इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Nanjil Nadu · Eastern Coastal Plains
Two menus in one kitchen, sorted by occasion rather than by preference. Fish, tapioca and coconut are everyday; the vegetarian leaf feast is for temple festivals and weddings; the Latin Catholic coast cooks the same fish with more chilli and eats it at parish feasts. Cloves and nutmeg grown a few kilometres uphill turn up in the meat dishes, which is rare anywhere else in the south.
Boiled and mashed tapioca eaten with a fierce red fish curry — the plate that defines the region and that no other Tamil district eats as a default. The tapioca is cooked with turmeric and salt only; all the flavour is in the curry it is dipped into.
कहाँ चखें: Small eating houses across Nagercoil, Marthandam and the Kuzhithurai road.
Seer, sardine or the small estuary fish simmered with shallot, chilli and smoked Garcinia rind in a clay pot. The souring agent is the giveaway — a hundred kilometres east the same curry is made with tamarind and tastes like a different cuisine.
Fermented rice-and-coconut pancakes, lacy at the rim, with a dark black-chickpea curry. Ordered at the same counter and at the same hour as an idli plate, which is the most ordinary and the most revealing thing about eating here.
Steamed rice-string hoppers eaten either sweet, with first-extract coconut milk and sugar, or savoury with fish curry. The sweet version is the one children are given, the savoury one the one fishermen take out.
Coarse rice flour and grated coconut steamed in a cylinder. Eaten here with a mashed ripe nendran and a spoon of sugar as often as with chickpea curry.
The other half of the morning — urad-and-rice batter, steamed or griddled, with sambar, coconut chutney and a gunpowder that is milder than the Kongu version. It shares a kitchen with the appam batter and neither is treated as foreign.
The temple-festival and wedding feast on a plantain leaf — pickles, thoran-style poriyal, aviyal, olan, sambar, rasam, buttermilk and payasam, in the Travancore sequence and finished with coconut oil rather than ghee.
कहाँ चखें: Any village kodai between Chithirai and Aani, and at weddings year-round.
Mixed vegetables cut long, cooked until just done and bound with ground coconut, cumin and green chilli, then finished with raw coconut oil and curry leaf off the heat. The raw-oil finish is what distinguishes it from an otherwise identical Tamil kootu.
Seer fish steaks marinated in chilli, turmeric, pepper and lime and shallow-fried in coconut oil until the crust sets. Landed at Colachel, Chinnamuttom and Muttom and best eaten within sight of where it came ashore.
Estuary crab cooked down with shallot, coconut and a heavy dry-roasted masala. The Manakudy and Thengapattinam estuaries produce it, and it is a monsoon dish because that is when the crab runs.
Dried tapioca rehydrated and simmered in a tamarind and coconut gravy. This is the lean-season dish — what the sun-drying yard exists for, and what a household eats when the fresh crop is not in.
Mutton on the bone with shallot, coconut and a noticeably clove-and-nutmeg-forward masala, using spice grown on the slope above the village. Few south Indian meat curries use whole clove this freely, and it is a straightforward consequence of local supply.
Rice gruel taken with its starch water and a pounded dried-fish chutney with shallot and chilli. The evening meal of the working household on both coasts.
Rice dough spread on a plantain leaf, filled with coconut and jaggery, folded and steamed so the leaf perfumes the parcel. Made for kodai and for Onam in the Malayalam-speaking households.
Rice, jaggery and banana batter fried in ghee to a dark sphere in a dimpled pan. Temple offering and household sweet in the same recipe.
मुख्य आहार
मिठाइयाँ
स्ट्रीट फ़ूड
पेय
Nanjil Nadu का खानपान — ख़ास व्यंजन, मुख्य आहार, मिठाइयाँ, स्ट्रीट फ़ूड और उन्हें कहाँ चखें। (15)