BharatSangraha

Old Mysore · Deccan Inland Plateau

Foodways

A millet kitchen with a court kitchen sitting on top of it, and the two have swapped ingredients for two centuries. The base is finger millet, tamarind, groundnut oil and a roasted coriander-and-gram powder; the court contribution is ghee, sugar work and an appetite for refinement that produced a whole class of sweets. The distinguishing note against every neighbour is a deliberate touch of jaggery in savoury food — in the sambar, in the saaru, in the chutney — which the plain country to the north finds soft and the Tamil country to the south finds simply wrong. Heat is low. Byadagi chilli is used for colour and body rather than burn, and where a Bayaluseeme cook reaches for a dry seed-and-chilli powder, a cook here grinds a wet masala with fresh coconut and coriander seed.

Primary cooking medium

Groundnut oil, the default cooking medium on the plateauSesame (ellenne) in the older village kitchen and in picklingGhee, poured rather than measured in the sweet traditionCoconut used as flesh and milk rather than as oil, unlike the rain country to the west

Dominant sour agents

Tamarind — dominant, and used as a thin extract rather than a pasteButtermilk and curd, especially in the summer monthsLemonRaw mango in season, and the small sour bilimbi in kitchen gardensTomato, a late arrival that displaced tamarind in the city and not in the village

Spice register

Mild, sweet-edged and aromatic rather than hot. The signature is a wet-ground masala of fresh coconut, roasted coriander seed, roasted chana dal and a little cinnamon and clove, with byadagi chilli for colour and jaggery for balance. Set against its neighbours — the dry seed powder and raw chilli of the plain to the north, the pepper and kachampuli of the rain country to the west, and the harder tamarind and pepper of the Tamil country to the south — this is the sweetest and least aggressive kitchen in the peninsula, and its cooks will tell you that is a choice, not a limitation.

Staple grains and carbs

Ragi (finger millet) — the historic staple, and still the everyday grain in the dry beltRice in the canal command, where two crops a year are normalJowar at the northern edge, thinning as the tanks thickenAvarekai (hyacinth bean) treated as a seasonal grain in its own right for the ten weeks it is available

Preservation methods

Uppinakayi — lemon and raw mango held in salt brine for months before oil and spice go inHappala and sandige — sun-dried wafers of urad, sago and ash gourd, fried through the yearMajjige menasinakayi — chillies soaked in salted buttermilk and sun-dried to a black huskAchchu bella — cane juice open-boiled and cast in moulds, the storable form of the Mandya cropRagi held in sealed underground pits, where it keeps for years without insect damageGojju — a thick tamarind-and-jaggery relish cooked down to keep for a week without refrigeration

Signature techniques

Mudde rolling

Ragi flour is beaten into boiling water with a wooden mudde kolu until it forms a single stiff mass with no dry pockets, then rolled hot between wet palms into a ball. It is not chewed. A piece is pinched off, dipped in saaru, and swallowed whole — chewing turns it pasty and is considered a beginner's mistake. The method is what makes a coarse millet edible in quantity by a field labourer.

Also found in: Rayalaseema, Kongu Nadu, Bayaluseeme

Wet coconut masala

Coriander seed, chana dal and dried chilli are roasted separately, then ground wet with fresh coconut into a paste that goes into the pot near the end. It thickens without flour, carries aroma that a dry powder loses on the shelf, and has to be made the same day — which is why the bisi bele bath and the Mysore rasam of a house taste unlike anybody else's.

Also found in: Malnad, Tulu Nadu, Canara Coast

Paaka judgement

The sugar-syrup stage that names half the sweets here. Gram flour is cooked in ghee that is added in stages rather than all at once, so steam escaping through the setting sugar leaves a honeycomb — which is why a correctly made Mysore pak is porous and collapses on the tongue, and an over-worked one is a dense slab. The cook judges the syrup by thread and by sound, not by thermometer.

Also found in: Tondaimandalam, Chola Nadu

Obbattu lamination

A jaggery-and-lentil filling is sealed inside a rested maida dough and flattened on an oiled plantain leaf or wet cloth until the filling shows through as a shadow. The skill is entirely in getting it thin without tearing, and it is measured by whether light passes through.

Also found in: Bayaluseeme, Desh, Kosta Andhra

Stone-ground fermentation

Rice and urad soaked separately and ground on granite — urad whipped light for volume, rice left with a slight grain for texture — then left to sour overnight. The tilting granite wet grinder that made this possible at scale was invented and is still mostly built in the Kongu uplands, and it is the reason the breakfast trade of this region could industrialise at all.

Also found in: Tondaimandalam, Kongu Nadu, Tulu Nadu

Open-pan jaggery casting

Cane juice from the canal belt is boiled in shallow pans over its own bagasse and poured into wooden moulds to set as achchu bella. Nothing is centrifuged out, so the mineral content and the colour stay in — which is why jaggery, not sugar, is what goes into the savoury pot.

Also found in: Bayaluseeme, Desh

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