The Order of a Meal by Region

The order of an Indian meal was never fixed by one court or one cookbook. It grew in households, temples and market towns, each region arranging its dishes by what its grain, its climate and its customs allowed. The great divide runs between the rice-eating south and east and the wheat-eating north and west, and Alford and Duguid, travelling the subcontinent for Mangoes & Curry Leaves, write the meal as a matter of place before it is a matter of rule.

In much of India the meal is not served in courses that follow one another, as in a French dinner, but set out together, so that the diner composes each mouthful. The thali of the west and north, with its small bowls around a central mound of rice or a stack of bread, belongs to this manner; the order lies in how the diner moves between the bowls, and in what the cook places beside what. Where a meal is served in sequence, the sequence belongs to a region and a custom, not to the country at large. In the south the grain is rice, and the meal is built around it in rounds. On the banana leaf, salt, pickle and dry vegetable sit at the edge before the rice is served, and the rice then meets the dishes in turn: dal or sambar first, then a thinner rasam, and curd with rice last, which closes the meal. This is the pattern Alford and Duguid meet again and again in the Tamil and Kannada country, and the Kerala sadya and the Iyer and Iyengar tables keep it with their own refinements. The sweet may come before the final rice or after it, according to the house. The Bengali meal is the clearest example of a true sequence in the east. It begins with something bitter, then moves to dal, fried vegetables, fish, meat where it is served, then chutney and sweets, so that the palate travels from the sharp to the rich to the sweet. Rice is the base throughout. Odisha and Assam keep their own variations on this plan, with the sour fish dish and the khar of Assam taking a place at the start of the meal. In the north, bread and rice share the table, and the meal leans on the pairing of a dry dish with a sauced one, a dal with a vegetable, and a raita or pickle to settle the weight of the cooking. In Punjab the dal and the bread are the heart of an ordinary meal, while festive tables add meat from the tandoor or the pot. Kashmir keeps a different order again at the wazwan, where the dishes arrive in a fixed run, and Gujarat and Rajasthan serve the thali with the sweet alongside the savoury, not after it. What holds these arrangements together is the way the food is eaten: with the right hand, rice mixed with the dal or the sauce, a little of each dish at a time. The order of a meal is therefore as much the order of the diner's attention as of the cook's service. A traveller who sits down in a new region does best to watch what is served first and what is served last, and to eat in that sequence.

The order of a regional meal is designed to balance taste: the bitter, the sour and the pungent set against the plain mildness of rice or bread, and the sweet or the cooling curd placed to close. In the south the thin, sour rasam and the cool curd rice at the end give the meal its shape, and in Bengal the opening bitterness prepares the palate for the fish and the sweets that follow.