Canara Coast · Western Coastal Strip
The two registers are separated by about thirty kilometres and eight hundred metres of altitude. Below the ghat the meal is red rice, a thin coconut fish curry soured with kokum or uppage, and something rava-fried; above it, the Havyaka meal is served on a banana leaf in a fixed order, is entirely vegetarian, and moves between sour, sweet and bitter deliberately rather than incidentally. Bhatkal at the southern end runs a third kitchen altogether — the Nawayath merchant community's, which cooks with green chilli and coconut milk and almost no red chilli at all.
Parboiled red rice with a thin fish curry of ground coconut, byadgi chilli and coriander soured with kokum or uppage, plus a fried slice of mackerel or seer. The rice is unpolished and takes twice as long to cook as white rice, which is why it is eaten where it is grown and rarely outside.
Dried prawns cooked almost dry with roasted coconut, chilli and a little tamarind. It is the standard coastal preparation for the monsoon, when the boats are not going out and the year's drying is what remains.
The Nawayath community's rice-and-meat dish, distinguished by green chilli, coriander and coconut milk instead of the red-chilli and yoghurt base used almost everywhere else in the south. It is cooked layered and sealed, and it is closer to a coastal Arab trade kitchen than to a Deccan one.
A thick jaggery and coconut-milk preparation set with rice flour and served hot with ghee at Havyaka wedding and festival meals. It is ladled onto the leaf rather than plated, is eaten early in the sequence rather than at the end, and is one of the dishes by which a Havyaka feast is recognised.
Pineapple, bitter gourd or ash gourd in a roasted masala of sesame, coconut, chilli and tamarind, sweetened with jaggery. Hot, sour, sweet and faintly bitter at once, and the clearest single statement of what the upland kitchen is trying to do.
Colocasia leaves layered with a spiced rice-and-tamarind paste, rolled, steamed and then sliced and fried in coconut oil. The tamarind is not for flavour — without it the leaf's calcium oxalate makes the throat itch.
Idli batter steamed inside a cup pinned together from jackfruit leaves, so the dumpling comes out with the leaf veins printed on it and smelling of jackfruit. The cups are made fresh each morning and thrown away after.
A cold buttermilk preparation with a raw ground leaf in it — curry leaf, pepper vine, doddapatre or brahmi depending on the season and on who in the house is unwell. It is eaten first, with rice, and never heated.
Whole tender wild mangoes brined in a glazed jar, eaten one at a time with rice and curd. The fruit comes from named riverbank trees rather than from orchards, and households will drive two hours to a particular tree.
Jackfruit at every stage — the tender fruit as a vegetable, the ripe pulp steamed in leaves as a sweet, the seeds in curries, the pulp sun-set into sheets and the papad fried through the year. Nothing on the tree is wasted, because the tree fruits enormously and all at once.
A thin, hot, pink broth of kokum extract with jaggery, green chilli and a mustard tempering, drunk with rice or on its own after a meal. Its Konkani cousin along this coast is thickened with coconut milk into solkadhi.
Beaten rice, in a dozen preparations — soaked with jaggery and coconut, tossed with tamarind and byadgi masala, or simply with curd. It is temple food, travelling food and breakfast, and it needs no cooking.
Mackerel, ladyfish, pomfret or squid rubbed with a red chilli-and-tamarind paste, rolled in semolina and shallow fried until the crust shatters. The paste is the same one used for the curry; the semolina is what the coast added.
Where to try: The seafood counters at Karwar and the Kumta and Honnavar landings.
A wheat flatbread stuffed with coconut and jaggery, rolled paper-thin and griddled, then eaten with ghee or warm milk. Made for Ugadi, weddings and jatras in quantities that take a household several days.
Toddy-leavened steamed rice cakes, and the thin unleavened rice crepe poured so loose it needs no spreading. Both exist because coconut and rice are the two things always in the house.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Canara Coast — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (15)