Dishes

AvakayaఆవకాయVegetarianPickle

Raw mango cut through the stone into pieces that retain the inner kernel, packed with mustard powder, chilli, salt and fenugreek and sealed under oil. Named for the mustard — ava — and made once a year in May or June. The kernel-bearing piece, the muna, is the one people fight over.

Gongura pachadi and gongura mamsamVegetarian and non-vegetarianPickle and main

Roselle leaf cooked down and pounded with garlic and chilli, kept under oil; and the same leaf cooked with mutton, where its acid does the work tamarind would do elsewhere. It is the dish outsiders associate with this coast and the association is deserved.

Pandu mirapakaya pachadiVegetarianPickle

Ripe red fresh chillies pickled whole in oil and salt. Fruity, extremely hot, and eaten a fraction of a chilli at a time with curd rice, which is the standard method for putting out a fire with the fire.

Pulasa pulusuNon-vegetarianMain

Hilsa taken in the Godavari during the first monsoon flood, cooked slowly in a tamarind gravy in a clay pot and eaten the next day. The fish is in the river for a few weeks a year and single specimens have sold for tens of thousands of rupees; the local saying about pawning the wedding chain to buy one is quoted seriously as often as not.

Where to try: Godavari-bank towns from Rajahmundry down to Yanam, in July and August only.

Chepala pulusuNon-vegetarianMain

Fish in a thick tamarind gravy, cooked without stirring and improved by a night's rest. The delta version is sourer and thicker than the coastal Uttarandhra one and is usually made in an earthen pot.

Royyala vepudu and Kolleru fishNon-vegetarianMain

Prawn fried dry with ground chilli, and lake fish — murrel, catla, rohu — cooked in pulusu form. Aquaculture has made both cheap and constant, which has changed what an ordinary weekday plate looks like in two generations.

Ulava charuVegetarianMain

Horse gram boiled for hours and the dark broth decanted and reduced. A Godavari speciality, thick enough to coat rice, and by local convention finished with a spoon of fresh cream — a combination that sounds wrong and is the point.

Pappu, in its many formsVegetarianMain

Pigeon pea cooked with whatever supplies the acid — raw mango, gongura, sorrel, tomato, dosakaya cucumber — and tempered with mustard, cumin, garlic and dried chilli. Which pappu is made tells you the week of the year.

Kobbari-based Konaseema cookingVegetarian and non-vegetarianMain

Fresh coconut ground into curries, coconut oil in the tempering, coconut in the sweets. It stops abruptly at the edge of the coconut belt, which makes Konaseema the one part of the Telugu coast that cooks anything like the western seaboard does.

Natu kodi pulusuNon-vegetarianMain

Country chicken cooked long in a thin tamarind and chilli gravy. The bird is lean and tough by design and the cooking time is the whole recipe; the broth is what people actually want.

Pesarattu upmaVegetarianBreakfast

A green-gram crepe with a layer of semolina upma folded inside, eaten with ginger chutney and allam pachadi. Associated with Kakinada, where it acquired an incongruous political nickname decades ago and kept it.

PootharekuluపూతరేకులుVegetarianDessert

Translucent sheets of rice starch lifted off an inverted heated pot, layered with powdered sugar or jaggery and ghee, and folded into a roll that shatters when bitten. The Atreyapuram version carries a geographical indication, granted in 2023 after a long application; the sheets are still made by hand in village households.

Where to try: Atreyapuram, in Konaseema, and the sweet shops of Rajahmundry and Kakinada.

Bandar ladduVegetarianDessert

A coarse gram-flour laddu from Machilipatnam — bandar being the Persian word for port that gave the town its everyday name — with a loose, crumbly texture and a heavy hand of ghee. It carries a geographical indication registered in 2013.

Kakinada kaja and Tapeswaram madatha kajaVegetarianDessert

Two versions of one idea. The Kakinada kaja is soft, syrup-soaked and collapses in the hand; the Tapeswaram madatha kaja is folded into leaves and stays crisp. Neither holds a geographical indication and both would be plausible candidates.

Ariselu and bobbatluVegetarianDessert

Rice flour and jaggery fried into a dense disc, and a gram-and-jaggery filling sealed in thin dough and griddled. The Sankranti sweets, made in bulk in January and given away in quantity.

Perugu annam with nilava pachadiVegetarianClosing course

Curd rice with a year-kept pickle. It is not an afterthought; the meal is structured to end here, and the pickle chosen for it is a statement about the household's jar.