A son-in-law’s feast from Tamil Nadu

Ram Subramaniam

Editor’s note: Food is history. A shared heritage that traces our roots, as a family, community, and nation. The dizzying pace of urban change and of our 21st century lifestyles is transforming not just the way we eat, but what we eat. Age-old family recipes cooked by our mothers and grandmothers, passed down from one generation to the other in the intimacy of the family kitchen, are getting lost in this fast-paced shuffle.

A new generation of Indians may remember their favourite childhood treat but don’t possess the knowledge to recreate it. These ‘endangered eats’ are neither available in the restaurant or at home — and may well be lost to the mists of time if we don’t record this cherished oral inheritance. This Firstpost series is a modest attempt to do the same, and we urge you, dear reader, to contribute your family recipes to this worthy cause. We invite you to share with us the stuff of your memories of ghar ka khana bygone, either in the comments section or in an email to feedback@firstpost.com

I called my sister to ask her for some ideas on what she thought might qualify as an endangered recipe. She made a couple of suggestions but then I needed to call in the experts. I called my mother who is a great cook but quite lousy when it comes to recipes. It’s always “a pinch of this” or a “handful of that.”  My sister said I ought to call my aunt, who apparently has written down all the recipes of dishes my grandmother ever cooked. In short this turned into a Subramaniam family project.

The first recipe I asked her about is for something called “paal kuzhakkattai”. If I ever had a restaurant and were to put this on the menu, the description would read: “coconut and rice dumplings in a creamy jaggery sauce and garnished with cardamom.” This warm, creamy, sweet, delicacy is forever associated in my memory with my grandmother’s extended visit to our house about five years before she passed. If there ever was a mistress of spices, my grandmother certainly was one.

The paal kuzhakkattai made the whole house smell of freshly ground cardamom. So, how do we make this? My mother sneered at how people have tried to turn this into a “quick and easy” dish. And then she let me in on the secret with the warning that if I want to reproduce my grandmother’s PK, I’d better follow the recipe word for word.

Paal Kuzkakkattai

Ingredients

1 cup rice 1.5 cups jaggery 1 cup grated coconut 1 teaspoon freshly ground cardamom 1 cup milk

1. Soak one cup of rice in water for at least an hour.

2. Drain the water from the soaked rice and combine it with one cup of grated coconuts and blend into a smooth paste without adding too much water. (You don’t have to use stone grinder, a mixie is permissible.)

3. For the sauce, combine one cup of jaggery with one and half cups of water in a saucepot and heat until all the jaggery just melts. Don’t let it thicken; it needs to be a watery consistency.

4. Turn the heat down to medium low and now comes the tricky part of the recipe. Using a colander over the saucepot that contains the jaggery-water broth, add the rice-coconut paste mixture into the saucepot through the colander by pressing down with your palms. This will form little dumplings into the broth. Add the entire rice-coconut paste mixture this way into the saucepot.

5. Add a half a cup more of jaggery into the saucepot and let it dissolve. Now add a cup of milk and a teaspoon of freshly ground cardamom.

6. Allow the milk to come to a boil. As soon as you see bubbles around the edges of the pot turn the heat off.

7. Serve hot.

My mother must have been in a good mood the day she told me this recipe; she threw in an extra one without even my asking for it. This second dish is simply called, “masiyal” meaning “mash up”. My favorite used to be the masiyal my mom makes with a root vegetable called, karna kihangu, which according to the language experts on the Internet translates into “elephant foot yam.”

If you don’t know what I am talking about, it is round like a melon, and has a hard-to -peel dark brownish-blackish skin, which is usually still coated with some of the mud from when it was removed from the ground. The most painful aspect of this recipe is the skinning of the vegetable, which can leave your hands itchy and irritated. I have never been to a restaurant where you can order a masiyal!

I know this is one of those special recipes, because it mostly got prepared when my brothers-in-law were invited for a traditional south Indian lunch. Once you are past the skin-peeling-itchiness part of the recipe, the rest is surprisingly simple and adaptable to pretty much any root vegetable as I discovered.

Masiyal

Ingredients

1 karna kizhangu or senai kizhangu or other root vegetable (of the yam family) 1 cup of tamarind water 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon turmeric 2 small green chillies 1 teaspoon mustard seeds 1 teaspoon urad dal 1 tablespoon sesame oil

1. Cut the peeled vegetables into cubes and pressure-cook them to soften them.

2. Mash it up coarsely using a blender. Adventure seekers can use a stone grinder for extra fun and chunkiness.

3. In a saucepot, add a tablespoon of sesame oil (apparently the sesame oil will prevent the vegetable from feeling scratchy as you swallow it), and throw in a teaspoon of mustard seeds and a teaspoon of urad dal. When the mustard seeds pop, add in two chopped green chillies and sauté for about a minute.

4. Now add a cup of tamarind juice (to be extracted by soaking a lime sized tamarind in warm water for about 10 minutes) into the saucepot.

5. Add a teaspoon of salt, and half a teaspoon of turmeric powder. As soon as the contents in the saucepot start to boil, add in the mashed vegetable and mix them all up and turn off the heat.

6. Serve with hot rice.

Neither of these two recipes are dishes you can order in a restaurant, even in Tamil Nadu, let alone elsewhere in the country. So, you can forget about eating these if you are dining out or getting carryout food.

There is little chance that any cook you employ is going to get his or her hand dirty  and itchy peeling the karna kizhangu.

There is a chance that you might get my mom to make these for you, but then again you would need to be married to one of her daughters and those positions are all taken.

That leaves us commoners (and I am including myself in that category) with only one alternative which also happens to be the title of a popular Tamil cookbook that is presented to most Tamil-speaking brides— S Meenakshi Ammal’s Samaithu Par or Cook and See !

Ram Subramanian is a chemist who cooks outside the lab. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.