In much of the world, you have restaurants that serve comfort food. This is simple food that you could well make at home but every once in a while you want to give yourself a break and go out for a filling and comforting meal.

The concept exists in India but with a twist. Most people are not willing to go out and spend money on food they can easily make at home. When Indians go out to eat, it is usually for food that is not easy to cook at home kitchens. The most popular restaurant cuisine in India is still North Indian because we don’t have tandoors at home. For many of us, chaat, which is also hard to replicate at home, is the ultimate comfort meal.

Over the years, there is another cuisine that has come to represent familiarity and comfort to us, and yes, it is also not one we can easily reproduce at home. For many Indians, our desi Chinese food is always comforting. We know that it is not really Chinese but there are times when authenticity does not matter: We just want to be comforted and love the easy familiarity of desi Chinese.

Speaking for myself, I always find egg fried rice comforting. If I am unwell and am asked to subsist on soup, I am never going to order vichyssoise or French onion soup. Nothing hits the spot as well as a sweet corn soup with added chilli sauce and lots of soya sauce. I know that these are not traditional Chinese dishes (even the egg fried rice) but it really doesn’t matter.

Contrary to what we sometimes think, the idea of bogus Chinese food is not exclusively Indian. In fact, the Chinese food that most of the world eats has very little to do with China. The modern global Chinese menu was invented in America at the beginning of the 20th century by Chinese immigrants who found it difficult to get employment. Because they were people of limited means, they opened inexpensive restaurants catering to those who wanted cheap nourishment.

We eat a lot of starches and vegetables in India, so we don’t realise how novel the idea of restaurants that served relatively small quantities of meat was in the America of that era. The early Chinese restaurants served rice (cheap) and vegetables with thin strips or small pieces of meat (also cheap) which kept costs down.

Many of the dishes that we consider part of Chinese food were created in America: Chop suey, egg fried rice, wonton soup, chow mean (which later became chow mein, harking back to a Cantonese dish), and egg foo yong. All of those dishes used a Chinese technique (which was just one of the 20 techniques used in Cantonese cooking) which we would later call stir-frying. It is this menu that travelled the world and eventually arrived in India.

The first Chinese restaurants in India opened in the 1920s in Kolkata and though the Chinese immigrants tended to be Hakkas, they rarely served their own food, choosing to serve American Chinese, which was roughly based on Cantonese cuisine.

Since then, there have been broadly three phases in the development of Chinese food in India. The first phase was the tweaked global menu when the Chinese fed us cornflour- thickened soups to which we were encouraged to add vinegar, chilli and soya. Sweet corn soup, which is the star of this genre, was easy to make because it relied on canned sweet corn. Much later Lung Fung soup, based on the same mouth-feel principles (and vaguely related to a real Chinese soup: Dragon Soup) was popularised. All of these dishes are still great comfort food for many Indians.

A second wave came in the 1970s with the popularity of batter-frying, a practice that is not part of the original Cantonese tradition but was favoured by American Chinese restaurants. The advantage with batter-frying is that it requires no exotic ingredients and no refined palate to enjoy it: Even people who don’t normally like Chinese food will enjoy Golden Fried prawns.

From the 1980 onwards, almost every starter at a Chinese restaurant was batter-fried. That old standby, the sweet corn tin, so useful when it came to making soup, was put to a new use: Fried corn curd.

Each day, throughout the 1980s, came new battered dishes, only lightly brushed with what we might consider Chinese flavours : Chicken lollipop, Chicken (or vegetable) Gold Coin. (There is a dish called Chicken Gold Coin or Gam Chin Gai in Hong Kong but it is a pork and chicken slider and has nothing to do with the Indian dish.)

Eventually of course, there was a Sichuan wave, which resulted in the creation of Chicken Manchurian. Many years ago Nelson Wang, the celebrated Mumbai restaurateur, told me on a TV show, that he invented it when he was manager of Fredrick’s, a Colaba Chinese restaurant. That has become the accepted version though other Chinese restaurateurs have said that Nelson is taking too much credit for a dish that they invented and there is also another version which while it does attribute creation of the dish to Nelson, holds that it was not created at Fredrick’s but at one of the many clubs (such as the CCI) where Nelson held the catering rights.

The operative part of the story is Nelson’s claim that Indian-Chinese restaurateurs had no idea that Chinese food could be spicy until the Golden Dragon operated in 1973 and introduced Sichuan cooking. (Hakka food and Cantonese food can be bland and most of our local Chinese chefs had never been to Sichuan.)

He was right -- but only up to a point. The marriage of teekha chilli and soya sauce had taken place many years ago in Kolkata when local Chinese chefs created Chilli Chicken. This is a dish unknown in China but the chilli made it a favourite with Indians. Till Chicken Manchurian came along Chilli Chicken was among the most ordered dishes at Chinese restaurants all over India.

So why do we associate Indian-Chinese food with comfort? Well mostly because it ticks all the boxes for the Indian palate and wallet. We like eating curry and rice: Indian-Chinese dishes all have thick gravies and are meant to be eaten with rice. We love carbs: Many people will still order rice (or fried rice) as well as noodles when they go to Chinese restaurants and load up on carbs.

We love the pakora-effect: All deep fried and battered foods appeal to us. Indian Chinese food takes the pakora principle to greater and more Eastern heights. We love the idea of a cuisine that seems to be foreign and different but isn’t really: Indian-Chinese food emphasises masalas and other flavours that Indians like (garlic, for instance).

There is also the price factor. From the time bogus Chinese food became popular in America, most bogus Chinese restaurants all over the world have prided themselves on being relatively inexpensive. You can, if you like, go to a very expensive Chinese restaurant at an Indian five star hotel but you will be in a minority. Most neighbourhood Chinese restaurants all over the country will charge less than the average tandoori restaurant. And if you are looking for a really cheap ‘Chinese’ meal, then even roadside stalls can produce acceptable rice and noodle dishes at throwaway prices.

And finally, there is the umami factor. Chinese food in China is not necessarily packed with umami flavours. But, in India, the formula is Indian spices and other ingredients plus soya sauce or ketchup, both of which are big sources of umami. Almost every food trend in India in the last 50 years can be traced back to our discovery of umami. (Even the current so-called sushi-boom is based on soaking sushi-rolls in soya sauce).

Long before we knew what umami was, Indian Chinese restaurateurs had worked it out: Just take Indian flavours and add lots of umami to them.

What does that give you?

Well, comfort food , of course!

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