Tondaimandalam · Eastern Coastal Plains
Chennai is where the South Indian breakfast became a standardised commercial product, and where four unrelated kitchens learned to share a street. A single afternoon's walk can take in a temple-town idli made for offering, a Chettinad pepper fry, an Anglo-Indian ball curry in a railway suburb and a Burmese noodle salad sold by families repatriated in the 1960s. The enclave down the coast adds a fifth.
A coarse, longer-fermented idli seasoned with whole pepper, cumin, dry ginger and sesame oil, steamed in dried leaf cups or as a deep cylindrical block and cut into wedges — not the flat white disc sold elsewhere. It is a temple food first, and the shape and the seasoning both follow from having to survive hours of distribution.
Steamed rice-and-urad cakes, a fried urad doughnut, sambar, three chutneys and molaga podi. The combination was standardised in Madras hotels in the early twentieth century and is now the default breakfast of half the country, which was not the case before those kitchens made it portable.
A Chennai speciality — crumbled lentil vadai simmered in an onion and tomato gravy and served over idli. It exists because a shop with unsold vadai needed a use for them, and it is now ordered on purpose.
A dosa spread very thin and cooked long enough to shatter, served either plain and enormous or folded over potato masala. The city's hotels compete on diameter, which is a marketing decision rather than a culinary one.
Meat cooked in a fresh-ground masala of fennel, star anise, kalpasi and a great deal of pepper. It came to Chennai with merchant families from the dry country south of here and became the city's idea of a Tamil non-vegetarian restaurant, which has slightly misrepresented both the cuisine and the region.
Anglo-Indian household cooking — spiced mince rolled into balls in a thin tomato and coconut gravy, served with turmeric rice. It belongs to the railway colonies at Perambur and to the Vepery and Egmore streets, and it is now cooked in far fewer kitchens than it once was.
Literally pepper water — a thin peppery tamarind broth that the household drinks mixed with rice and that the colonial table turned into a soup course by adding meat stock and rice to the bowl. The English name is a mispronunciation of the Tamil one, and the dish exists in both forms simultaneously.
The full meal — rice, sambar, rasam, curd, two or three vegetable dishes, appalam, pickle and payasam, served in a fixed order and in fixed positions on the leaf, with the tip of the leaf pointing left. The order is the argument; eating it out of sequence is what marks an outsider.
Boiled pulses tempered with mustard, curry leaf and grated coconut, given to Navaratri visitors on a nine-day rotation and sold on the Marina in paper cones for the rest of the year. Cheap, dry, and the most-eaten street food in the city.
Layered flatbread chopped on the griddle with egg, meat and gravy, worked with two blades in a rhythm audible from the street — the sound is the advertisement. A late-night food, and a north-Tamil town food before it was a city one.
A Burmese noodle salad of wheat noodles, fried onion, cabbage, tamarind and chilli oil, sold near Burma Bazaar and in Parry's Corner by families who came from Rangoon in the 1960s. It has been in Chennai for sixty years and is still made almost nowhere else in India.
The Creole fish stew of the enclave — several kinds of fish in a turmeric-tinted broth, built on a French bouillabaisse idea and cooked with Tamil aromatics and often ghee. Served with bread rather than rice, which is the giveaway.
Prawn in ground mustard, vinegar, turmeric and coconut milk, from the Creole kitchen of the enclave and descended from the Portuguese vinha d'alhos through the Indian Ocean trade. It is a relative of the Goan vindaloo, not a local copy of it, and it is milder and mustard-forward.
A working baguette-style loaf and croissant tradition that has survived in the enclave's bakeries for generations, eaten with coffee at breakfast and with fish stew at lunch — the most everyday and least curated survival of the French period.
Decoction and boiled milk, pulled between tumbler and davara. Chennai drinks it at least twice a day, and the sabha canteens in December serve it in quantities that noticeably shape the concert intervals.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Tondaimandalam — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (15)