The Western Ghats and the spice hills

The Western Ghats rise close behind the Arabian Sea and run for some 1,600 kilometres from the Tapti valley southward to the tip of the peninsula, catching the south-west monsoon on their seaward face. That rainfall, the red lateritic soil and the shade of the evergreen forest made the hills of Malabar the source of black pepper, Piper nigrum, which grew wild there before it was ever planted. The pepper trade across the Arabian Sea is old, and it was the lure that brought Vasco da Gama to the Malabar coast in 1498.

The hills are best understood as a garden laid on a slope. Black pepper climbs living trees, green cardamom, Elettaria cardamomum, grows in the damp understorey of the high ranges, and cinnamon, clove and nutmeg were later settled in the same warm, wet country. Raghavan Iyer, in The Turmeric Trail, writes of the spices of southern India as the produce of particular places and not as a single anonymous pantry, and the Ghats are where that plain fact is easiest to see. Pepper, cardamom and turmeric, Curcuma longa, each ask something different of altitude, shade and rain, and the plantations and homesteads of the hills are arranged accordingly. The Geographical Indications of the region record this precision. Malabar pepper, Alleppey green cardamom and Coorg green cardamom are protected names, and each belongs to a defined territory and to the crop as it is grown there. Kerala's cardamom is picked by hand as the capsules ripen, then dried so that the pod keeps its green colour, which is the reason the spice is graded so closely by colour and size. In Coorg the cardamom grows beneath the canopy of coffee estates, and the two crops share the same shade and the same monsoon. The hills shaped the cooking below them as much as the produce. Kerala's kitchen takes pepper as its original heat, long before the chilli arrived from the Americas by way of the Portuguese, and it sours with kokum, Garcinia indica, and kudampuli, Garcinia gummi-gutta, fruits of the same forest. The curry leaf, Murraya koenigii, is a tree of these slopes and is picked fresh for the pan. Coconut, grown on the lower ground between hills and sea, supplies the oil and the milk that carry these flavours into stews, fish dishes and vegetable preparations. The Ghats also divide the subcontinent's cooking. The windward coast is wet, green and fragrant with coconut, while the plateau to the east lies in rain shadow and turns to millets, pulses and dry spice blends. Cooks on either side of the ridge therefore draw on different materials, though the same hills feed both through the rivers that start there. The spice hills are consequently less a single cuisine than the origin of an ingredient list that much of the south still depends on.

At the table the hills appear as pepper's slow, building heat in a Kerala stew or a fish preparation soured with kokum, and as cardamom in the tea and the sweets of the coast. A meal on a banana leaf in the hill country is built on coconut, curry leaf and whole spices tempered in hot oil, each added for what the dish needs rather than as a decoration.