The Arab Traders of the Malabar Coast

The Malabar Coast, the strip of western India between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, was a source of black pepper Piper nigrum long before any European ship reached it, and the monsoon wind carried Arab sailors to its harbours and back again each year. The pepper vines grew on the hill slopes behind the ports, and the trade that took the dried berries west across the sea is among the oldest connections between Indian cooking and the cooking of other countries.

The trade rested on the wind. Ships from the Arabian and Gulf coasts sailed to Malabar with the south-west monsoon and returned with the north-east, so that a merchant's year was fixed by the sea. They carried away pepper first of all, and with it other produce of the coast and its hinterland, such as green cardamom Elettaria cardamomum from the hills. Pepper is the spice that gave the coast its place in the markets of the western world, and the name Malabar pepper is still protected as a Geographical Indication. The Arab merchants did not only pass through. Settled communities of Muslim traders grew up in the coastal towns, took local wives, and became part of Kerala's society, and their descendants are the Mappilas, or Malabar Muslims. Their cooking is the lasting record of the exchange. It joins the coast's own materials, coconut, curry leaf Murraya koenigii, black pepper, fish and rice, to methods and tastes that came across the water, among them the layering of rice and meat in a sealed pot and a fondness for dried fruit, nuts and fragrant spice in festive dishes. The Mappila table is the clearest place to read this meeting. Its biryanis, made on the Malabar pattern with a short-grain fragrant rice rather than basmati Oryza sativa, are cooked in a sealed vessel and scented with spice in the manner of the Arab and Persian rice dishes, yet they taste unmistakably of the coast. Its seafood is dressed with coconut, chilli and pepper, and its sweets and snacks, often built on rice flour, eggs and coconut, show the same double inheritance. Alford and Duguid, writing in Mangoes & Curry Leaves of the long exchange across the Indian Ocean, treat the coast as part of a wider sea of shared tastes in which spices, techniques and ingredients moved in both directions. That view is the right one for Malabar: the Arab traders took pepper and spice to the markets of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and they left in Kerala a Muslim cooking that is neither Arab nor wholly Keralan but a settled blend of the two.

The Mappila table gives the exchange its flavour: fish and meat cooked with coconut, black pepper and curry leaf, and rice dishes scented with cardamom and other warm spice. A festive meal there may close with sweets of rice flour, eggs and coconut, in which the coast's materials and the Arab inheritance sit side by side.