Karnataka and Andhra

Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh lie across the southern Deccan, a high plateau of red and black soils that falls on the west to the Western Ghats and the Konkan and Malabar coasts, and on the east to the Coromandel plain and the Bay of Bengal. The Krishna and the Godavari water the Andhra delta, the Kaveri rises in the Coorg hills, and between them lie dry country, wet coast and hill plantation. The oldest written witness to the table of this region is the Manasollasa (1130), the encyclopaedia of Someshvara III of the Western Chalukyas, which sets down dishes, rice preparations and the order of a royal meal in the Kannada country.

The two states share a plateau and a great deal of vocabulary, yet their tables part company quickly. Karnataka is a country of several kitchens: the coast of Mangalore and Udupi, the Malnad hills, the Kodava highlands of Coorg, the old Mysore country and the dry north around Dharwad and Bijapur. The Udupi tradition, a vegetarian cooking of temple and monastery origin, gave the south its idea of the tiffin: dosa, idli, vada, and the rice dishes served in the morning and afternoon. Bisi bele bath, rice and lentils cooked together with vegetables, tamarind and a ground spice powder, belongs to the Mysore country, as does the soft, sweetened cooking of the old court. In the north of the state, the jolada rotti, a flatbread of sorghum pressed by hand without a rolling pin, is eaten with a pungent chutney powder and brinjal cooked in its own sauce, and that is the bread of a dry-farming people. Coorg stands apart again, with its pork cooked in a dark sauce soured with kachampuli, the vinegar of the Garcinia gummi-gutta fruit, and its steamed rice dumplings, kadambuttu. Andhra, together with Telangana in the lands of the old Hyderabad state, is the hottest table of the subcontinent and is known for it. The Guntur district grows the chilli exported across the world, and the Guntur Sannam chilli is a protected name; the Andhra cook uses it fresh, dried and ground, and in quantity that the north would not recognise. Tamarind Tamarindus indica supplies the sourness that answers the heat, and gongura, the sorrel-like leaf of Hibiscus cannabinus, gives the region its most distinctive acidity, cooked with dal, with mutton, or ground into a pickle. Pickles are a part of every meal, and the avakaya, raw mango cut with its stone and cured in mustard, chilli and oil, is made in a single season and kept through the year. The coastal districts add fish and prawn, and the Godavari delta is rich in rice, coconut and the sweet preparations of festival days. The history of these tables is a history of courts and trade. The Chalukyas, the Vijayanagara kings of Hampi, the Bahmani sultans and the Nizams of Hyderabad each left something in the kitchen: the vegetarian temple meal, the layered rice and meat of the Deccan Muslim court, the sour-sweet-hot balance that runs through both states. Black pepper Piper nigrum and cardamom Elettaria cardamomum grew in the Ghats and left from the Malabar ports in the spice trade, and Coorg green cardamom and Malabar pepper are among the region's protected names. The chilli came later, brought by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century from the Americas, and found a country so fitted to it that it came to define the cooking of Andhra within a few generations. What the two states hold in common is the architecture of the southern meal: rice at the centre, a dal or sambar and a rasam, a dry vegetable preparation, a wet one, a pickle and a powder, curd to close. The differences are those of proportion. Karnataka leans to sweetness, coconut and jaggery in its sambar, and a lightness of hand that the Udupi kitchen has made its own, while Andhra leans to chilli, tamarind and oil. Both rest on the tempering, the tadka or popu or oggarane, in which mustard Brassica juncea, cumin, dried chilli and curry leaf Murraya koenigii are fried in hot oil or ghee and poured over the finished dish. Raghavan Iyer, in The Turmeric Trail, places turmeric Curcuma longa at the base of this cooking, and in the south it is added early to the dal, as it is in the cooking of most of the peninsula.

The table is eaten from a banana leaf or a steel plate, with rice served first and the accompaniments in a fixed order, and the right hand does the work of mixing. In Andhra a meal begins with a spoonful of ghee and a powder, then moves through dal, vegetable, sambar or pulusu and rasam, and ends with curd rice cooled against the heat of what came before. In Karnataka the Udupi meal is the model of the vegetarian south, with its sweet, its palya, its saaru and its buttermilk, and the Ayurvedic tradition counts curd and buttermilk as cooling, which is why they close a meal in this country.