Explore India Cuisine with a Potluck Tasting
that’s Easy on the Host and the Guests

by Karen Tripson

India's a big country with diverse regional ingredients and cooking styles, plus a few religions with culinary rules. To characterize the vastness is impossible except to say that the cuisine is colorful and aromatic. Would either of those come to mind if you were asked to characterize American food?

Embrace Value for Wine and Food
High-end Indian restaurants exist, but typically, dining out, carrying out or cooking at home, Indian is inexpensive which encourages many people to try it. Using a wide variety of vegetables -- and using less expensive cuts of meat sparingly -- is the frugal approach that survives the translation into the American Indian we're most familiar with. The variety within the cuisine opens more doors to more people. I love the bold flavors and I love it chile hot sometimes, too. Of course, you could always enjoy a cold beer with an Indian meal, but why not look for wines that will enhance the experience. It's a perfect opportunity to explore value wines. The current parameter is $15 or less, as dear friends have told me the days of $10 or less are unrealistic. If you look outside of American production, it's even easier to find food friendly wines in this price range.

Traditional philosophy on wine for hot and spicey says go for acidity, go for a little sweetness or go for hot and spicey. Traditional choices might be reisling, gewurztraminer or zinfandel. This event wasn't exactly traditional so the creative experiment included many things you might not have considered, but somebody did.

To explore the cuisine in the broadest possible sense, and not make myself crazy, I invited a few enthusiastic cooks and consumers to bring an Indian dish and a bottle of wine to accompany the dish. As the I would provide a few indian snacks (they are great snackers), a lamb entree and typical accompaniments of rice and poori bread for the crowd to anchor the dinner part of the menu. I would provide also several bottles of red and white wines that I thought would be interesting to try with the lamb and the unknown side dishes. No matter what turned up, no one would go hungry or thirsty.

Menu Created by the Crowd
Potluck menus have inherent risks, but it’s important to live dangerously and not cramp creativity. If you end up with three salads, well, that’s so nutritious. In this case, we ended up with three appetizers and two entrees, which was great for those who don’t like lamb. It made it easy to present the appetizers on a buffet with the accompanying wines in a separate room before sitting down for dinner and serving family style. Here's the recipe for Badami Murgh (Chicken Curry) which was a crowd pleaser with robust flavors but not with chile heat. Adding heat is easy.

The remaining chutneys and raita came to the dinner table and showed how flexible they are as accent flavors. The ability to divide up the menu into appetizers, entrees and dessert made it much easier to organize the wines too.

My Favorite Wines of the Evening

Despite terrific tasting sheets, the tasting notes were wildly individual and I wish I had added a space to vote for the favorite in each category. Not only was my handwriting the most readable, I did mostly vote for one in each category. The close second choices deserved mentioning. Because the tasting was free form, without a specific pouring order, some wines suffered by comparisons that wouldn't have normally occurred. Here are my wine picks that I would buy and serve again.

Corbieres Rose Wine Domaine DeFontsainte Gris De Gris 2002: Dry with character and body. You can drink this with most anything.

2001 Alsace Pierre Sparr Gewurztraminer: Sparkly, almost effervescent.

Vin D' Alsace 2002 Dopff & Irion Riesling: Crisp, excellent with the food, this is my idea of a refreshing, food friendly white wine.

Chateau Ste Michelle 2003 Dry Riesling: I would have loved it if I hadn’t had the Dopff first, it's not as balanced in comparison.

Sonoma Zinfandel Sonoma County 2002 Seghesio Family Vineyards: smooth, full-bodied and equal to the big flavors in the lamb.

Chateau Rieussec Grand Cru Classe 1855 Sauternes 1999: Elegant, rich, lovely.

Covey Run 2001 Morio Muskat: Probably fine on its own, I'll try it again, but it was clobbered in comparison by the sauternes.

A Cool Internet Tasting Form
Uncorked Magazine’s Web site has a wonderful tasting notes sheet that you can print out for your own private tastings. It helps tasters of all levels of experience by prompting you for color, body, acid, sugar, tannin and finish and supplies the possible answers as multiple choices. Thank you Uncorked! So if you don’t know, you can make a good guess and not be embarrassed. A form gives shy people a wonderful prop and conversation tool. This particular crowd got in the tasting spirit creating lots of conversation and not so many written observations. It was a very fun evening with great new food and new wines to experience that seem to energize the crowd. Everyone said let's do it again.

Note about Curry Powder: The quality of grocery store curry powder is so inconsistent, it's not worth the convenience of using only one spice. Better to use whatever spices are called for in a recipe, that you have onhand --and don't worry about it. There’s not much harm done by omitting something. Curries, like beef stew or chicken soup do not have to be exact to be pleasureable. Taste and adjust the seasonings before serving is common sense with any cooking.

The concept of curry and curry powder is a sad left over from the British Raj period in India when the occupation forces had no idea what spices were in any dish and the unfamiliar stew-like dishes became a generic term. A traditional Indian cook choses from as many as 25 spices to season a dish. Common key spices are cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cardamon, nutmeg and tumeric. Fresh ingredients for seasonings are ginger, garlic and onions. Tumeric provides the quintessential gold color but it’s not an important addition in flavor in my book. A sweet or smoky paprika will add much more flavor and a pleasing red color.

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