BharatSangraha

Kalyana Karnataka · Deccan Inland Plateau

Foodways

A dryland kitchen with a court kitchen sitting on top of it, and the two barely mix. The base is millet, pulse and oilseed — jowar and sajje ground and baked daily, tur dal boiled into the day's saaru, groundnut and flaxseed pounded into dry powders that carry the fat and protein a vegetable plate cannot. Nothing here is cooked in coconut and nothing is soured with kokum; tamarind and buttermilk do that work, because both keep in a hot dry house and neither grows on this soil. Over it sits the Dakhni kitchen of Bidar and Kalaburagi — sealed-pot rice and meat, whole garam masala, mint and fried onion — which is a professional tradition with an address, not a village one.

Primary cooking medium

Groundnut oil, pressed locally and used for almost everythingSesame (ellu) oil in the older recipes and in temple cookingGhee, used sparingly and mostly on holige and on hot rottiMutton fat and marrow in the Dakhni kitchenSafflower and sunflower oil, which displaced groundnut in the last thirty years

Dominant sour agents

Tamarind (hunase) — the primary souring agent, in saaru, gojju and every meat curryButtermilk and set curd (majjige, mosaru), used to sour and to cool at onceRaw mango in season and tender mango held in brine the rest of the yearLemon and dahi in the Dakhni kitchenTomato, a twentieth-century arrival that has taken over a share of tamarind's work

Spice register

Hotter and drier than the Kannada country to the south, and less aromatic than the Deccani cooking of Hyderabad it borders. Heat comes from local guntur-type chilli with Byadgi added for colour rather than bite; garlic is used in quantity and raw; coriander seed and cumin form the base and coconut appears only as dry copra in a masala, never as milk. The signature is not a curry but a powder — the chutney pudi that sits on the plate beside the rotti and does the work a gravy does elsewhere.

Staple grains and carbs

White jowar (sorghum), the everyday grain, mostly rabi-sown on residual soil moistureSajje (pearl millet), winter bread, heavier and sweeterTogari (tur, red gram) — the region's cash pulse and its daily dalRice, only where the Tungabhadra canals reach, around Sindhanur, Gangavati and SirguppaNavane, same and other small millets, now marginal

Preservation methods

Khaddi rotti — jowar rotti baked thin and dried out so a stack keeps for two to four weeks and travels with migrant labourSandige and happala — sun-dried batter drops and wafers of rice, sabudana or gram, fried through the yearChutney pudi — roasted groundnut, flaxseed, niger seed, copra and garlic pounded dry and stored in tinsMidi uppinakayi — tender mangoes held whole in salt brine in glazed jarsHagevu — the underground grain pit, plastered and sealed, that held jowar through a bad yearDried red chilli, dried tur stalks for fuel, and copra bought in bulk from the coast at harvest

Signature techniques

Khaddi rotti baking

Jowar dough is worked with hot water because sorghum has no gluten, patted out on a wet cloth by hand rather than rolled, slapped onto a hot tawa, puffed over an open flame and then left on a dying fire until the moisture is gone. A soft rotti is a day's food; a khaddi rotti is a month's, which is why a Kalaburagi household bakes fifty or a hundred at a sitting and stores them upright in a basket.

Also found in: Bayaluseeme, Marathwada, Desh

Ennegayi stuffing

Small brinjals are slit twice at the base without separating them, packed with a dry paste of roasted groundnut, sesame, copra, garlic and chilli, and cooked in a covered pan until the oil separates and pools. The vegetable is a container; the masala is the dish, and it is judged by whether the oil comes out clean.

Also found in: Bayaluseeme, Marathwada, Rayalaseema

Chutney pudi pounding

Groundnut, flaxseed (agasi), niger seed (gurellu), dry copra, garlic and chilli are dry-roasted separately, cooled, and pounded coarse — never wet-ground, because water shortens the life of the powder from months to days. It is how a dryland plate gets its fat and protein when there is no vegetable worth cooking.

Also found in: Bayaluseeme, Khandesh, Desh

Dakhni dum and yakhni layering

Mutton is cooked down separately in a spiced stock, layered with parboiled rice, and the pot sealed and finished over coals. The Bidar and Kalaburagi biryani belongs to this method rather than to the Hyderabad raw-meat kachchi method, which is the practical difference between the two cities' rice.

Also found in: Telangana, Marathwada, Awadh

Ambali fermentation

Jowar or pearl millet flour is cooked to a gruel, left overnight to sour, and thinned with buttermilk and salt in the morning. It is drunk before the sun is high and is the only thing many field workers eat until midday. The overnight souring is what makes the millet digestible and what keeps it edible in a forty-degree house.

Also found in: Telangana, Rayalaseema, Desh

Hagevu pit storage

A bottle-shaped pit dug in the black soil, fired to harden its walls, lined with straw and sealed with earth after filling. Grain in a hagevu keeps for years because the pit is airtight and the soil holds a steady temperature; the practice survives in a thin way and is the reason a bad monsoon here was historically survivable.

Also found in: Bayaluseeme, Rayalaseema

The foodway signature of Kalyana Karnataka — cooking medium, souring agents, spice register, staple grains and the techniques that define it. (6)