The monsoon as the calendar

The south-west monsoon breaks on the Kerala coast in early June and moves north and east across the subcontinent over the following weeks, while the north-east monsoon brings the later rains to the Coromandel coast and Tamil Nadu. The winds were known to the sailors of the Arabian Sea, who rode them to the Malabar coast for pepper, and Vasco da Gama's arrival at Calicut in 1498 followed the same seasonal route. Long before any printed almanac, the rains divided the agricultural and domestic year of India, and the kitchen followed that division.

In most of India the year is counted by the rains rather than by the months. The dry heat before the break is a season of stored food: pulses, dried vegetables, sun-dried chillies, pickles and papads made while the sun is strong enough to finish them. When the monsoon arrives, the kitchen turns to what the rain brings and to what can be cooked quickly and eaten hot. In much of the north that means pakoras and bhajiyas fried in mustard oil, and tea taken beside them; the pairing of rain and fried batter is a custom of the household and the roadside stall alike, and Sonal Ved's Tiffin, which arranges Indian home and street food by the occasions of the day and the year, treats such snacks as part of the rhythm of the household rather than as a separate category of dish. The rains are also the season of sowing. Rice, the great crop of the wet south and east, is planted in flooded fields in June and July and harvested after the rains in the autumn; millets, pulses and cotton are sown on the Deccan plateau as the soil softens. In the Punjab and across the Indo-Gangetic plain the kharif crops of the monsoon give way to the wheat of the rabi season, sown as the rains withdraw and cut in the spring, so that the roti of the north and the rice of the south are each the product of a different half of the same cycle. The coasts live by the monsoon in another way. When the sea is rough in the rains, the fishing fleets of Kerala, Konkan and Bengal are traditionally restrained, and the fish that arrives is dried, salted or taken from rivers and ponds instead. In Bengal the hilsa, Tenualosa ilisha, runs up the rivers with the rains and is the fish of the season, cooked in mustard, Brassica juncea, and eaten with rice. On the Malabar and Konkan coasts the months of the rains are the time for dried fish, for tamarind, Tamarindus indica, and kokum, Garcinia indica, and for the sour, stored flavours that carry a household through the weeks when the boats stay ashore. The festivals follow the same turning. Many of the fasts and observances that fall in the rainy months, among them the weeks of Shravan, are kept with vegetarian food, and the larger feasts of autumn, Onam in Kerala and Durga Puja in Bengal, come as the rains end and the harvest approaches. Seen through the kitchen, the monsoon is less a weather than an order: it tells the cook what to store, what to fry, what to sow, what to fast on, and when the table may be full again.

At the table the monsoon is tasted in hot, crisp, sour and pungent things: onion and potato fritters in gram flour batter, hot tea with ginger, roasted corn sold from braziers, and in the south rasam and kanji taken warm. Ayurvedic tradition counts the rainy season a time for light, warm and freshly cooked food, and the household serves such dishes on those days accordingly. In Bengal the first hilsa of the rains is bought with ceremony and eaten with plain rice, and on the western coast the dried fish and kokum of the wet months give the sour curries of Konkan and Malabar their character.