TAMIL
KITCHEN

About Tamil Cooking

Tamil cooking is, at its heart, a vegetarian cuisine. The everyday meal is rice with a lentil-and-tamarind gravy, a thin peppery rasam, a dry vegetable stir-fry, a lentil-and-vegetable kootu, a crisp papad and, to finish, yogurt. Temple kitchens, the great old cookbooks, and the tiffin repertoire of idli, dosa and chutney are all vegetarian, and a Tamil family can eat for a week without a thought of meat. Most families do eat meat and fish, a few times a week and especially on Sundays, and those dishes are cooked in the same language: the same tamarind, the same shallots, the same tempering. This booklet touches on both. The chutneys, the kurmas, the dal and the rasam are the vegetarian backbone; the fish curry, shrimp and fried anchovies are the seafood Bharathi’s family loves.

Tamil food is built on sourness and heat. Tamarind gives the sour, dried red chili and black pepper the heat, and a tempering of mustard seeds, fenugreek and curry leaves crackled in hot oil carries the aroma through everything. Small red shallots, garlic and a pinch of hing do the savory work, and fresh coconut, ground to a paste, softens and sweetens the gravies made for bread. An old Tamil proverb says that with “the five and the three” at hand even an untaught girl can cook a curry; the five are usually taken to be pepper, salt, mustard, cumin and tamarind, the three water, fire and fuel. Chili came later, with the Portuguese, and joined the five.

Tiruvannamalai, where these recipes were cooked, is a temple town in the dry interior of northern Tamil Nadu, three hours from Chennai. The great Arunachaleswarar temple sits at the foot of Arunachala hill, which pilgrims circle barefoot on full-moon nights, and once a year at Karthigai Deepam a cauldron of ghee is lit on the summit and burns for days, visible for miles. The town’s food is plain inland Tamil cooking: shallot-and-tamarind gravies, peanut oil, rice from the paddy fields around Arni, and sea fish trucked up from the coast.

A note on fat: Bharathi cooks in peanut oil. Cold-pressed sesame oil (called gingelly oil) is the older choice for tamarind gravies and gives a nuttier finish. Use either.

How to use this booklet: every recipe in the first two chapters and the rasam began as a transcript of Bharathi cooking at her sister Dhanalakshmi’s house in Tiruvannamalai. Her quantities and techniques were then cross-checked against traditional Tamil recipes and the gaps filled in. The kurma and chapati gravies chapter is researched and compiled from published sources in English and Tamil, and written to sit alongside her recipes. Treat the quantities as starting points; taste and adjust, exactly as she did. Her own tricks appear throughout in the “From the kitchen” notes.

With thanks: to Bharathi and Babu; to Dhanalakshmi, who opened her home and her kitchen for these sessions; and to Babu’s mother for the rasam. Another proverb says to remember, as long as you live, the one who gave you salt.

The Tamil Pantry

A quick glossary of the ingredients that recur throughout these recipes. Most are at any Indian grocer, and the fish at any good Asian fish counter.

Bharathi’s Masala Curry Powder

Bharathi’s homemade curry powder is dried red chili, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, dried ginger and turmeric, roasted, ground fine and kept airtight, and it is the seasoning in the thokku, the fish curry and the shrimp. Tamil cooks call this family of blends kuzhambu milagai thool, “gravy chili powder,” and every household has its own ratio. Chili and coriander make up most of it; the dried ginger is Bharathi’s signature.

• 1 cup dried red chilies, stems removed (about 30; use half Kashmiri for a milder, redder powder)
• ¾ cup coriander seeds
• 1 tbsp cumin seeds
• ½ tsp fenugreek seeds
• 1½ tsp dried ginger powder
• 1½ tsp turmeric

1. Dry-roast each ingredient separately in a pan over low heat, just until fragrant and crisp: chilies until they stiffen (not darken), coriander until lightly browned, cumin until it smells toasted, fenugreek about a minute, until reddish.
2. Cool completely. Grind fine in a spice grinder in batches, sift once, and stir in the ginger and turmeric.
3. Cool again and jar. Keeps a month at room temperature, six months in the freezer.

The Tempering Mix

The fish curry begins with a dark, crumbly ball fried in the oil: sun-dried shallots and garlic bound with mustard, cumin, fenugreek, urad dal and curry leaves, made once a year in the hot season and kept for two. Tamil cooks call it vadagam. Bharathi’s own advice is not to worry about it. For one pot of curry, pound together in a mortar 1 teaspoon mustard seeds, ½ teaspoon fenugreek seeds and 3 garlic cloves, with a few curry leaves and a chopped shallot if you like, and fry that in the hot oil until the mustard pops and the garlic edges turn gold. That is the tempering in every seafood recipe here.

Cooking with Tamarind

Puli, “sour,” is the one word every Tamil gravy depends on.

Tamarind is the pulp of a brown pod, and in the Tamil kitchen it is what lemon and vinegar are elsewhere: the sour that makes the chili and the salt make sense. It goes into the fish curry, the rasam, the shrimp, and every kuzhambu meant for rice. It is never used in a kurma, which is why kurma is pale and mild and goes with bread.

Buy seedless block tamarind. Break off a lime-sized lump (about 2 tablespoons packed) and soak it in 1 cup hot water for 15 minutes. Squeeze and massage it hard with your fingers to work the pulp off the fibers, strain, then add water to the amount the recipe calls for. Taste it: it should be pleasantly sour, not harsh. Old, dark tamarind is sourer than pale new tamarind, so adjust.

In most American cities the jar is easier to find than the block, and Bharathi said the jar is fine. Two kinds are sold. Tamarind concentrate is the thick, near-black one, strong enough that a teaspoon does real work; stir 1 tablespoon into 1 cup hot water for the equivalent of block-made tamarind water, and use about 2 tablespoons for the rasam’s “small lump.” Tamarind paste is thinner and browner and closer to what you’d squeeze from the block; figure 1½ to 2 tablespoons per cup of water. Both keep in the fridge for months. Whichever you use, taste the water before it goes in and adjust; brands vary more than blocks do, and it is easier to add sour than to take it away.

The fish curry (about 4 cups of tamarind water for a big pot), the rasam (a small lump), and a spoonful in the shrimp thokku. Green mango can stand in for part of it in the fish curry, which is how Bharathi likes it.

The Tamil Meal

Sappadu, “the eating,” is the word for the midday meal, and the meal is a sequence, not a spread.

A Tamil meal is served on a banana leaf or a steel plate with rice in the center, and everything else exists to be mixed into it. Rather than courses on separate plates, the meal moves through the rice in stages, each gravy poured over a fresh portion and mixed in by hand. The six tastes of Tamil medicine, sweet, sour, salt, pungent, bitter and astringent, are all supposed to be on the leaf before anyone begins, and the old prescription is to eat them in that order, which is exactly the order the leaf follows: something sweet first, then the sour and salty gravies, then the pepper of the rasam, and cool, astringent curd at the end.

The leaf has rules. It is laid with its narrow tip to the diner’s left and the broad end to the right, and sprinkled with water before anything goes on it. The small things run along the top edge: a sweet at the right corner, pickle at the left, then the dry vegetable stir-fry (poriyal), the lentil-and-vegetable kootu, a papad (appalam). Rice goes in the middle, with a spoon of ghee on the first serving. The gravies come in order over fresh rice: the tamarind kuzhambu or sambar first, then rasam, then curd or buttermilk with the pickle to finish. Only the right hand is used, and only the fingertips; the food should never pass the first knuckle. A well is made in the rice for the rasam, and the server keeps coming back. A nineteenth-century collector of Tamil proverbs noted that it was thought bad manners not to take a second helping, and the line the server used on a hesitant guest survives: “He who will not take rice the second time it is passed is born a bullock.”

When the meal is over, the leaf is folded toward you, top edge down, to thank the cook. At a funeral meal it is folded the other way. Fold it away from you at any other table and you have said something you did not mean.

Ask why Tamils eat with the hand and you will get several answers about the body: the fingertips feel the temperature, the touch prepares the stomach, the five fingers stand for the five elements. The practical answer is in the food. Rice, gravy and a dry vegetable are meant to be pressed together into a single mouthful, and no spoon does that. A proverb catches the other half of it. “The ghee belongs to the village, but the hand that serves it is my wife’s.” The food may be anyone’s; the hand is what you remember.

Thayir sadam, rice mashed with yogurt and a little salt, closes every vegetarian meal in the south. It cools the mouth after the chili and the pepper, it settles the stomach, and before refrigerators it was how leftover rice was kept overnight, in a clay pot under buttermilk, to be eaten by the men going out to the fields at dawn with a bite of salted citron pickle. In the big temples the same dish, tempered with mustard seed and curry leaf, is handed out to pilgrims as the god’s own food. A Tamil meal is not finished until the curd rice has been eaten.

The leaf meal is lunch. Morning and evening belong to tiffin, the Tamil word for the light meals of idli, dosa, vada, upma and pongal, and in more and more homes over the last generation, chapati with a kurma or thokku. The word is Anglo-Indian slang from the East India Company days, when “tiffing” meant taking a little something, and the meal is nearly as recent: Tamils did not eat breakfast until the clerks who kept British office hours started to, and idli and dosa, until then main-meal foods, were drafted into the morning slot.

Dosa and idli are the most home-cooked foods in Tamil Nadu, which is why they are missing from this book: nobody makes them for a guest who is there to learn, any more than an American would demonstrate toast. The heart of it is the batter. Once or twice a week, four parts parboiled idli rice and one part skinned black gram are soaked separately for five or six hours with a pinch of fenugreek, ground fine, and left overnight in a big vessel to ferment until the batter doubles and smells faintly sour. The first day’s batter makes idli like cotton, steamed in a perforated stand. As the batter ages and sours it moves down the ladder: thin, crisp dosa on the second and third day, then thick uthappam with onion and chili pressed into the top, then paniyaram, little fried dumplings, to use up the last of it. The rule of thumb is that batter holds three days and turns properly sour on the fourth; the household trick is to refrigerate it unsalted and salt only what you use.

The grinding used to be done on a stone hand mill and was the hardest work in the kitchen; children were put to pushing the grain back toward the center. In 1955 a mechanic in Coimbatore fitted granite stones inside a motorized drum, and the wet grinder became the one appliance every Tamil kitchen owns. Coimbatore still makes three quarters of India’s grinders. In the cities the newest habit is to skip even that and buy the batter from a neighborhood batter shop, and the Tamil press scolds people for it the way an Italian paper might about jarred sauce.

When a Tamil says “let’s go to a hotel,” they mean a restaurant, and the usage is not a mistake but a fossil. Hotel, hostel and hospital all descend from the same medieval word for a house that takes in and feeds travelers, and Indian English kept that sense. The classic tiffin hotel is the Udupi or Brahmin hotel, a chain of which reached Madras in the 1920s serving idli, dosa, vada and coffee, and whose names often end in Bhavan, “abode.” A “military hotel” serves meat, the word being a polite 1960s code for it in a state where vegetarianism was thought virtuous. A “mess” serves home-style food and grew out of bachelors’ lodgings. And a kaiyendhi bhavan, “hand-holding house,” is the roadside stall where you eat standing with the plate in your hand. Hotel food is its own thing: hotel sambar is thin, dal-heavy, a little sweet with pumpkin and finished with ghee, while home sambar is tamarind-forward, full of vegetables, and different in every house. Bharathi’s food is home food, and no hotel makes it.

The Tamil Kitchen

Kai manam, “the fragrance of the hand,” is the Tamil word for the thing a recipe cannot hold.

Tamil cooks say the same dish tastes different from every cook and that the difference is the cook. That is kai manam, and it is why Bharathi measures by the handful, judges the tamarind by tasting the water, and knows the chapati is done by feel. It is also, as Tamil writers like to point out, forty or fifty years of doing the same thing every day. A woman learns it standing at the stove beside her mother, not from a book, and the old test of a new bride was whether her idlis came out soft. The novelist Jeyamohan, who writes a column on taste, puts the principle behind it in four words: taste lives in contrast. Sour against sweet, chili against curd, the crisp fried fish against the soft rice.

The traditional kitchen grinds and pounds. The ammi is a flat granite slab with a rolling stone, for chutneys and spice pastes, and it gives a texture no blender does; at a Tamil wedding the groom places the bride’s right foot on the grindstone so the marriage will be as firm as the stone. The ural is the stone mortar, with a long pestle, for pounding pepper, cumin and garlic for rasam, exactly as Bharathi does it. Fish curry is cooked, wherever possible, in a man chatti, an unglazed clay pot that has been seasoned with rice water, because clay holds heat gently and, the cooks say, makes the next-day curry better still. Pongal is boiled in a bronze pot with a holed lid, and everything that fries goes into an iron kadai. None of it is required for the recipes in this book, but all of it explains their textures.

The Tamil day begins before dawn with the kolam, a pattern of dots and looping lines drawn in rice flour on the swept, water-sprinkled threshold. It is a welcome to Lakshmi, a fence against ill luck, and, scholars point out, a small act of charity: the flour feeds the ants and the birds. Inside, the first handful of cooked rice is set out for the crows before anyone eats, because the ancestors are believed to visit as crows. And feeding others is merit in itself. Annadanam, the gift of food, is the highest gift in the old texts, which is why the great temples run free kitchens at midday, and why at Tiruvannamalai the temple hall serves rice, sambar, rasam, a vegetable, curd and buttermilk on a banana leaf to anyone who sits down.

Every Tamil family keeps a small pharmacy in the kitchen, and paati vaidhyam, grandmother’s medicine, comes before the doctor. Pepper-and-garlic rasam is for colds, fever and a heavy stomach, and it is the dish that gave English the word mulligatawny, from milagu thanni, “pepper water.” Dried ginger, the sukku in Bharathi’s curry powder, is for headaches and digestion; fenugreek and hing are in the tempering as much for the stomach as for the taste; buttermilk with ginger and curry leaf cools the body in the hot months. On Deepavali morning, after the oil bath and before a single sweet, the family eats a spoon of legiyam, a dark paste of dried ginger, long pepper, ajwain, jaggery and ghee, to ready the stomach for the day. This is why Bharathi, asked what she makes when someone is sick, answered without hesitating: rasam and rice.

The year’s great food festival is Pongal, in mid-January, when new rice is boiled with milk and jaggery in a clay pot decorated with turmeric leaves and sugarcane, and the whole family watches for it to boil over. When it does, everyone shouts “Pongalo Pongal!” and the first of it goes to the sun. The next day the cattle are bathed and their horns painted. In Tiruvannamalai the other great day is Karthigai Deepam, when the flame is lit on the hill and every house makes puffed-rice balls bound with jaggery, and adai, the thick lentil pancakes. In the hot month of Aadi, women cook koozh, a millet porridge with buttermilk and onion, at the goddess temples and hand it out free. Nine nights of Navaratri mean nine different sundal, a boiled and tempered legume, one each evening for the visitors who come to see the dolls.

Tamil has a proverb for everything, and the kitchen has more than its share. These are old; most were collected by missionaries in the 1870s and 1890s and are still in daily use.

• One grain tells you the whole pot is cooked. (Oru paanai sotrukku oru soru padham.) Test a little and you know the rest; Bharathi presses a grain of rice between her fingers.
• Remember, as long as you live, the one who gave you salt. (Uppittavarai ullalavum ninai.) Gratitude to whoever fed you.
• Food without salt belongs on the rubbish heap. (Uppillaa pandam kuppaiyile.)
• What use is salt in a pot that forgot the rice? Get the essentials first.
• The ghee is the village’s, but the hand that serves it is my wife’s. (Ooraar veettu neyye, en pensaadhi kaiye.)
• With the five and the three at hand, even an untaught girl can cook a curry. The pantry in one line: the basic spices and sours, plus water, fire and fuel.
• Where there is gruel is Kailasa; where there is rice is heaven. (Kanji kanda idam Kailasam, soru kanda idam sorgam.)
• When hunger comes, the ten fly away. Hunger drives out self-respect, learning, manners, charity and the rest.
• Hunger knows no taste; sleep knows no comfort.
• Chilies are the whip that makes you eat your gruel.
• Though the mustard seed is small, does its bite go?
• A drop of curd is enough for a whole measure of milk. A little leaven does the work.
• Like pouring ghee into dal. Said of a perfect pairing.
• Why wander for ghee when there is butter in the pot at home?
• A guest and a medicine, three days each. Hospitality and medicine both have a limit.
• If the one holding the ladle is your own, what does it matter whether you sit in the first row or the last?
• Chew it fine and live a hundred years.
• Past its measure, even nectar is poison.

And from the Thirukkural, the two-thousand-year-old book of Tamil couplets, a line every schoolchild knows: there is nothing sweeter than even the watery gruel earned by one’s own hands.