Dishes

Malvani fish curryMaslyacha kalvanNon-vegetarianMain

Surmai, pomfret, mackerel or prawns in a ground paste of fresh coconut, roasted Malvani masala and Bedgi chilli, soured with kokum and finished with cracked tirphal. Dark red, thin enough to pour, and cooked in under half an hour because the fish is fresh.

Where to try: The family khanavals of Malvan, Devgad and Ratnagiri town.

Kombdi vadeNon-vegetarianMain

The dish the region is asked for by name. Country chicken in a thin, fiercely spiced coconut gravy, eaten with vade — small deep-fried breads of rice flour with urad, fenugreek and black pepper worked in, which are neither puri nor bhatura and go leathery within an hour of frying.

Malvani mutton and mutton sukkaNon-vegetarianMain

The same animal twice — a thin dark curry on the ground masala with coconut milk, and a dry preparation finished with roasted grated coconut until it clings. Served together at weddings and at the temple feast, and the sukka is the one people argue about.

Sol kadhiVegetarianDrink or finish

Kokum extract in thin coconut milk with pounded garlic and green chilli, served cold at the end of a meal. In Malvani households the version without coconut — plain kokum water with salt and cumin — is drunk more often, and is what an unwell person is given.

Tisrya masala and sukkaNon-vegetarianStarter

Clams gathered from the estuary mud, cooked in the shell with ground coconut and masala, or dried off into a sukka. The Karli and Kalaval estuaries are the source, and the season ends when the rain starts.

Bangda hoomanNon-vegetarianMain

A thin coconut-milk mackerel curry with tirphal and kokum and very little grinding — hooman is the light, everyday register of the same kitchen that makes the heavy ground kalvan for guests.

Ghavane and shevaiVegetarianBreakfast

A lacy rice-flour crepe cooked on one side only, and hand-pressed rice vermicelli. Both are eaten with sweetened coconut milk (rasa) at breakfast, or with chicken curry at a wedding — the same two items serve as the sweet and the savoury course.

Kulith pithla and pejVegetarianEveryday

Horse gram ground and cooked into a peppery thin gravy, and the rice gruel drunk with it. This is what the laterite country ate when the mango money had not yet arrived, and it is still the monsoon meal in most village households.

Sandan and patoliVegetarianFestival

Steamed rice cakes — sandan, a jaggery-and-coconut cake set in a mould, and patoli, the same batter wrapped and steamed in a fresh turmeric leaf so it takes the leaf's scent. Patoli is made at Nag Panchami and for Gauri.

Ukadiche modakVegetarianDessert

Steamed rice-flour dumplings hand-pleated around coconut and jaggery, made in quantity for Ganesh Chaturthi, which in this region is the festival that governs the calendar. Twenty-one is the offering count, and the pleats are counted too.

Ambe poli and phanas poliVegetarianPreserve

Sun-dried sheets of mango and of jackfruit pulp, cut in strips and eaten as they are or soaked back into a dish through the year. Nothing is added — no sugar, no preservative — because the sugar in the fruit and the sun do the entire job.

Kaju usal and ole kajuVegetarianMain

Tender fresh cashew kernels, available for only a few weeks after the harvest, cooked in a light coconut gravy. The nut is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century plantation crop here that has quietly become the second cash crop after mango.

Solkadhi bhat and tandalachi bhakriVegetarianEveryday

Parboiled rice and hand-patted rice flatbread — the two carbohydrates that everything above is eaten with. Bhakri here is rice, not the jowar bhakri of the plateau above the ghat, and the two regions can be told apart by that alone.

Alphonso, eaten plainHapusVegetarianFruit

The region's actual signature dish is an unprocessed fruit. Devgad and Ratnagiri Alphonso is harvested at three-quarter maturity, ripened in hay-lined baskets for a week or so, and eaten with nothing added; the thin skin and the saffron flesh with no fibre are why it prices at a multiple of every other mango.

Aamras and mango preservesVegetarianDessert

Pulp with a little milk or ghee, eaten with poli during the season, plus the pickles made from the windfall raw fruit — kairi loncha, and the sweet-sour murabba the surplus goes into.

Kokum sarbat and amsul kadhiVegetarianDrink

Kokum syrup diluted with cold water, salt and cumin — drunk against heat exhaustion through the summer and prescribed for it. The tree's economic value now rests as much on this as on the cooking rind.