If you need context, here is where this series started: Why I Refuse to Westernise My Indian Home in Canada.
Smelly, too pungent, spicy, strong for the palette- just a few words with which Westerners describe the Indian food. Then I volunteered at one of the film festivals in Canada, where I met a fellow Canadian volunteer who said she loves Indian food, except Biriyani, because it's too spicy. And I just smiled at her.
Well, I could have responded with Biriyani not just being spicy, and there are other options. But the introvert in me decided not to talk, and think over it to an extent of something that society needs to know!
Addressing the entire society rather than answering that one lady- That's a classic me behaviour that I am not even Sorry about anymore!
So getting back to the topic of Indian food, Hello Westerners- When I talk about Indian food, I am not talking about spices and Tadka, but about Indian Food that carries the wisdom of weather, season and survival.
Last year, I was fighting Canadian winters all layered up when outside, or sulking in my room and having soup. This year, I was still layered up when outside, with fewer layers than last year. And at home, I cooked a nutritious meal that kept me warm inside and out and silently built that immunity I needed to fight the Canadian winters. And this meal is coming right from my grandma's kitchen- The pearl millet Khichdi (Pearl millet made with lentils in a hot-pot). I did not make it out of nostalgia. I made it because I belong to Rajasthan, India- an Indian state that knows winter (-15 degree celcius) as it knows fire (50 degrees Celsius). So my body just recalled the genes, and my mind recalled the childhood, and I did what Indians do as a climate response.
Indians change their food menu with every weather.
For Indians, change of food menu is a seasonal intelligence, passed not through textbooks but through kitchens, across centuries, with extraordinary accuracy.
The Premise No One Talks About
Indian food is often spoken of in the West as a category of restaurant, a riot of spice, a thing you order on a Friday night and forget by Saturday. What is rarely spoken of is that the Indian kitchen operates on an ancient logic, tuned over thousands of years, that reads the sky before it reads the recipe.
It understands that the body is not a fixed machine. It is a seasonal creature. And what you eat in December should bear no resemblance to what you eat in June.
This is not mysticism. The Ayurvedic framework, which has quietly underlain Indian cooking for millennia, describes the body as something that expands and contracts with seasons, that produces different needs in cold and heat, that requires different fuels for different weathers. Modern nutritional science is slowly arriving at the same conclusions, dressed in the language of microbiomes and thermogenesis. India had it in the flour. In the greens. In the ghee.
Winter: When the Kitchen Helps You Fight
An Indian winter kitchen does not simply warm. It fortifies. When the days shortened and the frost arrived in the parts of India that knew cold, Punjab, Rajasthan, Himachal, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, the flour changed. Wheat stayed, yes, but bajra/pearl millet came forward. Pearl millet, dense with iron and magnesium, produces a thermogenic effect in the body: it takes more energy to digest, and that energy becomes heat. A pearl millet roti eaten in January is, in the most literal scientific sense, a furnace you swallow.
Alongside it came sarson da saag, also known as mustard greens, cooked slowly with spinach, seasoned with a good amount of ginger and garlic. Mustard greens are rich in Vitamin K, Vitamin C, and antioxidants that support the immune system. Ginger is a natural anti-inflammatory. Garlic has well-documented antimicrobial properties. This was not a dish assembled for taste alone. It was assembled for survival, and it happened to taste, as anyone who has eaten it knows, like the most satisfying thing the cold has ever produced.
Breakfast in winter was never cereal from a box with cold milk. It was a paratha (flattened bread)- thick, sometimes stuffed with radish or fenugreek (methi), cooked in ghee. Methi, or fenugreek, is now known for its ability to regulate blood sugar, reduce inflammation, and support digestion. Radish, especially the white one that comes in cold months, supports liver health and digestion in ways that lighter summer vegetables simply do not. And ghee, the clarified butter the west spent decades fearing, is rich in fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, and provides the slow-burning fuel that a cold body genuinely needs.
Tea was not optional. It was structural. Kadha- a decoction of ginger, black pepper, basil leaves, and cardamom, long-boiled and strong, was the morning contract. Not tea-bag chai brewed lightly for flavour, but a serious hot medicine designed to open the lungs, thin the mucus, and heat the chest. Every ingredient in a kadha does something specific: black pepper aids the absorption of nutrients, basil leaves are an adaptogen that helps the body manage stress, and ginger reduces nausea and warms the gut.
Across Canadian winters, I have not found a single commercial product that does what a ten-minute kadha does, and I have really tried. The best part? All these ingredients I mentioned are available at almost all the supermarkets/Walmart/Costco.
Summer: When the Kitchen Cools
The Indian summer kitchen is an equal intelligence. The flour changes again. Jowar/sorghum is a go-to when the heat rises. It is lighter than wheat, easier to digest, and does not tax a body already working hard to stay cool. The body's needs have shifted, and the kitchen follows without argument.
Breakfast becomes poha/flattened rice cooked lightly, with mustard seeds and turmeric, dressed with lime and coriander. Rice is easier on the digestive system in heat, and poha in particular is low in calories, easy to absorb, and quick to make. Lunches lean toward dal/lentils with cooling vegetables: bottle gourd, ridge gourd, the pale gourds that western grocery stores stock without knowing quite why they are there. These vegetables have high water content, aid kidney function, and cool the internal temperature. They are not exciting. They are not meant to be.
Curd, not yoghurt, but fresh homemade curd, becomes a daily presence. It is probiotic without having to call itself probiotic. Raita, that quiet bowl of curd with cucumber and cumin, does more for summer digestion than most supplements on the market.
These are not just "Indian Food". These are foods engineered by observation, generations of it, to match the body to the season.
Spring and Monsoon: The Transition Intelligence
These seasons are when Indian food shows perhaps its most sophisticated awareness. Spring, in the Indian food calendar, is a time of cleansing. The body has been dense with winter warmth, heavy with the fats and proteins that sustained it through the cold. Curry leaves are added to cooking. Bitter gourd and berries loaded with Vitamin C are consumed in every form. They purge the liver of accumulated winter heaviness.
The monsoon brings its own complications: humidity, bacteria, the gut's vulnerability when the air is wet and warm at once. The monsoon kitchen responds with dried foods and legumes. Khichdi- the ancient union of rice and lentils becomes essential, because it is easy to digest in a system that humidity has made sluggish. Fermented foods appear. Tadka- the technique of blooming mustard seeds and asafoetida in hot oil before adding them to dal is not just flavour. Asafoetida (hing) is one of the most effective natural remedies for bloating and digestive disruption, which the monsoon season reliably brings.
What Canada Offers In Terms of Food?
The Canadian food is good and reflects its own history. But honestly, I would not start my morning with cereals + cold milk or a cup of yoghurt or bread and eggs. It gives me nutritional grief! Not because the food is bad, but because it is season-blind. Only if they can come up with Barley bread, Or Barley cereal. The soup gives me warmth at the moment, but does nothing to build my immunity. What I needed was not convenience but intention!
The western diet, for all its variety, tends to think of nutrition as a flat science. Vitamins as supplements. Fibre as a category. Protein as a gram count. Indian cooking thinks of nutrition as a relationship between the body and the season, the food and the weather, the ingredients and the time of year. Only one of them made me feel warm in January without touching the thermostat.
The Science Was Always There
Before you hate me for my "Indian Ways", there is a study that confirms that Indian kitchens have always known practically.
The combination of black pepper and turmeric, the bedrock of so many Indian preparations, increases curcumin absorption by nearly twenty times. Fermented foods like idli and dosa batter, left to culture overnight, produce gut-friendly bacteria that no probiotic pill has convincingly replicated. The spice combinations in Indian cooking are functional pairings, evolved through centuries of trial that never had a lab but had the remarkable rigour of survival.
Even the structure of a traditional Indian meal: dal, sabzi, roti or rice, a small amount of pickle or curd, is a nutritional architecture. Complex carbohydrates, plant proteins, fermented probiotics, fat from ghee to carry fat-soluble vitamins, and pickles to stimulate digestive enzymes. The meal was complete before anyone had words like micronutrients and macronutrients.
What I Am Not Saying!
There are still chances that you are judging me for saying "Indian food is superior in some absolute sense, or that the West has not produced its own nutritional wisdom." Well, I never said it. At least not directly. But I am not fighting with you, if you want to think so!
But seriously, what I am saying is that the Indian kitchen developed a seasonal language for feeding the body that is precise, tested, and still largely legible if you know how to read it.
When I arrived in Canada and found myself dropping Vitamin D and iron levels, and a sluggish gut, I did not look to the pharmacy first. I looked at my kitchen pantry and my mother's and grandmother's habits. I started consuming homemade herbal teas, started cooking with more sesame and jaggery in winter (both warming, both mineral-rich), and stopped eating cold curd after sunset, as I had been taught but forgotten. The winter was never easier.
When I cook Indian way in Canada, when I change my flour with the weather, when I make cool drinks with fennel seeds in the summer heat and sesame laddoos in the winter, I am not being sentimental. I am being accurate. I am speaking the oldest language I know to the body that lives in the newest place I have ever been.
The kitchen (east or west) did not forget the weather.
I just have to stop forgetting the kitchen.