Indianizing food in a foreign land

On moving abroad, most of us Indians need Indian food to really feel at home. We need our 'atta' [whole-wheat flour], daals [lentils], Indian vegetables, masalas and Indian snacks to really settle down into daily living, comfortably. These days, it is not difficult to find exactly what you crave. Indian food is very popular the world over -Indian restaurants exist in the smallest, most far flung places. So also, Indian groceries are easily available and accessible wherever in the world one lives. Wherever there is an Indian community, there is no dearth of Indian shops. Besides mainstream grocery stores in major cities of the world stock Indian ingredients.
But many years ago it was not so and perhaps there are still places outside India where Indian groceries are not easily found. So what does an Indian do when faced with the prospect of very limited access to Indian ingredients? What does one do when one is looking for coriander leaves and finds only parsley? What does one use when red chili powder is not available but paprika is? They say necessity is the mother of invention. This is so true when is faced with food that is alien and one is compelled to use one's ingenuity not to mention ones imagination to Indianize whatever is available and make it 'desi'.
More than 15 years ago, I found myself in Belfast, UK hunting high and low for Indian groceries. Of the things that I carried with me from India were my masala 'dabba' [box of Indian spices], a rolling pin ['belan'] and a rolling board for making chapatis. What I couldn't possibly carry was atta and replenishment for the masala stocks. It was a shock to find that atta was not easily available in Belfast. It was alright to eat rice in the beginning but slowly one really longed for chapatis. I tried using plain flour ['maida'] from the local shops but the rubbery chapatis that resulted made me give up. Visiting the local Chinese supermarket that sold some Indian stuff had me thinking the problem was solved. In this warehouse like shop were huge sacks of atta, but the flour was either very brown whole-wheat flour, which made really coarse and fibrous chapatis, or the extremely white atta, which was similar to maida. So of course the option was to mix the flours and try to make the most of what was available. If a trip to London was made, a sack of normal 'atta' was lugged all the way to Belfast by air.
But if atta was scarce, we turned to packets of Mexican tortillas, which were easily available in local grocery shops. Tortillas came pretty close to chapatis and all they needed was warming up on a pan. Also in Belfast, we discovered Irish potato farls, a very traditional Irish specialty, which believe it or not taste just like 'aloo paratha'. These could be heated on a pan or just toasted in a toaster and could be eaten with pickle, if you had any.
The local Indian ladies were a great resource when it came to exchanging ideas on how to Indianize food. As a small Indian community we were a close-knit group, meeting for potluck dinners quite regularly. The talk was often of how we could turn a local food item into something Indian. At the time, one could not get 'ghee' easily. So the solution was to simply buy unsalted butter and heat it for a long enough time over a low flame until it yielded 'ghee'! Festival time was when we yearned for Indian sweets. We figured that Greek yoghurt could magically transform into 'shrikhand' by just adding castor sugar, saffron [if we had it] and nuts. Some of the more enterprising ladies used ricotta cheese to make Indian mithai, like 'barfi'. 'Pedha' could be made with condensed milk, milk powder and butter in a microwave. Pav bhaaji a favourite snack had to accommodate the local buns called 'baps' as a substitute for the 'pav'.
Using the local vegetables was a culinary challenge. In how many ways could one cook cauliflower, cabbage, potatoes and peas in various permutations and combinations? What one craved were some traditional Indian veggies. When the Chinese supermarket managed to get 'bhindi' [ladies' finger], we Indian ladies pounced on it and that evening several families had 'bhindi sabzi' for dinner. When 'methi' [fenugreek leaves] arrived by air from mainland U. K, no matter how shriveled it looked, it was precious and grabbed enthusiastically.
The local veggies were often of a different variety than those we saw in India. The onions, which were huge, white in colour and highly pungent, tasted very spicy when used raw in a 'raita'. The chillies were often not the small green ones used in Indian cooking but were larger, less spicy ones. The cucumber looked different with a dark green skin that was edible. So as one can imagine, our Indian salads looked and tasted very different. They were Indian- because of the spices like 'chaat masala' that we added, but just not how they would be in India. We learnt to use vegetables we'd never seen in India, like Brussels sprouts. When chopped fine, it could be turned into a 'sabzi' just like a cabbage sabzi, with a simple tempering of cumin seeds and turmeric. I even tried making paratha with grated courgette [zucchini], which I make even now. Adding peeled, cubed courgette to 'sambhar' was another successful experiment. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, parsley, which looks so much like coriander, just could not take its place in Indian cooking.
The vegetables often had names that our English textbooks in India did not teach us. For instance, who knew that in English, ladies' finger is also called okra, that aubergine was another name for brinjal or that capsicum also goes by the name green pepper. Our vocabulary changed as we made Indian style aubergine 'bharta' or stuffed green pepper 'bhaaji'.
Anyone who has lived for some time outside India will recount tales of how they used whatever food was available in the country of their adoption and gave it an Indian 'tadka', an Indian flavour. Experimentation and the desire to explore local produce but at the same time trying to keep it Indian tasting leads to all kinds of interesting fusion cuisine. Some disasters are guaranteed but sometimes it paves the way to inventing gastronomic novelties, which then get passed on, to other people. However, there are some foods that are best left alone, for example I've never quite managed to Indianize parsnips and it's best to cook them the traditional English way. Likewise, with asparagus which although a lovely vegetable, is best not Indianized.
One advantage of being in a situation where Indian goodies are scarce is that one becomes an expert cook. If something is easily available in a can or a box, one doesn't really learn to make it, but if unavailable, motivates one to try and produce it. A prime example is a cousin of mine who moved to the west 25 years ago, who still makes rasgullas from scratch. The one food item that is hard if not impossible to make in a cold country is dahi [curd]. My friends and I tried every conceivable trick to make dahi- placing the pot in a warm oven, wrapping the pot in a sweater and even procuring the dahi culture through a relative coming over from India! Thankfully, the grocery shops soon started stocking 'natural bio yoghurt' which is like our very own dahi.
I cannot help thinking of a scene from the film 'The Namesake' where the female character, an Indian immigrant to the US craves 'bhel' and nonchalantly uses a boxed cereal with puffed rice to dish it up. Yes, that is exactly what we do when we desperately want something but cannot find the exact Indian version in a foreign land. All one has to do is look around and find something similar. In the process, one may just end up discovering a whole new world.