Old Mysore · Deccan Inland Plateau
Three kitchens that share a shelf. The village kitchen of ragi, saaru and country meat; the Brahmin household and temple kitchen that produced the puliyogare, the chitranna and most of the sweets; and the twentieth-century tiffin room, which took the second kitchen, standardised it, put it behind a counter and sold it standing up. The last of these is the one that travelled.
A ball of finger millet cooked to a smooth stiff mass and swallowed in pinched pieces dipped in saaru. It is the region's calorie engine — cheap, slow to digest, high in calcium, and eaten by preference with nati koli saaru, country-chicken broth thinned to the consistency of the dip rather than a curry.
Rice, toor dal and vegetables cooked together with tamarind and a wet-ground masala, finished with ghee and eaten with fried boondi and potato chips. Usually attributed to the Mysore palace kitchen. The name means hot lentil rice and the temperature is part of the specification — served lukewarm it is a different and much worse dish.
A thin tamarind broth built on a freshly ground paste of roasted coriander seed, chana dal, pepper and coconut, rather than on a shelf powder. It is darker, sweeter and more aromatic than the Tamil rasam it is often confused with, and the coconut is the tell.
Country-bred chicken — lean, dark, slow-cooked — in a thin peppery broth, with a dry-fried portion alongside. The Mandya and Ramanagara highway kitchens built an entire cuisine on it, and the birds are still sold live so the buyer can judge the leg.
A dosa smeared on the inside with a red chutney of chilli, garlic and roasted gram before the potato palya goes in, and finished with a lump of butter. The red layer is what separates it from every other masala dosa in the country; without it the dish is simply a masala dosa.
Where to try: Vidyarthi Bhavan in Basavanagudi, Bengaluru.
The butter-heavy variant of the Malleshwaram tiffin rooms, cooked on a tawa kept deliberately at a lower heat so the crust stays soft and the butter does not clarify. Ordering it and a plate of vada in the same sitting is standard practice.
A semolina idli leavened with curd and soda rather than fermented, studded with cashew and coriander. The account attached to it — that it was devised during a Second World War rice shortage — is repeated by the tiffin room that claims it and has never been seriously contested.
Two dishes on one plate — khara bath, a savoury semolina upma, next to kesari bath, the same semolina sweetened with sugar, ghee and saffron. The point is the contrast in a single sitting, and asking for only one half is a legitimate but slightly disappointing order.
Rice folded through a dark tamarind, sesame and jaggery paste (the gojju) rather than cooked in it, so the grains stay separate. The Melukote version, given as temple prasada, is the benchmark, and the paste keeps for weeks — which is why it became travel food.
A flat, crisp, onion-heavy fritter of rice flour, semolina and maida, named for the town on the Bengaluru–Mysuru railway where it was sold to passengers through the carriage window. It is thin because it had to fry fast between two trains.
For ten weeks from December the hyacinth bean takes over every menu in the Bengaluru belt. The prized version is sippe tegeda avarekai — beans individually skinned by hand, which is a household afternoon's work for a single meal and is done anyway for the aroma the skin masks.
Flatbreads patted out by hand directly on the hot tawa rather than rolled — finger millet in one, rice flour in the other, both worked with onion, curry leaf and grated coconut. They cannot be rolled with a pin because neither flour has gluten, which is why the technique is a patting motion.
A paper-thin flatbread stuffed with jaggery and either split gram or coconut, eaten hot with ghee or floated in milk. Made in batches for Ugadi and for weddings, and the household's reputation rides on how thin the last one on the stack is.
Gram flour, sugar and a great deal of ghee, cooked to a porous honeycomb that dissolves rather than chews. It was made in the palace kitchen for Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV by a cook named Kakasura Madappa, who named it on the spot when asked what it was. The hard commercial slab sold elsewhere under the name is a different sweet.
Where to try: Guru Sweet Mart on Sayyaji Rao Road, Mysuru.
A short, thin-skinned, intensely aromatic banana grown on a narrow strip of land near Nanjangud and almost lost to Panama disease before a deliberate revival. It holds a geographical indication, and it does not travel or ripen off the plant like a commercial banana.
Decoction dripped through a two-chamber steel filter, mixed with boiled milk and sugar and pulled between a tumbler and a davara to cool and aerate it. Ordering by two — one serving split into two tumblers — is a whole social form, not a way of saving money.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Old Mysore — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (16)