Why The Phrase Indian Food Explains Almost Nothing

The label survives abroad because it is convenient, not because it describes anything a cook would recognise.

Start with the grain, because the grain decides the rest. Where rice dominates, the meal is built around it: the accompaniments are looser, more liquid, designed to be mixed and eaten by hand from a mound. Where wheat and other flatbread grains dominate, the meal is built around tearing and scooping, and the accompaniments are thicker because they must cling to bread rather than soak into rice. Millets change it again, bringing their own textures and their own place in the day. These are not stylistic preferences. They follow the rain and the soil, which is to say they follow the map that most outsiders do not carry.

Then the fat. Coconut in some places, mustard oil in others, clarified butter in others again, groundnut or sesame elsewhere. Change the fat and you have changed the entire aroma of a cuisine before a single spice is added. Then the souring agent, which might be tamarind, or yoghurt, or dried fruit, or a citrus, or a fermented grain batter, and which determines the whole shape of a dish more than heat ever does. Then the vessel, the flame, the order in which things reach the table, and whether the meal is served all at once or in sequence.

Put those variables together and the number of genuinely distinct traditions is large, and none of them are subsets of a single national cuisine. What is sold abroad under one banner is usually a narrow slice: whichever regional tradition happened to have the migration history and the restaurant economics to travel. It is honest cooking, but it stands for itself, not for a country. The most useful correction is small: ask which region, and the conversation immediately becomes more interesting.