India Before Cashews

Cashews appear everywhere in modern Indian cooking — enriching korma gravies, studding pulao, filling festival sweets, garnishing rice dishes. They feel ancient, natural, inevitable. They are not. Cashews are native to northeastern Brazil, and for most of Indian culinary history nobody on the subcontinent had ever seen one. The story of how a Brazilian nut became a cornerstone of Indian cooking is one of the most remarkable ingredient adoptions in culinary history — and what came before it is, in many ways, more interesting.

A World Before Cashews

Today cashews are so embedded in Indian cooking that it is difficult to imagine the cuisine without them. Yet the civilisations of India, Persia, Arabia, China, Greece, and Rome all developed sophisticated cuisines without cashews. The nut existed only in South America until the sixteenth century, when Portuguese traders encountered it in Brazil and recognised its potential. When the same Portuguese traders established their colony at Goa on India's west coast in 1510, they brought cashew plants with them — though not primarily for culinary use.

The Strange Biology of the Cashew

The cashew is botanically unusual in ways that explain why it required Portuguese industrial knowledge to make it usable as a food. What we call the cashew nut is not botanically a nut at all — it is a seed attached to the outside of the cashew apple, the swollen false fruit of the cashew tree. The seed sits in a double shell containing cardol and anacardic acid, both of which are caustic oils that cause severe skin burns and must be completely destroyed by heat before the cashew is safe to eat. This is why raw cashews are never sold commercially — all cashews on the market have been processed to remove the toxic shell oil. The Portuguese, with their experience of processing and trading tropical products from Brazil and West Africa, understood how to manage this process; it is part of what made the introduction to India feasible.

Timeline

Before Cashews: The Great Thickening Traditions

The roles that cashews now fill in Indian cooking — richness in gravies, creaminess in sauces, texture in sweets, garnish on rice dishes — were performed by other ingredients for thousands of years. Understanding these pre-cashew thickening traditions reveals a more complex and regionally varied world of Indian sauce-making than the cashew-cream gravies that now dominate restaurant menus.

Coconut was the most important pre-cashew source of richness across coastal India — in Kerala, coastal Karnataka, coastal Maharashtra, and across South India generally. Coconut milk and cream provided the body and creaminess in South Indian curries that cashews now supply in Mughal-style North Indian dishes. A properly made Kerala fish curry or Chettinad chicken curry, built on freshly ground coconut with its natural fat content, achieves a richness and depth that cashew cream cannot replicate.

Melon seeds (magaz) and white poppy seeds (khus khus) were ground into pastes to thicken and enrich gravies in the cuisines that eventually became most associated with cashews — the Mughal-influenced cooking of North India. These pastes appear in historical recipes where cashews are now commonly substituted. A shahi korma made with poppy seed and melon seed paste has a distinctly different texture and flavour from the cashew version — more delicate, more subtly nutty, requiring more skill to achieve the same richness. Almonds provided similar thickening in royal dishes, and sesame paste (tahini-style) was used in certain regional cooking traditions that have now largely adopted cashews for equivalent purposes.

The Science of Richness — Why Cashews Succeed

Cashews thicken and enrich sauces through a combination of their fat content (approximately 44%), their protein content (approximately 18%), and the physical properties of cashew paste when ground. When raw cashews are soaked and ground with water, they form an exceptionally smooth paste with a neutral flavour and a natural emulsifying capacity — the proteins and fats create a stable suspension that prevents sauces from separating. This is the same principle that makes nut milks work, but cashews produce a richer, more stable result than most alternatives.

Coconut milk provides richness through saturated fats but without the protein-based emulsifying capacity of cashews, which is why coconut-based curries behave differently under heat and are more likely to split if handled roughly. Poppy seed paste provides similar emulsification to cashews but with a more pronounced flavour. The cashew's combination of neutral flavour, stable emulsification, and smooth texture made it the perfect restaurant ingredient — reliable, consistent, and unobtrusive.

How Regional India Adopted Cashews

Cashew adoption followed the same geographic logic as the nut's cultivation: starting in Goa and the Konkan coast where the trees thrived, moving northward into the Deccan and Mughal-influenced cooking of Hyderabad, and eventually spreading into the North Indian restaurant cuisine where cashew korma became a defining dish. Goa developed cashew as a food, a drink (feni), and a local industry simultaneously. Karnataka became the centre of India's cashew processing industry — the coastal districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi process enormous quantities of cashews for both domestic use and export. Kerala built a cashew processing industry that employed thousands of workers, predominantly women, in the early twentieth century. Hyderabad's royal cuisine adopted cashews as a luxury thickener in the Nizami culinary tradition, and from there cashew gravies spread into the broader North Indian restaurant tradition.

Cashews in Indian Sweets

The cashew's impact on Indian sweets deserves its own acknowledgment. Kaju katli — thin, diamond-shaped sweets made from ground cashews and sugar — is one of the most widely recognised Indian confections, sent as gifts during Diwali across the country. Kaju rolls, cashew barfi, and various cashew-based festive sweets represent a confectionery tradition that simply did not exist before the cashew's arrival. The cashew's neutral flavour and smooth texture make it ideal for sweet-making in ways that almonds — their closest predecessor — do not quite replicate. This is arguably where the cashew made its most distinctive contribution to Indian food culture: not in savoury gravies but in the festival sweet tradition that now defines it.

What Historians Know — and What They Debate

Historians broadly agree that cashews originate in Brazil, were introduced to India by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, Goa was the primary initial cultivation centre, and the nut spread along India's western coast before eventually entering mainstream Indian cooking.

What remains debated is the timing of culinary adoption versus ornamental or industrial use, whether the primary Portuguese motivation was cashew apple feni production or soil stabilisation, and the precise speed of the nut's spread beyond Goa into other regional cuisines.

Food Then and Now

Before cashews: coconut and melon seeds. Two ingredients, two regional traditions, both still alive in South Indian and traditional North Indian cooking respectively. The cashew significantly reshaped many regional and modern Indian cooking traditions — but it did not replace everything that came before it. The coconut-rich gravies of Kerala and the poppy-seed traditions of Bengal survive as living evidence of what Indian richness tasted like before a Brazilian nut arrived on a Portuguese ship and made itself at home.