Gobi Manchurian

I’m convinced Gobi Manchurian was the creation of a very talented con artist. An entirely Indian dish with pretensions to a Chinese origin.

Think about it, just see how misleading the name is. Gobi is the Hindi name for the cauliflower, the unpretentious squamous cell carcinoma type of bland vegetable which every mum has confused her child into eating by hiding it in the midst of potatoes. But it is also the name of the desert in Mongolia/China. So giving it that name gives it an exotic Oriental connection.

Manchuria is however the northeast part of China bordering Russia and doesn't overlap the Gobi. This whole mixing of geographical locations into one dish has ruined the knowledge base of every young teenager.

I think if I were a teenager and was accused to getting poor marks in geography I would just turn around and tell my parents "So why did you feed me Gobi Manchurian? You started it all by feeding me wrong information. You are just like Facebook, you introduce misleading information into my feed and then if I vote wrongly it becomes my fault!"

I'm not done with griping; I have more issues with it. It is obvious to me, as it should be to everyone else too, that if at all a dish were to be named after the Gobi desert it should have been a dessert. Like a salted caramel Gobi would be an ideal name rather than the boring sounding pudding.

The latter however, is also a name whose origins are as confusing as they are misleading. The pudding was originally used to describe savoury dishes. It's etymology is from the French word boudin which again came from the Latin word botellus meaning small sausage.

There's one episode of 'Friends’ where Jennifer Aniston's character 'Rachel' mixes up two pages of two different recipes and makes a trifle pudding which has jelly as well as meat. Matt Leblanc’s character 'Joey' thoroughly enjoys it and asks everyone else “what's not to like?” But he was a fictional character and hence could fit into any time period-medieval or modern and a pudding might fit into either frame of reference -savoury or sweet.

For the rest of us however call the Gobi Manchurian what it should be called- ‘ginger garlic cauliflower fries!’