Ancient Vegetables: What did Indians Eat Before Colonisation?
When I posted my Pav Bhaji video( • The Amazing Story of Pav Bhaji ) a while back, I had made this observation that almost every vegetable in the Pav Bhaji was introduced by the Portuguese or the British in the last 150 years. This made a lot of folks wonder in the comments section - Wait, what vegetables did we eat before these plundering Europeans arrived?
Turns out that it’s not an easy question to answer, given the general paucity of documentary evidence (we tended not to write things down in general). While archeologists and food historians have their ways, there are some simple ways in which laypeople like us can try and appreciate what vegetables our ancestors might have eaten:
1. Dishes cooked during Srardha rituals,
2. Dishes cooked in old temples and
3. Food eaten by the poor in remote villages - where older eating practices are more likely to have survived.
In this video, I will just focus on 1 - what is cooked by my family once a year in memory of our ancestors. As with anything to do with Indian food, this is one anecdotal example in a giant country with a million different cuisines and eating habits. But it’s one tiny window into the past in terms of what vegetables might have been available before colonization.
Please note: The vegetables likely varied tremendously by region and you can also appropriately add local sources of protein - such as fish, poultry, goats, or cattle as appropriate
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