Hunters of the lost recipe

BENGALURU: Shivakotiacharya is believed to have been the author of Vaddaradhane – the earliest extant prose work in the Kannada language. It’s dated around 900 BC. It’s mainly concerned with the stories of Jain saints, but it also contains one of the earliest recipes for the idli. The dosa, the other south Indian staple, finds references in Tamil Nadu’s Sangam literature. A 12th century Sanskrit encyclopaedia, the Abhilashitartha Chintamani, compiled by the Kalyani Chalukya king Someshvara III, provides recipes for the vada. Folk tales tie the origin of rasam to an ailing Pandya prince and sambar to the Marathas in South India.

But for every dish and

recipe

that has survived centuries, you can’t help but wonder about all the recipes that have been lost – or remain unconsciously secret. And for some people, tracking these recipes is profession and passion.

Not just nostalgia

More than three years ago, when chef Regi Mathew sat down with this childhood friends John Paul and Augustine Kurian in Chennai to discuss setting up a restaurant focussed on Kerala cuisine, the conversation veered toward

food

that they had growing up. The food that they’d had during their childhood days, they realised, wasn’t being made anymore – at least, not in restaurants.

The discussion would set Mathew, Paul and Kurian out on a three-and a-half-year long journey across the length and breadth of Kerala. Today, the culinary discoveries made by the trio have found their home in the menu of their restaurant, the Kappa Chakka Kandhari, located in Bengaluru and Chennai.

For chef Mathew, research into Kerala’s forgotten recipes began at home. “When I decided to do this, the idea wasn’t only about looking at recipes, for me it was really about telling stories of these recipes. We then asked our mothers to connect us to ten of their friends who they thought were great cooks,” says Mathew. This meant visiting 30 homes set across Kerala to start with. Mathew ended up meeting 267 housewives totally. “These ammachis didn’t see us as strangers, they saw us as sons of their friends. They opened up their kitchens to us,” The road trip helped Regi discover culinary secrets of the various Keralite communities. “In Malabar, we learnt the Moplah cuisine, in Palakkad it was Iyer food, Thripaiyar introduced us to Namboothiri cuisine, Thrissur-Syrian Christian food, in Kochi, we discovered Jewish and Portuguese inspired food and so on,” says Mathew. The husbands of the housewives opened up too. “They started suggesting dishes and recommending toddy shops they thought we had to visit,” says Mathew. In Kerala, where toddy shops litter the alleys and bylanes of small towns and villages, it is the food served more than the toddy that sets each one apart.

‘You will need four or five stomachs’

Travel and food writers Priya Ganapathy and Anurag Mallick had a similar experience when they were roped in by Total Environment to research and document regional cuisine of Karnataka and curate the menu for the restaurant Oota Bangalore in Whitefield. The journey would see them travel over 20,000 kms within in the state for two and a half years, with chefs (Chef Manjit Singh and Chef Suresh Venkatramana). “We would set out every two months to do it and to make it easy for us, we mapped the state into five main regions: North Karnataka, south Karnataka, Coorg-Malnad, Coastal Karnataka and Udupi ,” says Ganapathy.

The idea behind this journey was to discover and rediscover less-known, and in some cases, lost recipes that were indigenous to the state. “We covered 25 communities overall. And through the course of this journey, we learnt that there are so many sects and subsects and each of them had their own culinary specifications,” says Ganapathy. Mallick adds, “Almost every community we met had cuisines specific to occasions. There are regional, seasonal, festive and marriage cuisines.” The culinary road trip was an endless source of stories of food memories and trivia. Like when Ganapathy laughs and says, “The Havyaka community, which is vegetarian, blew our minds off in terms of how much variety they have. A huge number of dishes are served in their weddings, so much so that you will need four to five stomachs to eat it all!”

NEW DISHES UNCOVERED

The Ramaserri idli is one of the best-selling dishes in Kappa Chakka Kandhari. Chef Regi Mathew says, “I didn’t know much about the Ramaserri idli, so asked an uncle to take me there. When we went there, I saw that it was just two streets with two shops. And it is one family that makes it.” Mathew has two brothers from the original family working with him today. “Another dish I learnt was when I visited the tribal people living in the Agasthiyar mountains. They cook a fish dish which is made with gooseberry, kandhari chilli. The fish is smeared with these sparse ingredients and grilled on a hot river stone.” That dish, Mathew says inspired him to experiment with gooseberry masala,” he says.

“In our 20,000 km journey we cooked unusual fare with various communities – like Sukki Bhakdi and Sangolli roti with kaaso bhajji/aamey soppu (fiddlehead fern) with Siddi tribals at Kalleshwara, Halakki meen saaru (spicy fish curry) with Halakkis at Ankola, besides tasting countless more,” say Ganapathy and Mallick.


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