Tasting India by Christine Manfield

Author:Christine Manfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia

As lunch is finishing, dramatic thunder and lightning flashes erupt and it sheets with rain for the rest of the afternoon. I take shelter in the kitchen, watching Shaji prepare the dishes for our dinner. He works quietly and methodically and his food is full of honest flavours.

The houseboys prepare the dinner table with the best crockery and gold cutlery laid out on a beautifully woven white cloth. The household condiment is a thoroughly addictive ginger chutney, with perfectly balanced flavours of lime, date, spices and some elusive health-giving plants. When I enquire about it, the sisters tell me they source this Ayurvedic pickle from a special shop near Mysore. It is the food of angels.

Dinner starts with a restorative country-style mutton soup (nadan adu), a light broth gently spiced with cardamom and pepper and with a few fried shallots floating in it. It’s a soup that offers rejuvenation during the steamy monsoon season. A wickedly rich masala-fried pork and chicken coriander curry (kozhi malliaracha) follow, with steamed basmati rice as a foil. Two desserts complete the repast: mottayappam, an egg-and-coconut crepe filled with a sweet coconut stuffing and rolled up to make a neat little parcel; and a creme caramel that is steamed in a water bath rather than baked, as ovens are generally not a feature of Indian kitchens. A refreshing Nilgiri blue tea completes our feast, then it’s time to waddle off to bed to read for a while before falling into a sound sleep.

We drive further into the mountains to Thekkady to spend time exploring the spice plantations, a dense landscape of pepper vines, cloves cardamom, turmeric, nutmeg and allspice trees. The air smells so fragrant and the vibrant, spicy flavours define the food everywhere we eat. We follow a guide one morning, exploring the nature trails in Periyar Reserve, one of India’s largest wildlife sanctuaries with an active conservation policy. We take a short boat ride to a small island in the middle of the lake to Lake Palace, a former summer palace of the local king, and sit on the verandah taking in the peaceful ambience. Lunch is a throwback to colonial times with Anglicised Indian staples of chicken cutlets and coleslaw, a simple fish curry and cinnamon apple pie – yet another Kerala perspective.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.