Opinion Coast toast

The kitchen I mention is not your modular-at-the-touch-of -a-button beauty.

New DelhiJanuary 21, 2011 06:49 PM IST First published on: Jan 21, 2011 at 06:49 PM IST

For those of you who apart from slurping up good food also enjoy watching the steel blur of a sharp knife dicing onions,love the flip-flop of a caramel custard being turned out on a serving plate,a visit to a kitchen in the traditional homes found in Kerala is highly recommended. The kitchen I mention is not your modular-at-the-touch-of -a-button beauty. It is not the kind with cabinets to hide the gas cylinder or with a dish drying rack,but a kitchen where the smells and flavours of the days cooking cling on soot covered walls. The vegetables used in this kitchen have been grown in the backyard. This is the birthplace of the secret recipe to that mean meen curry and the mellow mor curry.

This kitchen is mostly at the far end of an ancestral home,you have to walk past photographs of over 5 generations of grand fathers,grand mothers and grand aunts staring down at you from the huge living room walls. The high ceilings,the rooms lined with dusty books and the long corridors are part of the tour.

The typical Syrian Christian kitchen in Kerala is broken up into three kitchens. The first is the one with cups and dishes neatly lined up,this is where the quick biscuit plate is laid out for tea time guests. You enter the main kitchen after a few steps,an open space with a huge platform on one end,clearly demarcating the dry and the wet cooking areas. This kitchen is where the action is at. The vegetables and meat is cut,coconuts cracked and the appam batter swirled into a perfect circle. A bulbous bunch of garlic hangs in the corner,the sunlight streaming in through this half open kitchen,bounces off the sparkling pots and pans and chattis (clay pans used for curries in Kerala homes). The third kitchen,is more like a huge fireplace with three or more open fires licking the bottoms of huge black pots in which rice or kanji bubble in mists of white steam. The ash collected from these hearths is also put to good use,and mostly ends up near the roots of the banana or coconut trees as manure.

Nothing goes to waste in the land of coconuts where with the sound of the native tongue,the chatter of the maid servant doling out gossip,the plop of the spoon in the mutton stew and the sizzle of the prawns in the pan. The kitchen walls have heard it all.