Cooking is a unique trait humans possess and is believed to be a major cause of increased brain size. While cooking encompasses an array of food processing techniques, cuisine is an organized series of food preparation procedures intended to create tasty and healthy food.
India has a unique blend of culturally and climatically diverse regional cuisines. Its culinary history dates back to the early Indus valley civilization.
Indian dietary practices are deeply rooted in notions of disease prevention and promotion of health.
Food perception involving olfactory and gustatory mechanisms is the primary influence for food preferences in humans. These preferences are also determined by a variety of factors such as culture, climate geography and genetics, leading to emergence of regional cuisines.
Food pairing hypothesis:
Food pairing hypothesis is a popular notion in culinary science. Food pairing is the idea that ingredients having similar flavor constitution may taste well in a recipe.
Studies by Ahn et al found that North American, Latin American and Southern European recipes follow this food pairing pattern where as certain others like North Korean cuisine and Eastern European cuisines do not.
Food pairing in regional cuisines of India:
Food pairing in major Indian regional cuisines follow a consistent trend. Spices, individually and as a category, play a crucial role in rendering the negative food pairing to the cuisines. The use of spices as a part of diet dates back to ancient Indus civilization of Indian subcontinent.
They also find mention in Ayurvedic texts such as Charaka Samhita and Bhaavprakash Nighantu. Trikatu, an Ayurvedic formulation prescribed routinely for a variety of diseases, is a combination of spices viz., long pepper, black pepper and ginger.
Historically spices have served several purposes such as coloring and flavoring agents, preservatives and additives. They also serve as anti-oxidants, anti-inflammatory, chemo-preventive, antimutagenic and detoxifying agents.
One of the strongest hypothesis proposed to explain the use of spices is the antimicrobial hypothesis, which suggests that spices are primarily used due to their activity against food spoilage bacteria. A few of the most antimicrobial spices are commonly used in Indian cuisines.
The beneficial role of capsaicin, an active component in cayenne which was revealed to be the most prominent ingredient in consistently rendering the negative food pairing in all regional cuisines.
The importance of spices in Indian regional cuisines is also highlighted by the fact these cuisines have many derived ingredients (such as garam masala, ginger garlic paste etc.) that are spice combinations.
The key role of spices in rendering characteristic food pairing in Indian cuisines and the fact that they are known to be of therapeutic potential, provide a basis for exploring possible causal connection between diet and health as well as prospection of therapeutic molecules from food ingredients.
Flavor pairing has been used as a basic principle in algorithm design for both recipe recommendation and novel recipe generation, thereby enabling computational systems to enter the creative domain of cooking and suggesting recipes.
In such algorithms, candidate recipes are generated based on existing domain knowledge and flavor pairing plays a crucial role while selecting the best among these candidates.
Conclusion:
Any national cuisine is a sum total of its variety of regional cuisines, which are the cultural and historical identifiers of their respective regions. India is home to a number of regional cuisines that showcase its culinary diversity.
Frequency of ingredient usage is central in rendering the characteristic food pairing in each of these cuisines. Spice and dairy emerged as the most significant ingredient classes responsible for the biased pattern of food pairing.
Interestingly while individual spices contribute to negative food pairing, dairy products on the other hand tend to deviate food pairing towards positive side.
Randomizing ingredients within a certain category provides an insight into their contribution towards bias in food pairing. Spice and dairy category showed up as prominent categories contributing to the negative food pairing of regional cuisines.