Eating with the Hand

Eating with the hand is the oldest and most widespread manner of the Indian table, older than any regional cuisine now named in this book. It rests on custom rather than on any single dated text, and it is practised from the Punjabi courtyard to the Kerala banana leaf, with local variations in which fingers are used and how the food is gathered.

The first rule is cleanliness. The hands are washed before sitting and again at the end of the meal, and in many households a vessel of water and a basin are brought to the table for the purpose. The right hand feeds; the left is kept for the glass or the serving spoon. In many homes it is the custom that a hand which has touched the mouth does not touch the common serving dish, and the cook who serves does so with a spoon. The method differs with the food. In the north, bread is the instrument: a piece of roti or naan is torn with the fingers of the right hand, folded around a mouthful of dal, vegetable or meat, and carried to the mouth, so that the bread does the work a fork would do elsewhere. In the south and east, where rice is the base of the meal, the rice is mixed with dal, sambar, rasam or a thin fish sauce on the plate or leaf, worked into a loose mass with the fingertips, and pushed to the mouth with the thumb. The mixing is part of the cooking, since the dishes of such a meal are made to be combined on the plate and not tasted one by one. The practice shapes the food itself. Dals are cooked to a consistency that will cling to rice or bread; dry vegetable dishes are cut to sizes that can be lifted in the fingers; and the sauce of a dish is judged by whether it will be taken up by bread or by rice. Rice varieties differ in how they behave under the hand, and a cook choosing between a long separate grain and a softer, stickier one is choosing for the manner of eating as much as for the taste. The wider table is arranged to suit it. A thali or a banana leaf places every dish within reach of the right hand, and the leaf or the metal plate is the only surface needed. Many Indian households hold, in Ayurvedic tradition, that food taken with the hand is part of the meal's proper conduct, and the custom is kept on those terms as history and habit. At formal feasts, guests seated on the floor eat in rows, and the servers pass along with buckets of rice and ladles of dal, replenishing each leaf without being asked.

Eating with the hand changes the taste of the food as the cook intends it, because the dishes of a meal are mixed in the mouthful and not eaten in turn. A spoon of sour rasam, a pinch of salt, a dry vegetable and a little ghee-slick rice meet on the fingers before they meet the tongue, and the cook seasons each dish with that blending in mind.