A rich mild, curry of meat, chicken or vegetables cooked in cream, yoghurt and nuts (often cashews) and sometimes flavoured with saffron.
Lovage seeds from a plant of the caraway family, used mainly in Indian cooking. The greenish-brown seeds are a little larger than celery seeds and have a strong aroma of rather coarse thyme. Oregano can be substituted.
Finger millet. After rice and wheat, finger millet, with pearl millet, is the most important grain crop of India. It is used to make flour. Finger millet is often intercropped with legumes such as peanuts (Arachis hypogea), cowpeas (Vigna sinensis), and pigeon peas (Cajanus cajan), or other plants such as Niger seeds (Guizotia abyssinica).
Mustard oil. Siddharth Dasgupta provides fascinating information. The pungency of mustard oil is from a compound called allyl-iso-thio-cyanate. This is attractive to Bengalis but others may find it too pronounced. Unfortunately mustard oil also contains erucic acid, which is a low grade neurotoxin. It turns out that long term heavy use of mustard oil is injurious. All mustard oils imported to the US from India or Bangladesh) have to be labelled "For external use only". For many years Australia tried to grow a low erucic acid variant, but this was not successful.
