Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu occupies the south-eastern peninsula of India, with the Coromandel coast and the Bay of Bengal to the east, the Western Ghats and Kerala to the west, and the Kaveri delta as its rice bowl. Its cooking rests on a very old literary and agricultural culture: the Sangam poems, composed in Tamil in the early centuries of the common era, already speak of rice, millets, pulses, tamarind and the produce of hill, plain, coast and dry land.

The table of Tamil Nadu is first of all a rice table, built on the delta of the Kaveri and on a sequence of small courses: rice with sambar, rice with rasam, rice with curd, each taken in turn from a single banana leaf. Pulses, above all toor dal, give the sambar its body, and tamarind (Tamarindus indica) gives it and the rasam their sourness. Curry leaf (Murraya koenigii), mustard seed, dried red chilli and asafoetida (Ferula assa-foetida) are fried in oil or ghee at the start or end of a dish, and the tempering is the habit that most clearly marks the southern kitchen. The state is not one cuisine but several. The Brahmin vegetarian kitchens of Thanjavur and Kumbakonam, which do not use onion or garlic in temple and festival food, produce the kootu, the poriyal and the vatha kuzhambu, while the temple tradition lends the pongal, the curd rice and the tamarind rice that are offered and then eaten. The tiffin tradition gives idli and dosa, made from a fermented batter of rice and black gram, with vada, uttapam and the coconut and tomato chutneys that accompany them. Madurai and the south have their own meat cooking, and the parotta eaten with salna belongs to the roadside and the small hotel. Chettinad, in the dry country of Sivaganga and Pudukkottai, is the region most often named outside the state. The Nattukottai Chettiar merchants who traded across the Bay of Bengal built large houses and a lavish table, and their cooking is known for freshly ground masalas of black pepper (Piper nigrum), fennel, star anise, kalpasi or stone flower, and dried chilli, used on chicken, mutton, and the fish and prawn of the coast. The Alford and Duguid account of the south treats such food as the cooking of households and of travel, learned at the stove rather than from measure, and that is the right way to approach it. The coast adds its own fish cooking, with seer, sardine and prawn fried in a coating of chilli and turmeric (Curcuma longa) or simmered in a sour tamarind gravy. Coffee, filtered through a steel device and mixed with hot milk, is the drink of the southern morning, and tea and the roadside stall take the afternoon. Sweets are of jaggery, rice, coconut and ghee: payasam, adhirasam, the halwa of Tirunelveli, and the sweet pongal offered at the harvest festival of Thai Pongal in January.

A Tamil meal is eaten in sequence on a banana leaf, with rice taken first with sambar, then with a spiced kuzhambu or rasam, and finally with curd, so that each course changes the one before it. Sourness from tamarind, heat from chilli and pepper, and the aroma of curry leaf and tempered mustard seed hold the balance, while Ayurvedic tradition counts curd and rasam as cooling or digestive foods and serves them for that place in the meal.