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Only if you believe that there is a canonical definition of bread, which refers to the things made out of wheat flour, whose only acceptable meaning is what the
by jasim 10y ago
Only if you believe that there is a canonical definition of bread, which refers to the things made out of wheat flour, whose only acceptable meaning is what the western hemisphere thinks of as bread.
Dosa, Appam, and Idiappam are breads, even though even in South India, if you ask for "bread" from your local grocer, they'd give you sliced loaves. We use the word bread to refer to these other staple breakfast dishes in an anglicized context, because it maps better than any other word to the meaning we want to convey. Which is why restaurant menus categorizes them under "Indian Breads", and if you accept that language is mutable and responds to how people use it, this is as good an alternative meaning as it can get.
- sean_patel 10y ago> canonical definition of bread. Love it! Spoken like a true engineer :) The process of Baking is what makes a Bread a bread. If it's not baked in an oven, it's not Bread. I didn't make that up, that what has defined a Bread since the beginning of time :) Dosa is fried on a stovetop pan. Appam is cooked on a stovetop pan. Iddiappam is steamed on stovetop using water. None of these are baked at any time in the process.
- DanBC 10y agoCornbread, traditionally cooked in a skillet, isn't a bread? Most people I know would call English muffins a bread product.
- sean_patel 10y ago> Cornbread, traditionally cooked in a skillet, isn't a bread? It's not. Americans have a strangely funny way of naming things. Only in America would you find "Orange Juice" that would say in the ingredients. "Contains no juice. Artifically flavored and coloured." English muffins are baked goods, not breads.
- greglindahl 10y agoSource for the "orange juice" claim? You're thinking of products like "Sunny Delight Beverages Orange", which you should note does not call itself "orange juice". Even in the US, that's not allowed. Skillet bread, on the other hand, is bread, as are english muffins.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jff 10y agoBhatura are deep fried, roti are pan-fried. Edit: basically, India doesn't have a particularly big tradition of oven baking, so by a definition of "bread must be baked" you're gonna have a lot of things that aren't bread.
- sean_patel 10y agoCorrect. Bhatura is fried dough.
- tptacek 10y agoSo is bannock bread!
- tptacek 10y agoThe process of baking is almost definitely not what makes a bread a bread. We had breads long before we had ovens, and we have things that are indisputably breads today that aren't cooked inside ovens. Even today, we can readily cook breads that are typically cooked in an oven over a suitably large open fire or uncovered grill. A bread is a solid stable foam created by heating a dough made primarily of milled plant matter and water. There are no breads that aren't foams, and there are no breads I'm aware of that made primarily of something that isn't plant matter or that hasn't been crushed or otherwise processed to create a homogenous dough with a water-based liquid.
- pcrh 10y ago>A bread is a solid stable foam Another engineer I'd bet :-)
- sean_patel 10y agoROFL.
- tptacek 10y agoIt's not my idea; it's Harold McGee's.
- moultano 10y ago>A bread is a solid stable foam created by heating a dough made primarily of milled plant matter and water. The most common Indian bread, the roti, is not a foam. It's a very flat bread made of wheat flour and water with no internal structure.
- tptacek 10y agoI'm pretty sure it is; it's just a foam of very small bubbles. It's the little pockets of air in bread (usually made by escaping steam, from the water in the dough) that make it tender and palatable. The most obvious foam structure we think about with bread are the big bubbles inside a sourdough or tuscan loaf. But the foam that, say, Harold McGee is thinking about when he describes bread as foam is occurring at a smaller scale. A communion wafer, for instance, is indisputably bread --- extremely thin, with no discernible internal structure --- but it's also basically a very thin slice of styrofoam.
- alphakappa 10y agoNit: Dosas don't need to be fried. They are often just made on a non-stick pan without oil. Sometimes with a touch of ghee on top for flavor, but again, not for frying.
- moultano 10y agoSo roti isn't bread? That's a strange definition.
- solipsism 10y agoThat is not how words work. First of all, bread has existed for much longer than the word "bread". And any translation into another (perhaps earlier) language is bound to be imperfect. Things called "bread" don't line up perfectly with things called "pan" in Spanish. Stop looking for precision in words. If you want to talk about "things that are baked in an oven" then say that.
- jasim 10y ago> The process of Baking is what makes a Bread a bread. Says who? The dictionary? It can change. You forget that language is a social construct, and like it or not, India is a country of a billion people with a different cultural context and we're going to make words up, or overload new meanings to existing words. And there is nothing you can do about it. That's how language works. You could claim ownership over it and try to dictate and browbeat alternate usages, but come to India, and try telling them that Appam is not a Bread, they'll tell you "of course not, Appam is an Indian Bread".
- eastern 10y agoEnglish-speaking Indian living in India here, been eating rotis, naans, parathas, bhatirey, dosa, appams every day for half a century. ALWAYS thought of all these as Indian breads. So does everyone else. For example, look at the menu of a famous Indian restaurant: https://www.zomato.com/ncr/bukhara-itc-maurya-chanakyapuri-new-delhi/menu https://www.zomato.com/ncr/bukhara-itc-maurya-chanakyapuri-n... There are countless other menus on that site that do the same. The article gets it absolutely correct.
- sridca 10y agoEnglish-speaking South Indian (Tamil) living in Canada & India here. NEVER thought of dosas, idlis, idiyappam, uthappam, etc. as a "bread".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- duaneb 10y agoEither people in India use the english word "bread" or they have different meaning. I would be very, very weirded out if someone handed me bread and it does not contain ground grain.
- parennoob 10y ago> Either people in India use the english word "bread" or they have different meaning. The only thing people use the English word "bread" in India for is the sliced white bread that you can find in any store in the US or Europe. All the other words are mentioned by the article. Also, as the article clearly states, the author, for the purposes of the article, counts the following things as breads: > It would be virtually impossible to capture the full diversity of India’s breads ... or even to say what, in India, counts as bread. But here we’ve given it a go. I went about it like this: if it’s starchy and used as a utensil, it’s bread.
- SixSigma 10y agoRice is a grain
- duaneb 10y agoTrue. But—to my understanding—the rice to which you're referring is soaked with lentils, not ground into a flour, and you aren't going to find ANY gluten in rice (which gives bread its characteristic texture with wheat, barley, oat, rye, etc etc). At this point, it's more of a question of "foamy thing", unrelated to the rich history of cooking flour with water (and maybe some salt).
- SixSigma 10y agoWell, I can add Besan Ki Roti the the list of things that seem to be bread which is made from chickpea flour. And I make moong bean roti myself. I feel this is all a bit "we call these things bread" is like "we call these things fruit and these things vegetables" and then someone says "but what about bananas and cucumbers and strawberries" so we have to introduce "culinary fruits vs botanical fruits vs berries"