If you instantly think of masala dosa when you think of Udupi food, you can’t be blamed. But one must remember that the Udupi kitchens have fed god Krishna in the temple town and the cuisine is associated with worship, and purity. But that doesn’t mean there’s no fun. Lip-smacking tokkus and gojjus, payasas, hayagriva, and modakas, and the humble mosaru-avalakki and matwade palya came out of these kitchens and have surely appeased humans as much as we hope it would have, the gods.
With regional variations in food in India being a plenty, and then again variations between communities, that’s a whole lot of recipes for the food lover to gather. The Udupi Kitchen (Westland Ltd, Rs. 495) is an effort by mother-daughter Malati Srinivasan and Geetha Rao to capture the essence of their family’s simple everyday Madhwa Brahmin cuisine from the Udupi region, and present a cookbook that even a first-timer in the kitchen can use, in any part of the world. In the elaborate introduction, if Malati evokes texturally the kitchen with the wood-fire stove where her aunt ‘Athi’ created magic cooking in madi (ritual purity), Geetha is the voice of the next generation that travelled abroad and craved comfort in home-made anna-saaru and beans-palya, extracting recipes hurriedly from her mother over the telephone to hand over to her cook.
“Food is religion in Udupi,” Geetha reiterates what she’s put down in the book. “There are 14 types of food made in the Udupi Krishna temple every day. And history goes that the Shivalli Brahmins who cooked in the temples, took it later to the hotels, and combined it with a good business model. They began with the simple idli-dosa.”
Malati, who’s 84 now, has been cooking since she was 16! She decided to pen down her recipes for the next generation because, she says, “I enjoyed cooking and the children enjoyed eating”. “I was very clear that there were no secrets to hold back. Let the whole world enjoy the taste of this food,” she smiles. The contrasting worlds she lived in, her travels with her husband, and her later life in Toronto, Canada give a sense of all the culinary skills and insights she’s assimilated. Her recipes have been published in magazines like Bangalore Food Lovers and Madhur Jaffrey’s classic cookbook Taste of India. Malati was featured on Loving Spoonfuls , a Canadian TV cookery show that profiled the favourite recipes of grandmothers from across the world. Malati admits to being partial to sweets and lists appe payasa as her favourite. “The kitle hannu sippe (orange-peel) gojju is also a hit whenever I make it,” she beams. Geetha says the hasi gojjus (uncooked gravies) is a signature segment in the book. “I love the gojjus, served mid-meal as palate-cleansers, much like sorbets in French cuisine. It can be made with fruits or vegetables, and sometimes yield other tastes too, when made with bittergourd.”
Geetha, who is the chairperson of the Crafts Council of Karnataka has been in the travel and tourism business for over three decades. She admits to have started cooking very late in life, with a hearty laugh. “Mummy hand-wrote 175 recipes when we decided to do this book. Unfortunately we could put only 100 in this book. She cooks by andaaz (estimation), so we had to measure everything and put it down in a logical way.” It is this cooking by instinct, the Indian way, that becomes difficult describing in a book, and Geetha admits “It has to do with intuition, which is based on experience, and of course supreme confidence!” Sanjay Ramchandran’s photography keeps you drooling over the dishes.
The books takes you from the basics, making all the powders needed for the dishes, and works its way up through the rice and lentil dishes, from the humble tovve and saaru to the complex sangide-huli, through palyas, yoghurt gravies, tiffin items — both sweet and savoury, to desserts. Malati points out how palyas and raitas are the easiest to make. Geetha pitches in: “My son who lives in Washington says he can cook a huli and a palya in half an hour!” Malati also points out how a dish like the bise bele hulianna (popularly called bisi bele bhath or BBB) is a very satisfying meal — a one-dish wonder that combines, rice, lentils and vegetables.
The Dosa deal
The duo has made an effort to try and put down in a few pages, a quick culinary history of Udupi, the communities and their significance, how satvik food was consumed, how English vegetables have been incorporated into their food, with a sneaky anecdote about why the onion-laced playa is “hidden” inside the masala dosa. (And don’t miss the way the recipe’s spelt ‘Masal Dose’, the way it’s said when we speak of it in Karnataka.) “The Masal Dose has hit headlines in the last few years — it made CNN’s 50 Most Delicious Foods in 2011 and is on the list of Huffington Post’s ‘10 foods to try before you die’ — and that’s a pretty good indication of its popularity!” And why is it so popular? “It’s transcended the tiffin stereotype. It’s very similar to the pancake and crepe. It has all elements of tangy and spicy come well together and, it’s a filling snack and it’s crisp, brown and lovely to look at!”
