What does the way most Indians eat our food have in common with the West’s great Michelin starred restaurants?

And we started doing it thousands of years before the West had any restaurants at all, let alone a Michelin guide. Also read | The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: Why Indian chefs hide their recipes

If you have been to a fancy western restaurant or even to one serving that kind of food in India, you will have noticed that the food comes out from the kitchen already plated. The main component of the dish (usually a protein) will be surrounded with a few smears of sauces and one or two side elements (say, a stalk of asparagus or a mushroom).

The chef will tell you that he has worked hard on creating the perfect combination of flavours. You must cut a bit of the protein, spear it with your fork, then dip (or rub) it in the sauce (or sauces) and then try and skewer a bit of the vegetable (asparagus, baby carrot etc) on to the same fork. It is the way the flavours marry each other that makes the dish special, you will be told.

Ask the same chefs about Indian food and they will say that it’s very different. After all we eat everything with our hands. They may be too polite to put it in words but the subtext will be : yours is a primitive way of eating so different from the delicate mingling of flavours that characterises the food of top western chefs.

In fact, they are completely wrong. The opposite is true.

Central to the misunderstanding of the sophistication of Indian cuisine is this business of ‘they eat everything with their hands.’

Yes we do. But we don’t just grab our food and thrust it into our mouths as they would do in medieval Europe where a royal banquet could consist of a roomful of........

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