WHY ARE THE PICKLED ONIONS IN THE RESTAURANTS RED?

 I waited for this season to write this article. The new harvest of Ginger is in the markets. I will explain the relationship between this and the onions in a minute.

We all go to Indian restaurants for a meal. Once the order is placed, the waiter usually keeps a set of three containers  on the table. One has some pickle , one has a chutney of  some kind and the third has pickled onions which are red at the edges. These are supposedly pickled in vinegar.

Have you ever thought what this colour is ?  Have you ever wondered why red, why not any other colour like blue or green?

Now we come back to our new ginger. It is a pale pink colour and it has a tender skin which is also edible. Try the following at home. Take a large piece of ginger say 50 to 70 grams and cut into thin strips. It cuts very easily like a potato.   Now cut an onion and cut that also into small pieces and mix with the ginger pieces. Add some salt and put it aside for half an hour.

Most housewives know this simple day-pickle.  What they may not know is that these strips of salted ginger are blue litmus. Strange but true, its edible blue litmus. This can be used for any laboratory test also.  When we add a tablespoon of vinegar or squeeze the juice of a lime in it, the ginger, the onions in it turn pink and the edges mildly red.  This ginger and onion pickle has a lovely tangy taste and the natural pink colour is lovely.

This red colour is what all restaurant owners are trying to copy but the process has got bastardized two times over. First they tried to bring the same colour by using a piece of beetroot, then they stopped using vinegar and started to use synthetic vinegar of unregulated concentration, Then suddenly all the restaurant owners started to use food colour in large quantites ( a pinch in half a kilo of onions is a huge quantity).  Now they have stopped using the vinegar altogether and you will see that the onions are bland. They have also stopped using salt because of which the onions got a semblance of pickling.

Food colouring is highly avoidable, it is toxic, it gets into the liver of humans and doesn’t get excreted. A simple test is to rub the coloured onion in a white hankerchief. The colour will rub off on the cloth.

We started with a, pale pink coloured, tangy,  onion- ginger pickle and we have ended with deep red, toxic, bland, salt less onions.  This is the sad story of a lot of restaurant food.  I will bring more such horrors to your notice.  The professionals in the food business are taking the consumers for granted and are dishing out some nonsense in the name of good food.  

Refuse to eat the coloured onions, ask for a fresh cut onion with a spoon of natural vinegar or piece of lime and do try the fresh new ginger-onion pickle at home, it tastes good at the time of making and even more wonderful a day later. It doesn’t last much longer than that.

Param Jigyasu

 

A SENSE OF DISORDER

 A SENSE OF DISORDER

Recently I had the good fortune to travel to Malaysia.  It is similar to India in many ways. Its multicultural, its democratic, parts of the population are very conservative . The climate of the country is very similar to south India. Tamils form  some 9% of the population and Tamil is one of the official languages.  I had some of the nicest Dosa’s of my life in Kualalumpur.

It is a petroleum producing  country and its income is more than that of India. The one outstanding thing about Malaysia is that it is very organized and very clean. Life in general seems to be running smoothly. The common man is very scared of breaking the law. We do hear of frequent purse snatching etc but otherwise there is no evidence of people breaking the law blatantly.

In my mind I have been ruminating about `what is it that they do differently from us’.

One thing is definite that  there seems to be much more investment in public infrastructure in roads, paths, lighting, buses, trains, trams etc.

Second and the more important thing that people seem to have done differently from us is that they seem to have killed their raw instincts and they have learnt to respect common property. There seems to be no body spitting (a lot of people chew tobacco and areca nut there). Nobody seemed to be throwing cigarette butts in wrong places (smoking also is very common in Malaysia). Nobody seems to be vandalizing common property.  Buses , Taxis, trains are all clean, Public toilets are clean and everything works .  Public telephones work very well and the booths are clean. Mind you there are still a lot of illiterate and jobless people like in India. Though not so big,  but the urban rural divide is there, it is not that the country is one big mass of  educated yuppies. Their mix of educated- uneducated, city -village, rich-poor etc is not very different from ours.

 Third is the invisible hand of the law enforcing agency.  There are people who serve food on the sidewalks but they keep the side walks shining.  I had some lovely sweet tea (called `chai’ and contains a big helping of condensed milk ) from a chap with a push cart on the road side.  The glass in which tea was served was spotless clean and the pavement was even more clean, he didn’t let even a drop of the sweet liquid spill on the paving in the process of making, serving and washing.  I am sure that there is somebody to ensure that street vendors don’t litter, but the enforcement is wonderful.  

The fact that the invisible hand of Law is heavy is evident from the airport from the time of landing. There are big warnings to say that `Drug trafficking is punishable by the death Penalty’.  

Cut to Scene 2

Came back after a month and  I went for a walk some days later  in of the quieter bye lanes of Rajpur Road and I saw something wonderful. It was such a contrast to my days in Malaysia.  Some body has just cocked a snook at MDDA and built a house right on the road(on two roads in fact as it is a corner plot.  A three storied monster has been constructed without leaving even an inch from the roadside say within 9 feet of the centre of the road.  If I know the law right 15 feet from the centre of the road is right of way or road and some 6 feet minimum is the setoff. So one cannot build any structure within 20-21  feet from the centre of the road.  I invite the powers to come and see this wonderful creation still under  construction. The pillars of the porch are not even 10 feet from the centre of the road. The main structure is not more than 12 feet away from the road and all other setoffs are zero. In fact on one side he seems to have built  a roof projection over the neighbours land. I asked one of the neighbours and  everybody seems helpless. 

I had started to think that we in India have also come around a little bit, every body wears the  seat belt in Delhi, The Delhi Metro is actually quite clean. Railway stations are not as dirty as they were some 10 years ago. These and the nice thoughts of the ordered developments still fresh from my Malaysian experience came to a screeching halt. 

Here are some pictures of this house which is on the lane behind Ramakrishna Mission Temple.

Another wonderful thing I see  not far from here is a sort of nursery on the Kishanpur Masjid  bus stop.  MDDA makes the wall to its property behind it, the proprietor of this nursery breaks it. (all this is within 50 metres of the Chief Secretary’s residence). Again one day MDDA will come and make the wall. Again the same thing will happen. Needless to say at least 150 feet of the sidewalk is permanently occupied by his nursery which has half a dozen dogs, children men and women.  This has been happening for many years.  If you are walking from say Jakhan to the Diversion , at the busy junction of Inder Bawa marg, behind the bus stop there is no sidewalk, you have to walk on the main road in front of the bus stop in the fear that a bus may be right behind you.

A stretch of road between the main Rajpur road and the Indane gas agency at Jakhan is under construction since the last six months . Its work under progress  but it’s a big mess worsened by the heavy rain. 

It is good to be back in India and buy lovely sweet mangoes for Rs 25 a kilo but along with it comes the `sense of disorder ‘ which  hit me thrice in one mornings walk.  It has  been there and it refuses to go away. Are we different, or selfish or too relaxed. We all like a good burger when we see it but we do not seem to be taking enough care to produce one.

Param Jigyasu