Indochinese Cabbageways With Ragini Kashyap
(This interview was transcribed and edited)
Who are you, where are you really from and what do you do?
I’m Ragini Kashyap. I started Third Culture Cooks in 2016 when I was living in London.
I am a third culture kid: I grew up in the Middle East, moved to Canada and worked in India and East Africa for a while and also lived in the UK a bit. A city like London was very comfortable because people come from everywhere and you can find different communities. It was when I was living in London that I had the idea for Third Culture Cooks. At the time, I hadn’t seen too much online about what people were eating or reading. The history of food has since then become ‘cool’ but in 2016 it wasn’t something that was as all over the place as it is now.
I knew I wanted to incorporate that third culture element, and I wasn’t really interested in putting out recipes and didn’t yet know what my voice was. I spent a couple of months walking around different markets and parts of London, talking to people and trying to see what it was that I was trying to tell. Finally, what I realised was interesting to me - as someone who loves history and political science - is how food moves with us. Because that’s been a massive theme of my own life: taking what I love from whatever and creating an identity out of all these different places.
I started doing research for six or seven months before I put anything out into the world, and the first thing I came up with was my supper club series ‘Bordered’, where I would look at a particular conflict through the lens of someone who had been through or had a family history in the conflict. So, for example, if I was looking at Punjab 1947, I relied on my whole family history, which starts from and ends with that conflict on the Indian side. And then I have Pakistani friends who similarly have stories that crossed over the other way.
I spent a long time interviewing people who were very kind with their time and their recipes and, and they liked having the chance to tell their story, which is focused on what the woman was creating - the continuity of the home - as opposed to the continuity of life, which is what we tend to focus on more [in storytelling]. I did that for about six different conflicts and put these menus together, thinking about how I would tell the stories through my supper clubs. Then I took a couple of months off to work in a commercial kitchen to understand how it works.
From there I moved back to Canada and then quite quickly to India with work within sort of a six month period. All through this time, I was doing ‘Bordered’ on the side and when I got to Bombay, I started doing it in restaurants spaces. That really took off and I found myself doing it pretty much every weekend. I did that through 2019 and the first part of 2020 and I had just quit my job to do it full time when Covid hit.
I had to pivot because up until then I hadn’t really focused much on social media. Suddenly, I wasn’t working - and I was like, what am I doing? I realised I had collected and analysed all this research over the last four or five years, and there was so much I could do with it.
That’s when I got into the teaching of food and politics and looking at food and conflict and food and being in diaspora. I created a Patreon community, and every month we were looking at a different Indian diaspora in a different part of the world. It was a combination of a podcast with a few recipes, bringing in people from the community to speak of their experience, both from the country of origin - if it was India - or not. It did so well - we had 75 sign up the first, second and third year.
So, Third Culture Cooks has morphed into its own thing to be honest. Until now I haven’t needed to define a direction very clearly because things have just happened and grown. But after my baby’s born, that might be a time when I ask, where am I going from here?
I love complex back stories, especially because it sounds very organic. How much of it is reflective of your own personal journey? There are many parallels with what I'm doing - essentially creating my own path, my own ecosystem and building community.
For sure. The thing is, I’ve physically moved around a lot. I’ve put a lot of effort in the last couple of years into building a strong virtual community and that’s something I can bring together and disband as needed. But something I really want to focus on is going back to what I was doing at the beginning - having people being in a physical space together to do something.
I’m going to ask you the first actual question I wanted to ask: when people ask you, ‘where are you from, where are you really from?’ how do you answer that question? Is it something you get a lot?
That’s definitely a question I get a lot. It’s interesting because it depends where I’m being asked. Now that I’ve lived in India for the last four years, I find I have to answer that question. Previously I lived in Canada, the UK, Middle East - and in none of these places can I claim to be solely from that place, right?
I don’t know if you’ve heard the term NRI (non-resident Indian) but it’s used very widely. It has certain connotations that aren’t always great, people make a lot of assumptions just as they people make assumptions of immigrants and, in this part of the world, it’s not that different. They come to you with those assumptions like their own heavy set of filters.
Usually I’ll say that I am Canadian because technically my passport is Canadian, but that my family is from India and I grew up in the Middle East. No one’s ever really satisfied. But if I say oh no, I’m from Delhi, which is where all of my family is from, they will say oh but you’re not actually from here. Like, OK!
So, Asian as an ethnic label obviously lands differently in North America to how it does here in the UK because they actually have different meanings. What do you think of this label Asian and how do you use it?
I think the first time I came across both the labels ‘Asian’ and ‘brown’, in the North American context, was when we immigrated here and I was sixteen years old. It’s one of those things that you become a little desensitised to over time because they’re so heavily used around you. But I remember thinking, I don’t really want to define myself as brown - what a strange way to talk about myself! But equally, we are also part of Asia and how do we make this distinction? Now ‘brown’ has become less popular and ‘South Asian’ has become more popular in this part of the world. So now Asian does’t have quite the negative connotation in everyday parlance, and South Asian has kind of come in to mimic that. But 20 years ago, both black and brown were used very widely.
Now it goes both ways - there’s certain benefits to it because of how communities have grown. In Vancouver, for example, Asian is used primarily to describe the East Asian community. It’s just become so commonplace that you’re not processing its usage anymore and it’s such a part of mainstream language that I don’t really hear it having the connotations that it used to. It’s become so common for us to define people by their ethnicity that it’s been reduced to that. Are there levels of racism in this terminology? Of course there is. But the term itself is being used than in just those contexts - South Asian or Asian.
I remember when I moved to the UK, that was really confusing because suddenly I was the Asian and I was like, hold on a second! And it’s a very different culture in the UK - it’s a much older, more integrated Indian culture. The connotations of being Asian or South Asian are also very different, and how people assume you've assimilated into the mainstream.
And obviously the colonial link to British Empire is a very different migration story to that of the States.
I think Canada is a little more similar to the UK in that regard because all the East Asian migration started with the railways and the import of human bodies from East Asia for the railways, from Eastern Europe or South Asia for the farmland. It was a purpose to bring people here. And with the South Asians they had a rule in place that you couldn't land on Canadian shores, unless you had arrived here by continuous passage. The Komagata Maru was the first ship that arrived by continuous passage.
So, do you know what Asian slaw is?
When I hear the term I immediately think of a bad salad mix of cabbage and carrot, some cashew nuts and an overly sweet salad dressing and sesame seeds, and maybe some strips of chicken. And that it’s very heavily anglicised.
It’s interesting how you say we are so desensitised to the label Asian - even on this side of the pond were also quite desensitised to Asian slaw or Asian, this, Asian that, and we never really questioned what’s Asian about it.
Right.
Do you like it? I must admit I do like Asian slaw as it is presented and there’s a reason it’s popular.
As a standalone thing, yes, in the same way that I would enjoy a chicken tikka masala. I mean, it’s not bad but like, what is it?
What’s been your encounter with cabbage in your research into South Asian foodways?
Cabbage is one of those hardy vegetables that shows up across the length and breadth of the sub-continent, which not every group of vegetables does. They’re not delicate or seasonal vegetables. Cabbage plants, certain gourds, potatoes - which are new to the sub-continent - these are things you’ll see crop up, no matter what part of the sub-continent you’re looking at. That’s unlike vegetables like okra or spinach, which are more seasonal and regional. Cabbage is definitely popular for its nutrition and as an easy-to-grow vegetable.
In terms of how we consume cabbage: when I think of slaw I think of a cold salad dish, and I couldn’t think of a South Asian cold application context - except for this newly-introduced role as a filler where it’s mixed with lemon and coriander to bulk up sandwiches and wraps. And then I realised the only place in the subcontinent that I’m aware of, where it’s used as a cold salad, is in Goa. Cabbage came with the Portuguese so the use of cabbage there is different to the rest of the country. We’re talking 18th century as opposed to the 20th century. So in Goa it would be cabbage, onion, coriander and green chilli.
So what’s the most typical way to cook cabbage across the Indian subcontinent?
A version of sautéed cabbage is most typical, and then the additions to that depends on where you are. The recipe I have for you is more North Indian, Punjabi specifically. Whereas if it was from Tamil Nadu, say, it may have coconut and a dry roasted dal.
Cabbage isn’t really cooked in soups and we don’t use the leaves the way you would for a cabbage roll. It’s mostly chopped or shredded. We don’t boil it either, because boiling tends to be a method for softening hard vegetables, like potatoes and turnips. It’s very energy intensive in a hot environment.
I’m thinking about the rules of Chinese cooking and eating, as well as those pertaining to digestion. Chinese cuisines generally do not favour raw salad. Are there any South Asian rules around raw vs. cooked vegetables?
I’ll caveat this by saying Chinese cookery is much much more clearly defined than South Asian cookery - like to the power of 10! A big challenge when looking at food from South Asia is that nothing is absolute, yet at the same time people have very strong ideas, almost tenets of cooking. So you have to speak to each community, and only now are we coming to a stage where people are starting to write things down when previously they were passed on orally. So, I miss a lot in my answer.
So, I think the default thing to fall on is Ayurveda, but the reason I caveated this is that you can retrofit things into the rules of Ayurveda, but it's not the basis of all South Asian cooking. It was very specifically a school of medicine.
A lot of people don’t eat raw vegetables unless it’s immediately before you’re eating - typically onions and, depending on where you are in the subcontinent, it would be cucumbers and tomatoes. Primarily the concern has to do with heat and keeping things fresh. For example, in the monsoon season you know not to eat salad because it could have some sort of parasite in it. And you would cook that vegetable, right?
Why? How does that make sense?
I couldn't tell you! [Laughs] This is what I mean by the tenets. In the monsoon season you don’t eat most fish, you don’t eat salad. And the Jains won’t eat eggplant either, which I hadn’t heard of before, but I learned recently at a dinner where most of the vegetarian things I had prepared used eggplant, and a lot of the vegetarians told me they weren’t eating eggplant this month and I was like, oh… that’s unfortunate!
The rules change per community depending on the season or where you are. In Chennai it would be very different to Bombay. I think one of the big concerns is the quality of water: what water are you able to wash these vegetables with and have faith that it’s not going to make you sick?
With Ayurveda there are guidances around ingesting ‘cold’ foods and when you should do that. However there’s a conflict because so many of the vegetables came in with the Europeans which are now commonplace: cabbage, potatoes, cauliflower, tomatoes, green peas. A lot of that has just been adjusted to the speed of growing, as opposed to being a part of the school of thought. There's no way that potatoes were part of Ayurvedic texts because the timelines just don't match up.
There’s also a huge trend of people eating what they're calling a ‘sattvic diet’. But the basic tenet of Ayurveda is to eat to your body type. So there can't be a particular diet; it’s at odds with what the school of medicine prescribes. I think social media makes it problematic because people can just put anything out there.
As a long-term yoga practitioner I’ve been exposed to Ayurveda - like this idea that we have doshas. But many people don’t understand you’re not just one dosha; you’re a mixture of all three and it’s in constant flux. Part of the practice is learning your own body and intuition, rather than eating one particular diet so you can live forever. But I also find it fascinating how traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda have exchanged ideas through the travel of Buddhism…
Absolutely. One phenomenon in South Asia that isn’t spoken of as much is this whole other school of medicine and food consumption - Islamic Unani. Ayurveda has had so much more continuation and exposure, maybe through a lack of breakup of the community or just more people practicing it. But the study of how Ayurveda and Unani work together go back to the second century and it’s a shame that it’s been lost a little bit.
Ragini’s hing aur zeere wala pata gobi
(Literal translation: hing and cumin flavoured cabbage)
Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups cabbage, chopped
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp ginger, grated
1/4 tsp hing
2 dry red chillies OR 1 fresh green chilli if you want it sharper
2 tbsp mustard oil
1 tsp amchoor (dry mango) powder
Salt to taste
1/4 cup fresh coriander, chopped
Method
Heat the mustard oil on medium heat in a wok or frying pan.
Once the oil is hot, add the cumin seeds and let them sputter for 30 seconds. Now add the grated ginger, chillies and hing. Give the mixture a good stir and let it cook for about a minute, till the ginger no longer smells raw.
Turn up the heat, and add in the cabbage and salt. Let it sear for a minute or two, tossing often. Then turn off the heat, cover and let it steam for five to seven minutes, till soft. You can cook this more or less based on how crunchy you’d like the cabbage to be.
Sprinkle on the amchoor and chopped coriander and mix through.
Serve with rotis and a yellow daal of your choice.
How should we eat this sabzi?
In Punjab you would typically eat it with roti and a yellow or channa dal, maybe some yogurt on the side but that’s basically a complete meal. The name indicates how new it is to the cuisine - because it’s just very descriptive. It just translates to cabbage with cumin and hing. That’s because cabbage was a very new vegetable and it was just about finding ways to cook it. To give you an example, there’s a Tamil preparation of vegetable called poriyal; there you could make a poriyal of cabbage and so it’s integrated into a way of cooking it. So you can see from nomenclature how it fits into different cuisines now.
So what would older dish names be like?
Take something like a biryani from the Mughal period: biryani doesn't actually tell you anything in the South Asian language. It’s a proper noun. Whereas this is just purely descriptive.
Who would you like to invite to eat this dish?
This is something you would eat at home. A small family meal as opposed to a large shared meal of any variety. It’s almost too simple for a large gathering!
How would you describe the flavour?
The thing that’s great about cabbages is that they’re not unlike potatoes - they’re chameleons that can take on flavours. With a lot of Indian food the vegetables tend to be cooked to within an inch of its life [laughs] so it’s really the spices that you’re eating. The way that I cook, it tries to maintain a little integrity of the vegetable.
Any other any fermentation or pickling techniques that you've come across for cabbage in South Asian content?
Cauliflower yes, cabbage - no. It doesn’t have enough of an identity in South Asian Cuisine in the way that it might in either Eastern European or East Asian Cuisines where it has like a pride of place. I wouldn't be surprised if it was never on people’s grocery list. In Punjab, they stuff almost every other vegetable into paratha, right? But I’ve never seen a cabbage paratha. I wonder if it’s because the water content of cabbage is quite high. So it's difficult to, you know, make a flatbread. This is just me hypothesising…
Actually, in newer, South Asian cuisines cabbage plays a very significant role especially in street food. Going back to your pickle question, in one part of South India there is a fresh cabbage pickle that’s consumed within a couple of days as opposed preserved in any way. I’m obviously speaking from the North with that ‘hat’ on, where there isn’t much done with cabbage beyond sabzi.
And then coming to street food, cabbage is hugely important, you see a disproportionate consumption in cabbage - some of them might make your toes curl with the example of fusion I’m about to tell you!
There’s Indochinese street food, which basically takes Indian dishes and then add what seems to be a Chinese flavour to them that is not Chinese at all - by any stretch of the imagination! Like soy sauce, ketchup, ginger, garlic, green chilli. So, you have Schezwan dosa, which is basically a dosa stuffed to the brim with cabbage in the mixture of these five things. And then a bit of orange food colouring. But the main ingredient in that is cabbage, right? Or a Chinese bhel: instead of using puffed rice and potatoes for bhel, they’ll use shredded cabbage carrot and have the same sauce. The same with Hakka noodles, kati rolls and paratha rolls, as well as momos, which came with the Tibetans. All use cabbage as a popular vegetarian filing.
For more Schezwan explorations, read Jenny’s essay S Is For Schezwan from An A-Z Of Chinese Food
Do you think there’s an inherent association of cabbage as a Chinese ingredient?
For sure, with Indochinese cuisine. I’m weary of applying a causation to it, but it’s either an association with being Chinese or that cabbage is just cheap and hardy.
I love it! We’ve come to an interesting hypothesis. We can only speculate!