The backwaters of Kerala

The backwaters are a long band of lagoons, lakes, tidal canals and river mouths lying just behind the Malabar coast of Kerala, where the rivers coming down from the Western Ghats meet the Arabian Sea and are held back by a barrier of sand. Their heart is Vembanad Lake, the largest of the system, with Kuttanad, the low rice country around it, and the port of Kochi at its northern end. Fresh water and salt water mix here with the tide, and that mixing governs what is fished, what is grown and how the people of the shore have eaten for as long as the coast has traded in pepper.

The cooking of the backwaters begins with the water itself. Fish and shellfish are taken from lagoon and canal alike: pearl spot, Etroplus suratensis, known in Malayalam as karimeen, is the fish most prized on the lake shores, while prawns, mussels and clams come from the brackish margins. Karimeen is classically marinated in a paste of chilli, turmeric and salt, wrapped in banana leaf and cooked over heat, or fried in coconut oil with curry leaf, Murraya koenigii. The preparations are plain in method because the fish is carried to the pan fresh, and the cook's task is to leave it recognisable. The land is as particular as the water. Kuttanad lies at or below sea level, and its rice is grown in fields reclaimed from the lake and held behind earthen bunds, a form of farming that has no close parallel elsewhere in India. Pokkali rice, a protected Geographical Indication, is a salt-tolerant variety grown in the flooded fields of the Kochi region, where a rice crop is followed by a catch of prawns in the same waterlogged plots. The two harvests, grain and shellfish, show how closely the diet of the coast is bound to the movement of water through the year. The coconut palm holds the shore together and fills the kitchen. Its oil is the cooking fat of Kerala, its milk and grated flesh thicken and sweeten the sauces, and its toddy is tapped on the same banks. Alford and Duguid, travelling the coast, write of a cooking in which coconut, curry leaf, green chilli, shallot and ginger recur in changing proportion, and of fish cooked in sour preparations in which tamarind, Tamarindus indica, or kudampuli, Garcinia gummi-gutta, supplies the acid. Black pepper, Piper nigrum, from the hills behind, and the Malabar pepper protected as a Geographical Indication, are the older wealth of this coast, and they reach the table as an ordinary seasoning rather than a luxury. The backwaters are also a meeting of communities. Hindu, Syrian Christian and Muslim households of the coast each have their own fish and meat dishes, and the long trade through Kochi brought Arab, Jewish, Portuguese, Dutch and British merchants to the same shore. The Syrian Christian tables of Kerala are known for stews and fried fish; the Mappila kitchens of the Malabar coast for their rice and spiced seafood. The water that links these communities also carried the rice, coconuts and spices between them, and the canals remain a working road for the produce of the region.

A meal of the backwaters is typically served on a banana leaf, with red parboiled rice at the centre and fish curries, vegetable preparations with grated coconut, and pickles set around it. Karimeen pollichathu, the pearl spot wrapped in banana leaf and cooked with a masala of shallot, tomato and curry leaf, stands as the fish the shore is best known for. The sourness of kudampuli, the sweetness of coconut and the heat of green chilli and pepper are balanced against one another, and coconut oil, with its own faint sweetness, carries them all.