Kongu Nadu · Deccan Inland Plateau
Two registers, and the region is candid about the difference. The village and festival kitchen is meat, millet and pepper, cooked in quantity by men over wood; the town tiffin kitchen is rice, urad, ghee and filter coffee, served fast at marble tables from six in the morning. Coimbatore's tiffin houses made the second register into an export — the fixed short menu, the ghee-heavy pongal, the coffee poured from a height — and the first register never left the village at all.
The whole-goat feast served as a sequence — blood fry, offal pepper fry, stuffed intestine, bone kuzhambu, head and trotter stew, marrow. It marks weddings, temple festivals and the settlement of family business, and it is cooked outdoors by men in pots that would not fit a kitchen.
Rice and toor dal cooked together with pepper, cumin, garlic and small onion, finished with a great deal of sesame oil or ghee and eaten with curd and a fried appalam. The Kongu one-pot meal — plain, hot, peppery, and unrelated to the tomato-and-vegetable khichdi it is sometimes mistaken for.
Pearl-millet gruel soured overnight in an earthen pot and broken up with buttermilk, drunk cool with raw small onion, green chilli and a sun-dried vegetable. It is a working drink for hot wind, not a dish for a table, and it is served in the same pot it soured in.
Roasted urad flour beaten into jaggery syrup and finished with sesame oil until it forms a dense dark mass, eaten warm in the morning. Given to girls at puberty and to women after childbirth, for reasons the household will state plainly and a nutritionist would broadly agree with.
Finger millet cooked to a stiff mass and eaten in pinched pieces with a thin peppery mutton or country chicken kuzhambu. The same object as the plateau's ragi mudde and eaten the same way, with a much hotter dip.
Country chicken in a thin gravy built on a wet masala of pepper, fennel, small onion, garlic and a little roasted coconut, ground the same morning. There is no cream, no cashew and no coconut milk, and the heat comes from pepper rather than from chilli powder.
Goat trotters simmered overnight to a thin gelatinous soup with pepper and fennel, eaten at dawn with idli or idiyappam. The regional counterpart of nihari, arrived at independently and by the same logic — cheap collagen-rich cuts and a long fire.
Fine steamed rice noodles pressed hot from a dough, eaten with coconut milk and jaggery in the sweet version or with a mutton kuzhambu in the savoury one. Kerala's idiyappam through the gap is the same technique with a different accompaniment.
A fermented rice-and-urad batter dropped into hot oil and fried without browning, so it puffs white and stays soft — the trick is oil hot enough to puff and not hot enough to colour. Eaten with a coarse coconut chutney, and specific to this region.
Rice cooked loose and finished with first-press coconut milk, made in the western taluks near the gap for Aadi and for temple offerings. Sweetened with jaggery in some households and salted with a pepper tempering in others, and the argument between the two is a family matter.
Millet flours worked into the ordinary dosa batter, giving a heavier, darker, faster-cooking dosa that does not crisp the way a rice dosa does. Sold in the town tiffin houses as a health item and eaten in the villages because that is what was in the house.
The town breakfast as a fixed sequence — idli, ven pongal heavy with ghee, cashew and whole pepper, a medu vada, a set dosa, chutney and a sambar sweeter than the delta's. The convention is that a good house is judged on its pongal and its coffee, not on its dosa.
Where to try: The old Kovai tiffin houses of Coimbatore, of which Annapoorna is the best known.
Steamed lentil balls dropped into a tamarind gravy, the vegetarian household's answer to a meat kuzhambu and made for the days on which meat is not cooked.
A thick-skinned, fibreless, intensely perfumed mango from the Salem and Krishnagiri belt, eaten cut rather than sucked. The region is one of the largest mango tracts in the south, and the crop moves through the Salem markets in May and June.
Sago pearls made from tapioca starch, which the Salem belt processes on a scale nothing else in India approaches. It appears here as vadagam wafers, as kheer and as thickener, and it holds a geographical indication.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Kongu Nadu — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (15)