Foodways
Two kitchens share a plateau and barely speak to each other. The village kitchen is a millet kitchen — jowar and bajra roti patted by hand, dry pounded powders eaten with a spoonful of oil instead of a curry, tamarind used at a strength that startles visitors, and chilli used as a bulk ingredient rather than a seasoning, because dried chilli keeps and vegetables do not. The Hyderabad kitchen is a court kitchen — ghee, yoghurt, saffron, mint, coconut and a sealed pot — and it arrived with an administration rather than growing out of the soil. What the two have in common is the rolu, the coarse stone mortar, and a refusal to grind chilli smooth. Against the coast, Telangana is drier, less sour and far more millet-dependent; against Marathwada to the west it drops the goda masala and picks up sesame and groundnut as thickeners.
Primary cooking medium
Groundnut oil, the everyday mediumSesame oil (nuvvula nune), used for pickling and for the pounded powdersRendered mutton fat in the village meat kitchenGhee in the Hyderabadi and temple kitchensSafflower (kusuma) oil in the northern districts
Dominant sour agents
Tamarind — used at a concentration the rest of the south finds excessive, and often uncookedGongura (roselle leaf), pounded rather than cookedRaw mango, fresh in season and sun-dried as magaya through the yearButtermilk (majjiga), both as a souring agent and as a preservative bath for chilliesYoghurt and lime in the Hyderabadi kitchenTomato, a late arrival that displaced tamarind in the towns and not in the villages
Spice register
Dried red chilli pounded coarse in a stone mortar, sesame and groundnut ground in as body, coriander seed, a heavy hand of garlic, and curry leaf and mustard in the tempering. The heat is dry and blunt rather than fragrant. Coastal Andhra reaches the same temperature with fresh green chilli and more tamarind sweetness; Rayalaseema goes hotter and garlickier still; Telangana sits between them and adds the sesame. The Hyderabad kitchen runs an entirely separate register — green chilli, mint, coriander leaf, saffron, coconut and poppyseed — and the two are not blended.
Staple grains and carbs
Jowar (jonnalu) — the dryland bread grainBajra (sajjalu) in the poorest soilsRagi and korra (foxtail millet), mostly as gruelRice, but only under a tank command or a canalRedgram (kandi) — the plateau's defining pulse, grown as a border cropMaize, which has taken a great deal of jowar acreage since the 1990s
Preservation methods
Ooragaya — whole-piece mango pickle laid down in sesame oil and mustard, made once a year in JuneMagaya — mango cut, salted, sun-dried and then oiled, so it keeps without the oil bathChalla mirapakayalu — chillies soaked in salted buttermilk and sun-dried through repeated cyclesVadiyalu and appadalu — sun-dried lentil and ash-gourd drops fried through the dry monthsTamarind pressed into blocks with salt and stored for yearsGongura pachadi packed under a layer of oilJowar and redgram stored in mud gadis and gunny inside the house rather than in a granary
Signature techniques
Cascading tank storage
Not a cooking technique but the one that decides the menu. The surplus weir of an upper tank is the feeder channel of the next, so a single monsoon's runoff is impounded and re-used five or six times down a valley before it reaches the river. Rice and vegetables exist under the command of a tank; a hundred metres above the bund the crop is jowar, and the kitchen changes with it. The two cuisines of this region are the same distance apart as an upper field and a lower one.
Also found in: Bundelkhand, Bayaluseeme, Rayalaseema
Rolu pounding
Dried chilli, garlic, sesame and gongura are pounded in a stone mortar with a wooden pestle rather than wet-ground. The result stays coarse and flecked, releases oil rather than water, and keeps for weeks — which is the whole point in a kitchen with no refrigeration and a four-month growing season.
Also found in: Rayalaseema, Kosta Andhra, Bayaluseeme
Kachchi dum
Raw meat, marinated in yoghurt, papaya and spice, is laid under partly cooked rice, the lid sealed with dough, and both cooked together on a slow fire until each is done at the same moment. It is much harder than the Awadhi pukki method, in which the meat is cooked separately and only layered in, because there is no correction after the seal goes on: the marinade has to tenderise in exactly the time the rice takes, the fire has to be low enough not to catch the base and hot enough to cook the meat through, and the pot is opened once. A kachchi biryani that fails, fails completely.
Also found in: Awadh, Kalyana Karnataka, Marathwada
Deg pounding for haleem
Cracked wheat, lentils and mutton are cooked in a copper deg over a wood fire for six to eight hours and beaten continuously with long wooden paddles until the meat fibres shred and the whole becomes a single emulsion with no identifiable ingredient. The labour is the recipe; nothing about the ingredient list explains the texture.
Also found in: Malabar, Kalyana Karnataka
Buttermilk sun-curing
Green chillies are slit, steeped in salted buttermilk, dried in the sun, re-steeped and dried again over several days until they are pale, brittle and saturated with salt and acid. Fried in seconds at the table, they replace a vegetable in the driest months.
Also found in: Rayalaseema, Kosta Andhra, Old Mysore
Cold-pan hand pressing
Sarva pindi dough is pressed by hand directly into a cold, oiled iron pan, spread to the rim, and holes punched through it with a finger before the pan ever goes on the fire. It then cooks from a cold start over low heat for the better part of an hour. The holes are structural — they let heat reach the middle of a disc too thick to cook from the edges.
Also found in: Marathwada
Ambali souring
Jowar or ragi flour is cooked to a thin gruel, cooled, slackened with buttermilk and left overnight to sour. Drunk cold in the fields through summer, it delivers salt, acid and carbohydrate in a form that keeps a morning without a fire.
Also found in: Rayalaseema, Old Mysore, Bayaluseeme