Indian cooking, with its allusions to ancient customs and its regional variations, for decades alternately lured and spooked me. There was so much to know. There were so many terms, so many spices, so many nuances. I was intimidated.
Then I became the Advocate’s Springfield reporter and I found myself in the vicinity of Lyman and Main streets one day at lunchtime. I was simply too hungry to travel the distance back to the office without something to eat, so I decided to drop in at the Sitar and look for something I could relate to—something not so hot that it would numb my tongue. There was aloo chole, a stew made from the chick pea, the mainstay of the few vegetarian dishes I knew well.
I ordered; the chick peas were tender, the sauce delicious; and I learned that I didn’t have to be ready to write a master’s thesis about tandoors or the geographical influences on the Indian menu to add a new star to my list of preferred workday lunch dishes.
To my own surprise, in a town that at that time had any number of tempting American and ethnic restaurants, my favored destination dish—the entree I would walk nearly half a mile from the office for—became the Sitar’s aloo chole. It was the first vegetarian dish, other than the occasional grilled mushroom sandwich, that I trusted not to wimp out on me and leave me grabbing for cheese and cracker sandwiches before the end of a busy afternoon.
When the Advocate moved to Northampton, the lunchtime scene was a dream. Oh, the charm of the midday meal in a town with Sylvester’s, the Brewery, the Eastside Grill, Osaka, Veracruzana&where to stop? But I stopped, early on, at the India Palace, where to my culinary vocabulary I added other vegetarian dishes.
Saag paneer: the perfectly textured cheese cubes swim happily in the spinach as it all covers rice that’s reliably tender, never either hard or gummy. An Indian restaurant is a wonderful place to eat spinach, either in saag paneer or in a dish I choose even more often, aloo palak. Perfectly done potatoes are one of the best things about this dish as creamy spinach embraces them with its own smooth flavor, rich but not cloying.
Then there’s the stewed eggplant, the baingan bharta, which is, in my opinion, a delicacy—again, not very hot, but a little richer and more complex than the spinach dishes. Sliced thin, cooked long and well seasoned, eggplant rewards savoring; this dish is a very tasty example of the potential of a vegetable that’s not exactly a mainstream favorite with American cooks. Somewhat less exciting, but beautifully blended and very satisfying, is the aloo gobhi, in which cauliflower is the star in a stew with onion and potatoes that’s flavored with ginger, curry and cumin.
The local Indian restaurants foster a quiet atmosphere that some might find bland but that favors conversation. The service is usually unobtrusive but attentive and the food is served up quickly, a blessing for people on a lunch hour. Without employing the how-y’all-today type of friendliness some eateries use to build their customer base, the waitstaffs manage with a very few words to make guests feel welcome and at ease. There is no particular expectation that diners will know anything about Indian food in advance, and no culinary pyrotechnics to put them in the position of having to be impressed.
The India Palace, for example, is gracefully and attractively decorated but unpretentious and, for what you’re getting, hardly more expensive than a fast-food restaurant. In such an environment, it’s surprising how fast an unfamiliar foreign cuisine can become comfort food.
