Kerala

Kerala is a narrow strip of the Malabar Coast, held between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea and cut by lagoons, rivers and backwaters. Its hills grew the black pepper, Piper nigrum, that drew traders from the Mediterranean, Arabia and China long before the Portuguese arrived at Calicut with Vasco da Gama in 1498, and the coast has been a place of exchange for as long as the spice trade has been written about.

The cooking of Kerala rests on three things: coconut, the sea and the spices of the hills. Coconut appears as oil for frying and seasoning, as grated flesh ground into pastes, and as milk of varying richness that carries a stew or a fish curry. Mustard seed, Brassica juncea, and curry leaf, Murraya koenigii, are crackled in hot coconut oil to finish many dishes, and black pepper, grown on the Malabar hills, supplied the heat of the region's food before the chilli came from the Americas. Malabar pepper is a protected name and is to be written as such only for pepper that truly bears it. The coast is a fish table. Indian mackerel, Rastrelliger kanagurta, and the pearl spot of the backwaters, Etroplus suratensis, are cooked in earthen pots with a souring agent, most often kudampuli, Garcinia gummi-gutta, whose dried rind gives the red fish curries of the south their sharp edge. Tiger prawn, Penaeus monodon, is fried, stewed in coconut milk or tossed with grated coconut. Pokkali rice, grown in the saline fields of the lagoon country and alternated with prawn farming, is a protected name, and Navara rice is another that belongs to the state. The communities of Kerala each hold a table of their own. The Hindu kitchen, with its vegetable dishes, its sambar and its avial of mixed vegetables in coconut and yoghurt, serves the sadya, the feast laid on a banana leaf in a fixed order of dishes with rice at its centre. The Syrian Christians, the Muslims of Malabar and the Jewish community of Cochin each brought their own habits: stews with appam, meat cooked with pepper and coconut slices, biryani in the northern Malabar manner, and breads and sweets of their own. The Portuguese added the chilli and the cashew, and later cooks took them in as if they had always been there. Alford and Duguid, in Mangoes & Curry Leaves, write of the south as a country of rice, coconut and the shared habits of a long coast, and the Kerala kitchen fits that picture closely. Its dishes are cooked in clay or in the broad-mouthed pot called the uruli, and rice is taken in many forms: boiled red rice, rice flour steamed into puttu, and fermented batter made into appam and idiyappam. The sauce is the point of the meal, and the rice is there to carry it. The spice trade is Kerala's own story, and its cooking is the plainest record of it. Cardamom from the high hills, with Alleppey green cardamom as a protected name, pepper, cinnamon and ginger left the ports of the Malabar Coast for centuries, while the foods of the people who came to buy them settled along the shore. The cooking that results is distinct from that of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to its east and north, and it is recognised across India by its coconut oil, its sour fish curries and its leaf-served feast.

The sadya is the meal in which Kerala can be read most clearly. Served on a banana leaf, it begins with rice, parippu dal and ghee, moves through sambar, avial, thoran, pickles and banana chips, and ends with rice and buttermilk after one or more payasams. Each dish has its place on the leaf, and the whole meal is eaten with the right hand.