Indian Tomato Raita (Tomato/Yogurt Salad)

"Raita" is pronounced as if, "rite-ah." Raita is often served in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal to "cool" the palate and stomach after spicy dishes have been eaten.

 

Make sure to use finely chopped ingredients.

 

Ingredients:

 

1 cup plain yogurt, stirred or whisked so that's it's smooth

1/2 cup finely chopped tomatoes (seeds removed)

1 heaping tablespoon finely chopped onion

1 teaspoon finely chopped green chili (serrano chili pepper is good, or unripened cayenne pepper)

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

2 teaspoons finely chopped mint

1/2 teaspoon salt 

Put the yogurt into a bowl and stir or whisk it so that it's smooth. (Optional) You can preheat a small dry skillet over medium heat and add the ground cumin for just like 10 seconds (shaking the skillet), and remove from the heat and let it cool down before adding it to the other ingredients; or, you can just add the ground cumin to the raita without toasting it. Add all of the ingredients to the bowl and mix everything together well.   

WORD HISTORY:

Tank-This word has an uncertain origin, and there are at least a couple lines of thought on its ancient history, but to me, the best history is the idea that "tank" was a word borrowed by Portuguese, as "tanque," from a language in India in the early 1600s, perhaps from transliterated Gujarati "tankh" (I also found it as "tanki" and "tanku"), with meanings like "cistern, pool, reservoir." Some believe this goes back to Sanskrit^ "tadaga" meaning "pond or lake."^^ Portuguese took the word back to the Iberian Peninsula from India and it passed into Spanish also as "tanque," and into English (circa 1609-10). I don't necessarily dispute the English borrowing, but both the Portuguese and the English were heavily involved in India in those times; so, in theory, English could have borrowed the word right in India, or it could have at least reinforced a borrowing from Portuguese in English. The meaning in English at the time was "a pool used as a water supply," obviously closely tied to the Gujarati meaning of "cistern, pool, reservoir." From this, the meaning "container" developed. Now ... during World War One, "a vehicle of armor with a mounted machine gun moving on caterpillar tracks" was dubbed "a tank" purely for deception purposes, but the name stuck when the British first used "tanks" in action in the autumn of 1916. This meaning was borrowed by Portuguese, proving "what goes around, comes around." The verb form "tank" came from the noun and had the meaning "to put something into a tank," with that meaning seemingly used to give a figurative meaning "to fail, to lose badly, to give up on achieving something;" which came about in the 20th Century, but exactly when, is tough to pin down, although the late 1960's tennis world is a possibility.

 

^ Sanskrit is an ancient language from the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo European; thus, it is related to English, although much further down the family tree. It is still in use to some degree, especially in India, with ancient texts of religious significance to Hindus and Buddhists.   

 

^^ One source says the Sanskrit form "tadaga goes back to Dravidian, but without any way to connect the word to that language family. Dravidian is a family of languages spoken primarily in southern India, but also to some extent in Pakistan and on the island of Sri Lanka.