A heated argument

Does India need to spice up its chilli game? Hot sauces and chutneys rule Thailand, Mexico and North Africa. And yet, each of them offers more than a blast of heat

- VIR SANGHVI

The cuisine of Morocco is much celebrated in the West. There are highly-rated Moroccan restaurants in America. Moroccan cookbooks are popular all over the world. Everybody loves Moroccan food.

Except for me.

Believe me, I tried. One reason I enjoy travel so much is that it gives me the chance to taste unfamiliar cuisines. And for the most part, because I am relatively open-minded when it comes to food, I love them all.

But to my unsophisticated, very desi palate, Moroccan food tasted much too bland. Many times, it was just too sweet. But I found a sort of solution.

Even before I first went to Morocco two decades ago, I had fallen in love with harissa, the chilli-rich paste (ie chutney) that is popular all over North Africa and is probably of Tunisian origin. So I added harissa to everything I ate in Morocco. By the end, I was even slathering it on my hamburger patties.

At its most basic level, harissa is made by pounding at least two kinds of chillies Baklouti chillies and red chillies plus garlic, caraway, cumin, coriander seeds etc.

All this got me thinking: How much do we depend on spicy, chilli sauces all over the world? Oddly enough, India is the one country that has no sauce tradition. We are unlike our neighbours in the rest of Asia and very different from America.