BharatSangraha

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Kongu Nadu · Deccan Inland Plateau

खानपान पद्धति

A dry-country kitchen that solved heat and thirst before it solved flavour, and then solved flavour with pepper and small onions. The base is sesame oil, tamarind, garlic, curry leaf and the tiny sambar onion, with a masala ground wet on stone for meat and almost no coconut paste — which is what separates it immediately from the plateau kitchen to its north-west and from the Malayalam kitchen a day's walk through the gap. The staples are gruels and stiff flour cakes made from pearl millet and finger millet, engineered for people working in hot wind: koozh is drunk cool and sour, kali is eaten in the morning and lasts until dark. Meat is central and unapologetic. The whole-goat feast is the region's formal meal, and a household's standing at a festival is judged by how completely the animal was used.

मुख्य पाक माध्यम

Nallennai — cold-pressed sesame oil, the default and the one used for kali and picklesGroundnut oil, from the region's own cropGhee, on kali and on temple foodCoconut oil in the western taluks nearest the gap and almost nowhere else

प्रमुख खट्टे तत्व

Tamarind — dominant, used strong and unsweetenedButtermilk, both as a souring agent and as the entire liquid content of koozhRaw mango and lime in seasonTomato, a late addition that has taken over the town kitchens and not the village onesKadamba puli and country lime in pickling

मसाले की पहचान

Pepper first, chilli second, and no sweetness at all. Whole black pepper, dried red chilli, garlic, small onion, curry leaf and a wet-ground masala made the same day are the working set; asafoetida and fenugreek hold the vegetarian side together. Against its neighbours the contrast is sharp — the plateau kitchen to the north-west grinds coconut into everything and adds jaggery, the Kerala kitchen through the gap cooks in coconut oil with coconut milk, and the delta kitchen to the east is built on rice and a softer tamarind. This one is drier, hotter and more direct than any of them.

मुख्य अनाज

Kambu (pearl millet) — the gruel grainKezhvaragu or ragi (finger millet) — the kali grainCholam (sorghum)Thinai, samai and varagu — the minor millets, still sown as insuranceRice along the Cauvery and Bhavani, and everywhere in the towns

संरक्षण की विधियाँ

Vathal — vegetables salted and sun-dried, chiefly manathakkali, sundakkai and kothavarangai, fried into a meal at any time of yearVadagam — onion, garlic, fenugreek and curd worked into balls and dried, then used as a tempering baseKoozh soured overnight in an earthen pot and drunk the next dayTurmeric boiled, sun-dried for a fortnight and polished, which is how the crop becomes a tradeable commodityEllu urundai and kadalai mittai — sesame and groundnut set in jaggery, the storable sweets of a dry countrySalted and sun-dried mutton in the older herding households, now rare

विशिष्ट पाक विधियाँ

Kali stirring

Flour — finger millet, or urad roasted first — is beaten into boiling water and jaggery syrup with a long wooden stick and stirred hard until the mass leaves the sides of the pan clean, then finished with a quantity of sesame oil that looks like a mistake and is not. The oil is what keeps it from setting hard, and ulundhu kali made this way is given to adolescent girls and to new mothers for exactly that combination of urad and sesame.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Pandya Nadu, Old Mysore

Overnight koozh souring

Pearl millet is cooked to a thin gruel, poured into an unglazed earthen pot with water and left overnight, so the pot's own resident flora sour it. Next morning it is broken up with buttermilk and eaten with raw small onion, green chilli and a salted dried vegetable. A new pot makes bad koozh; the pot is the culture.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Pandya Nadu, Marava & Ramnad

Kari virundhu

The whole-goat feast, cooked as a sequence in one sitting so that no part is wasted and each part gets the treatment it needs — blood set and fried, liver and offal dry-fried with pepper, intestine cleaned and stuffed, leg and bone taken slow into a thin kuzhambu, head and trotters into a separate stew, and the marrow eaten first because it will not keep. It is a temple-festival and wedding meal, cooked by men outdoors in pots too large for a domestic stove.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Marava & Ramnad, Rayalaseema

Santhakai pressing

Rice is soaked, ground, steamed to a dough and pressed hot through a perforated iron press into fine threads that are steamed once more. Doing it hot is the whole difficulty; the dough stiffens as it cools and the press becomes unusable, so the work is done fast by two people.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Malabar, Pandya Nadu, Nanjil Nadu

Turmeric curing

Rhizomes are boiled until soft, spread to dry in the sun for a fortnight or more, then tumbled in a rotating drum to knock off the rough skin. Boiling gelatinises the starch and fixes the colour through the whole rhizome instead of leaving it in a ring; polishing is what lets a buyer grade it by eye. The Erode market runs on those two operations and on the curcumin figure that follows from them.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Desh, Telangana

Stone wet grinding

Rice and urad ground against granite under a rolling stone, slowly enough that the batter never heats and the fermentation is not killed before it starts. The tilting motorised version of this — a granite drum with two rollers — was designed in Coimbatore in the 1950s and is still mostly built here, which is the unglamorous reason South Indian breakfast could be produced at commercial scale.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Tondaimandalam, Old Mysore, Chola Nadu

Kongu Nadu की खानपान पहचान — पाक माध्यम, खट्टे तत्व, मसाले, मुख्य अनाज और वे विधियाँ जो इसे परिभाषित करती हैं। (6)