Kodava Cuisine

Every year during our 2  month long summer vacations when we travelled to Coorg, we would spend a lot of time hanging out at home. Life had a rhythm to it. You'd wake up really early head to the kitchen for a cup of coffee or tea, eat some delish breakfast and follow that with another cup of tea or coffee and then basically hang around reading the newspaper or take a nap or go for a walk in the estate if it's not too hot. And the day would go by precisely that  lazily. Unless, you were going out visiting other relatives. Then you'd wake up every morning and be engulfed in a rush of activities, everything would need to be done with speed so you could depart at a reasonable hour. Often when people ask me what Coorg is like I describe it to be acres of coffee estate after coffee estates one after the other - often looking like one big estate itself. Often interspersing this view are occasional paddy fields. Chances of one coming across a house or people are rare when you'...

Kumm, cleaned, cut and already in the pan!  Most Indian agricultural societies lead culinary lives based on the seasons. That can be said about agricultural societies world over I guess. And hence it is true for Coorg as well. One afternoon my maternal uncle walked in with a bunch of long stalks / leaves wrapped in a kannada newspaper - announcing the arrival of "kembu" and our estate manager or "writer" as they call them in Coorg, followed close behind also cupping in his hands a newspaper, wrapping "kumm" or wild mushrooms. Kembu or wild colocasia is this plant with a huge leaf and long stems, and is also called elephant-ear, because the leaves are HUGE. More about Kembu in another post, today I shall limit my words to the other treasure the writer was carrying in his hands. But before that I shall speak about the squeals of excitement these announcements brought forth fro my mom and grand-mom. And it's only then that I realised the word I use...

[This is a very random picture of random flowers, nothing to do with madh thoppu :)] Most of my stories of Coorg on this blog will invariably be stories of my dear mother. Unless you count the two months of summer vacations we used to spend at my grandparents' place, i haven't ever really lived in coorg and hence most of my stories and tales are stuff that I've heard from my mother,  mostly also in the beautiful warm flavourful and fragrant surroundings of her kitchen. She regales me with stories from her childhood, from her teenage years, from when she was the belle of the village right up until when she married my father and had to leave the land she always called home.  I had to head back home to Bangalore a couple of weeks earlier to recover from an illness smack in the middle of the monsoon season. After I had spent time at home recouping lost energies, my parents and I went to a Food festival in the Kodava Samaj in Bangalore.   Every relatively bi...