Feeding Homesickness
At the outset, let me say that I have been rice deprived the last three years. That’s a long and sad story about weight loss and cholesterol so let’s not go there. But rice deprivation to a good South Indian is akin to well…food deprivation to anyone else. So when my diet was fortuitously tweaked this week to include rice, it was a sign from the Food Gods. Go forth, eat rice and live happy.
First there was a birthday lunch at the home of an old college buddy. She personally cooked an Andhra style meal for about eight of us. I guess that’s why she felt she ought to have about eight items on the table. Plain rice. Tamarind rice. Plain dal. Sweet and sour dal with vegetables. Bottle gourd cooked in milk. The peel of the bottle gourd turned into a chutney. Yaay for no wastage. Gunpowder chutney and gongura pickle. That’s a pickle made of ambada or sorrel leaves (hot white rice, ghee and gongura pickle. That’s halfway up the stairway to heaven.) A sprouts salad. Appalams and a crunchy papad cake made of rice flakes. Dal stuffed brinjals. Prawn curry. Fish curry. And the most divine payyasam made with bamboo rice. Me, I didn’t know there was such a thing. Bamboo rice. Soft yet crunchy, sweet yet nutty, that bamboo thicket produces only one harvest of its grain (bamboo is a type of grass) at the end of its 40 year life cycle. It felt like an honour to eat that rice. Plus it was super delicious. And as if that wasn’t enough, a thick shot of filter kaapi to finish us off. My selfless friend spent her own birthday feeding us mouthfuls of heaven. Good karma for the next year. I drove back across the city in a happy haze of ghee and rice and the taste of that payassam lingering on my palate.
Any normal middle aged soul would have been satiated by that meal. Blessed the hands and heart of the cook and happily returned to Diet La La Land. Ummm, not.
A popular restaurant is hosting a festival of Chettinad food in collaboration with the cooks of the famous home stay in Chettinad itself. So off we toddled for another round of gastronomic nostalgia.
Massive amounts of Mallipu and chillies were hung together as if best buddies in real life. A bit distracting but only till The Food got under way. Then the senses were concentrated and dedicated for the next couple of hours to the praise and veneration of the two reigning deities: Pepper and Coconut.
The first course. Chutneys served with spongy rice pancakes. Coconut, tomato, and tamarind. The last one was unusually cooked with potato. I had a second helping to convince my palate that I liked it. A cheese and semolina fritter to mop up the last of the chutney trail.
The quail cooked with peppercorns. Delicate, tiny boned, delivering a kick right up the sinuses. It reminded me of my dry witted grand aunt, all four feet of her, who always knew the exactly balanced acerbic response to deflate my ego. Except the quail was delicious. And I could crunch through the bones.
Fluffy, fat rice followed. Served with the most fragrant ghee. It was obviously worth its weight in gold, that ghee. The servers jealously guarded it and didn’t leave it unattended on our table for a single minute. Good thing too. I might have polished it off on helpings of the rice single mouthedly. Sambhar, two pachadis (an elegant cross between a relish and a raita) – raw mango and the beautiful beetroot. A buttermilk and peppercorn curry. Dynamite stuff, that. Only soothed with one more helping of the rice. Appalams. A mild vegetable and mustard seed stew.
A dry chilli mutton. The mutton melting in the mouth. Two helpings, just to be sure I loved it.
Curd rice. Accompanied by an interesting combination of shallots, garlic and lady’s finger cooked in a tamarind and rice water sauce.
Two rasams. One redolent of crabshell, the other of chicken. Served in little shot glasses. To hell with modern serving fads. I poured one after another on a little hillock of rice, mashed it up and went for it.
Finally, the paal payyasam. Much anticipated. Unfortunately watery, uninspiring, a strange mixture of mango and tasteless rice dumplings that did not appeal to this payyasam purist. A let down at the end of an otherwise exemplary meal. Oh well.
It would have been two perfect meals in three days but the Food Gods are jealous gods: you can’t have too much of a good thing. Hence the payyasam disappointment. The mind has already erased that blip in time.
For now, my southern roots are awash in contentment. This Southern girl is renewed, refreshed, ready for whatever her diet and her life may throw at her.