BharatSangraha

South Gujarat Littoral · Western Coastal Strip

Foodways

Four kitchens share this coast and do not merge. The Surti Gujarati kitchen is the sweetest and greenest in the state — jaggery in the dal, green garlic and fresh coriander in almost everything, and a calendar so tight that half its best dishes exist for six weeks a year. The Parsi kitchen, settled here for a thousand years, is Gujarati in its ingredients and Persian in its logic, working sweet against sour with vinegar, jaggery and dried fruit, and using eggs and meat where the kitchen next door uses neither. The Dawoodi Bohra kitchen, centred on Surat, eats from a shared platter in a fixed alternating order of sweet and savoury. On the forest slope above them, the Dangi Adivasi kitchen runs on finger millet, forest tubers, bamboo shoot and mahua, with almost no spice and a great deal of smoke. This is also where coconut enters the western coastal kitchen — grated into chutney and gravy here, and absent a hundred and fifty kilometres to the north-west.

Primary cooking medium

Groundnut oil, the default cooking medium on the plainGhee, in Surti sweets and in the Parsi kitchenFresh grated coconut, used for body and richness rather than as a garnish — the northern limit of the coconut kitchen on this coastRendered fat and butter in Parsi and Bohra cooking

Dominant sour agents

Tamarind — the dominant sour on the plainLemon and raw green mangoVinegar, in Parsi cooking, where it does work that tamarind does elsewhereCurd and chaasKokum is essentially absent here and becomes standard immediately to the south, which makes this coast the boundary of two souring conventions rather than a member of either

Spice register

Green and sweet-leaning rather than hot. Green garlic, fresh coriander, green chilli and coconut define the Surti register, and jaggery is added to dal and shaak as a matter of course — the exact habit that the Kathiawadi kitchen to the north-west refuses. The Parsi kitchen adds its own two blends, a dhansak masala heavy on cumin, coriander and dried chilli and a sambhar masala for fish and eggs, and finishes with vinegar and sugar together. Bohra cooking runs on whole spice and on smoking with a live coal. On the Dangs slope, chilli, salt and garlic are close to the whole spice repertoire, and heat comes from the fire rather than the masala.

Staple grains and carbs

Rice — the everyday grain of the plain, which sets this region apart from the rest of GujaratNagli, or finger millet, the staple of the forest slopeVarai and other small millets on the slopeJowar, eaten as grain and, at the milk stage, as ponkWheat, as rotli and in Surti sweets

Preservation methods

Boomla and prawn sun-dried on racks along the Umbergaon and Daman shoreBafenu — raw mango sealed with mustard, turmeric and salt in a jar and left in the sun, a Parsi preserveGor keri and chhundo, as on the rest of the Gujarat coastMahua corollas dried and stored through the year on the Dangs slopeBamboo shoot cured with salt and chilliJaggery from the cane belt, the region's own storable sweetener

Signature techniques

Ponk roasting

Jowar is cut while the grain is still at the milk stage, the whole ears are roasted over embers or burning stalks, then rubbed by hand and winnowed to release soft green kernels. The window is a few weeks per field and roughly ten weeks for the region, because a day too late and the grain has hardened into an ordinary cereal. It cannot be stored, frozen or transported far, which is why it is eaten near where it is grown.

Also found in: Nimar

Matlu ubadiyu and undhiyu

Whole winter vegetables, papdi beans and muthiya are packed into an earthen pot, sealed, inverted and buried in a pit with a fire built over it. Ubadiyu is the plainer of the two — banana leaves, ajwain, green garlic, salt and no oil at all, so the vegetables cook in nothing but their own steam. Undhiyu adds oil, masala and coconut. The name comes from undhu, upside down, and describes the pot rather than the food.

Also found in: Saurashtra

Leaf-wrapped steaming

Colocasia leaves are smeared with a besan, tamarind and jaggery paste, rolled tight, steamed and sliced into patra; pomfret is coated in coconut-coriander chutney, wrapped in banana leaf and steamed into patra ni machhi. In the colocasia version the acid is not a flavouring but a requirement — the raw leaf carries calcium oxalate and will burn the throat without tamarind to neutralise it.

Also found in: North Konkan, Kochi & Central Kerala

The dhansak purée

Three or more dals are cooked with pumpkin, brinjal and fenugreek until they collapse, then passed through a mouli into a single smooth purée and finished with mutton. It is eaten with brown rice, which takes its colour from sugar burnt almost black in the pan before the rice goes in. By convention dhansak is a Sunday dish and is not cooked on festive days, because it is associated with the meal eaten on the fourth day after a death.

Also found in: North Konkan

Toddy tapping

The unopened flower spike of a palm is sliced and bound, and a pot is hung beneath it to collect sap overnight. Drunk within a few hours of collection it is sweet neera; left in the heat it ferments on its own within the day, which is why the drink has no shelf life and is sold at dawn at the foot of the tree.

Also found in: North Konkan, South Konkan

Mahua gathering and drying

Mahua corollas drop at night through March and April. The ground under each tree is swept clean beforehand so the flowers can be collected clean at dawn, then sun-dried until they keep for a year. The dried flowers are boiled, cooked with nagli flour, or fermented; the sweeping of the ground is the part of the process that outsiders never see and that determines the quality of the crop.

Also found in: Mahakoshal & Gondwana, Chota Nagpur Plateau

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