Food Talks : Ep1 - Chaat conundrum

The northern part of our country has had a rich cultural past and what more can describe our habits & lifestyle other than food. Our food choices have always been parallel to our situation. In today's blog, we'll see how the invasion of Mughals from the North changed our food habits and created new dishes that originally aren't ours but have a lot of similarities. 

When we talk about food from Northern India how can one not think about Indraprastha (during the Mahabharata period) which then changed into Shahjahanabad (during the Mughal period) which we today know as Delhi. Before, the Mughals came to India the major population of Delhi was comprised of Hindus of them majority were Pandits & Baniyas. Almost everyone was vegetarian, and meat was hardly present in our diet. It was the Mughals who brought to us the wide variety of delectable meat dishes be it the Biryani, Kebabs, etc. Now Delhi being the trade capital of our country had a wide variety of spices and items coming to us from different parts of Asia, and by the time Mughals settled in comfortably the water flowing across the Yamuna had started to become hard which made it difficult to consume it & satiate our thirst. 

So when the Emperor was discussing with his ministers on how to solve this problem, one of his ministers suggested that we should consume such foods that can counter the harmful effects of hard water. Such foods had to be spicy loaded with all forms of spices so as to counteract the hardness of Yamuna's water. 

Now, this wasn't much of a problem for the Muslims as they had their dishes such as Kebabs, Nihari, etc but for Pandits & Baniyas, who were predominantly vegetarian didn't have such dishes that could help them counter this problem. And also being the traders & businessmen they had to have something that could suppress their hunger across the whole day as they were always seated & engaged with a customer. This is when the concept of 'Chaat' came about, they were spicy & could be easily made and had on the run and also provided the traders aka Baniyas with an opportunity to provide their customers with such options from the stalls just outside their shops.

So this is how the 'Chaat' we know today came to be invented & this is the beauty of our country. Generally, dishes are created to satisfy our hunger but here the dish was created just so that we could drink our daily 8 glasses.