so you need more salt to end up with roughly the same salt concentration.
mustard cabbage WITH CARROTS! and also maybe peas!
Dice a carrot. You don’t have to literally dice it like a professional chef, just cut it into chunks about the size of dice from a board game. I know some of you people reading this are terminally online megabrains who have never seen real dice! But presumably you have retained your thumbs, if only to swipe in the rightward direction, so aim for cubes with faces slightly smaller than your thumbnail.
nerd alert: cooking times
Diced carrots need to cook a little longer than cabbage, even when cut this small. Why? Listen up because this is a key concept in food science (but also for the same reason don’t worry, I’ll repeat it over and over): because the center of each piece of carrot is buried deep inside an armor of carrot, and because vegetables are generally a poor conductor of heat (fact 5 from the water post), it takes a while for it to get hot enough to cook. Meanwhile the cabbage shreds are thin and flat, nearly two-dimensional, so they cook much faster. And peas are both small and also soft enough when raw, so they don’t need to cook long.
Imagine that the center of each cube of carrot is a naked, shivering human. The first millimeter of carrot covering that center is like underwear, the next is t-shirt, and so on until inch cubes being kinda like you in a puffy jacket looking like a marshmallow doughboy this past winter. Imagine putting both the naked and the layered-up person outside in Antarctica. Eventually they’ll both die, but the naked person will die a lot faster. It is the same with cooking: the bigger the piece of food, the more insulated its center, and so the longer it will take to get up to “cooked” temperature.
But mr indian science man, what is this mysterious “cooked” temperature? How do I know it? How come it’s different for peas vs carrots? A story for another time.
baby steps toward powdered spices
After adding cabbage in step 5, add 1/4 tsp each of turmeric and mild hungarian paprika. Stir well to distribute. Learn the smell of raw turmeric, and notice how it mellows as it cooks. See how the color turns from light grassy green (or purple, depending on the kind of cabbage) towards yellower, browner, rusty tones.
Most powdered spices aren’t at their yummiest when raw. Like garlic or onion, they need to be heated for a bit before they release their flavors and lose some of their harshness. You can read this a million times but there is no substitute for direct experience, and mustard cabbage is the best classroom for this lesson.
experiment with over-spicing
Once you’ve successfully made the turmeric-paprika version from the previous section, I highly recommend making a few more batches that you’re mentally prepared to throw away. For each batch, add 1/2 tsp more turmeric than you did last time. Keep doing this until the final result is unpleasant from how much turmeric it has, even after cooking it for a while.
You can also scale up the paprika but you’re probably better at predicting what happens if you do that.
This is a really valuable exercise because you’ll see and taste what happens when there’s too much turmeric. It’s unlikely that you’ll never make this mistake in your entire cooking career, so it’s better to make it now, in a controlled setting, with cheap ingredients and low stakes. You will also learn that there’s a pretty wide range of acceptable amounts of turmeric, and at the lower end of that range the color varies a lot but not the smell or taste.
Some people will be uncomfortable that I’m advocating for food waste by deliberately making batches that you’ll throw away. But it’s actually the other way round: by training efficiently using cheap materials, you’ll cook at home more often instead of eating out or ordering in, and I think that’s probably better for the world in the longer run? idk I’m not very sure about this claim. I offer it to you in the hope that you can use it to gaslight yourself into being ok with this exercise. The exercise is good and will make you better at making Indian food, and that’s all I actually care about.
experiment with blanching
Boil water in a saucepan. Dump in the shredded cabbage. Let cook for 5 minutes, then use a sieve or colander to throw out the water while keeping the cabbage. Now cook mustard cabbage as written. Notice any differences in texture, flavor and aroma. Notice whether it’s easier or harder to get a bit of browning.
add aromatics before the cabbage
Chop an onion or shallot. If you can, get some curry leaves. If you like spicy food, chop a hot green chili pepper. If you can, get some urad dal (you want the dried, hulled kind, smooth and cream-colored seeds). If you can, get some unsweetened dried coconut flakes, or fresh shredded coconut. If you don’t have the bad soap gene, get some cilantro and chop it.
Here’s how to use those ingredients: add a teaspoon of urad dal right after the mustard seeds. Once the urad dal becomes brown and toasty, add around 10 curry leaves, let em pop and crackle for a few seconds, and then dump in the onion/shallot and hot pepper. Stir this around for a bit until the onions get soft and translucent, then add the cabbage and proceed as before. At the end, add coconut, let cook for a few minutes, then add cilantro.
Notice how many of those ingredients were optional! Only the onion is essential. Any combination of the five others would work well and be yummy. That’s 2^5 - 1 = 31 combinations! (The minus 1 is to account for the case where you use none of the aromatics, which is equivalent to the original recipe. Have I scared away readers with the math? So be it.) Make as many of those 31 flavors as you can, I will give you a really cool prize if you do them all!
classic flavor combinations: poriyals
One of those 31 combinations to use every single one of the optional ingredients. If you do that, congratulations, you’ve made cabbage poriyal. This is a classic South Indian flavor combination and forms the basis of an entire class of vegetable dishes.
Here’s a dumb and bad way to think about it: the only valid thing is to have all the ingredients for a classic poriyal. If you’re missing even one of them, then you should just give up and order Masala Grill.
Here’s the right way to think about this: masters from the past have found that this combination works well. You can choose to use it. It’s a tool in your toolbox. If you’re already using mustard and curry leaves and green chilies, then consider adding some coconut. That would be the conservative choice, guaranteed to work. Or consider using broken cashews instead, because that’s another nutty, fatty, crunchy thing. If coconut works well, then maybe so would cashews or peanuts or almonds or even pine nuts if you’re bougie. Knowing the classic combination reduces the vast space of all possibilities, mostly bad, to just a few, mostly good. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
why is this good?
By doing variations on a known base, you’re getting to know ingredients and techniques one at a time. Peas have their own particularities, turmeric its own terrors. When you cook this way you build intuition for how each thing behaves, what it’s for, what you can achieve with it. When you make a new recipe with a bunch of new ingredients you have no idea what each thing in there is doing.
In future posts I’ll give you a bunch of recipe templates which make this way of cooking explicit. But unfortunately I can’t rewrite all the cookbooks out there. The way to get value out of the recipes in those books is to treat them like this, as starting points for variations.