The Coromandel coast

The Coromandel coast is the long, low eastern shore of the peninsula, running from the Krishna delta in Andhra Pradesh south through Chennai and the Kaveri delta to Cape Comorin's approaches. It faces the Bay of Bengal, takes its heaviest rain from the north-east monsoon in the last months of the year rather than the south-west rains that drench Kerala, and has long looked east across the water to Southeast Asia. Its ports, its river deltas and its temple towns together made a cooking that is at once coastal, agrarian and devotional.

The ground of the coast is the delta. The Kaveri divides into a fan of channels before reaching the sea, and the flat, silted country it waters has for centuries been rice land, so that the coast's table is built first on rice in its several forms: boiled and eaten with sambar, rasam and curd, steamed as idli, fermented and ground into dosa batter, or soured with curd into the cooling rice that ends a meal. Alongside rice stand the pulses, above all toor dal and urad dal, and the tamarind Tamarindus indica, whose sourness gives the region's sambar and its kuzhambu their backbone. The sea supplies the second half of the pantry. Along the shore, fishing communities land pomfret Pampus argenteus, Indian mackerel Rastrelliger kanagurta, sardines, seer fish and prawns, and the coast's fish cooking is generally hot and sharp with tamarind, black pepper Piper nigrum and dried red chilli rather than coconut-rich and mild. Inland from the delta, the Chettinad country of the Tamil interior is known for a dry, aromatic cooking in which freshly roasted spices are ground for each dish, and its merchants carried their tastes along the same sea routes that linked the coast to Burma, Malaya and Ceylon. The coast is also vegetarian country of long standing. The temple towns of the Kaveri basin and the Brahmin households of Tamil Nadu developed a meticulous vegetarian cuisine of rice, lentils, vegetables, coconut and curry leaf Murraya koenigii, seasoned in the tempering of mustard Brassica juncea seed, urad dal and asafoetida Ferula assa-foetida in hot oil. The banana-leaf meal served in sequence, with its fixed order of rice, sambar, rasam and curd, belongs to this tradition, and the coast's tiffin of idli, dosa, vada and pongal is the form in which much of the world meets it. Trade gave the coast its name and its outward habit. Ports along this shore sent rice, textiles and spices overseas for many centuries, and Tamil traders and labourers carried their food to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and beyond, where idli, dosa and rasam survive in diaspora kitchens. Alford and Duguid, in Mangoes & Curry Leaves, write of the south as a country where rice, coconut, tamarind and the leaf of the curry tree define the flavour of everyday cooking, and the Coromandel coast is a central part of that country.

The taste of the coast is sour, peppery and fragrant with tempered seed and leaf. Tamarind, black pepper, dried chilli, curry leaf and mustard seed recur from the fish curry of the shore to the sambar of the temple town, and the coast's meal closes on curd rice, which Ayurvedic tradition counts as cooling and which is served at the end of the meal on that account. Coffee, filtered through a metal device and taken with hot milk and sugar, is the region's customary drink between meals.