The South platter: Beyond coconut and chilli

If you thought southern cooking was nothing but coconut and chilli, try the lamb curry with poppy seeds from Usilampatti, writes Sumit Chakraberty, after a unique culinary tour

Here you will find a Kuttanad chicken, and not the familiar one from Chettinad; a Bhejwada Kodi Biriyani rather than the stereotypical Hyderabadi Biriyani; and a separate menu card for rasams of all hues.

A visit to the newly reopened Southern Spice restaurant in Chennai’s Taj Coromandel turned out like a culinary tour of the south where you can enjoy taking as many roads less travelled as you like. Take the Kozhi Malliperalam, a mild cilantro-flavoured chicken stew from Kuttanad in Kerala, whose cuisine may be little known but is refreshingly different from the peppery Chettinad chicken that you will find in most restaurants of Tamil Nadu. The Bhejwada Kodi Biriyani, picked up from an old restaurant in Vijayawada, is a chicken pulao traditionally made by the Andhra community there, whose flavouring and preparation is quite unlike its more famous Nizami cousin, the Hyderabadi Dum Biriyani. While you can expect red chillies and garam masala in most biriyanis, the Kodi Biriyani gets its fieriness from a green chilli paste cooled with yogurt.

But first you have to get past the rasam menu, remember? So what shall it be — the jaggery-sweetened thick orange Mysore rasam concocted by the Hebbar Iyengars or the rich Nenju Elumbu rasam that Thanjavur’s flamboyant Thevar community makes with lamb ribs in it? You can forget the regular tomato and pepper rasam, that is for sure, because the chefs here have one surprise after another up their sleeves.

This kaleidoscopic range of exotica did not gather under one roof by accident either. The Southern Spice restaurant had shut down for more than a year, during which time its chefs and cooks fanned out in search of traditional but under-exposed South Indian cooking. They visited the royal households of Thanjavur as well as the bylines of temple towns like Madurai; they went from the balmy coastal region between Kochi and Karwar to the hot chilli country of Guntur and Vijayawada. The result is a menu on which a ghee-infused Moplah fish biriyani from North Kerala competes with a spicy Yeraichi mutton biriyani from Madurai, apart from the aforementioned Bhejwada biriyani.

Even for somebody trained in a variety of cuisines, like executive chef Alok Anand, it was an eye-opener. He used to think South Indian cooking was basically about coconut and chilli but now there seemed to him as many ways to make a sambar as there were homes to visit on his culinary excursions. Each dish had a unique flavour and every region was characterised by what grew there. The Usilampatti mutton curry, for example, has a poppy seed base rather than the coconut that is favoured elsewhere in Madurai district, simply because Usilampatti is so arid that coconut trees are not to be found there.

For sous chef Anand Ramesh, one of his most instructive experiences was at the home of the late Sivaji Ganesan, where he mastered a pickle-like Thanjavur fish curry made with red snapper. The trick was to let the tamarind-mustard-fenugreek-based curry mature overnight. The curry also got its pungency from the fish heads which were cooked in it and discarded later.

But it didn’t always come as easy as that. Anand remembers visiting four homes in Mangalore where the Kori Gassi, a simple enough chicken curry with Byadgi chillies, methi, tamarind and coconut, had a distinct taste in each home. They picked the one they liked the most and invited the housewife over to the Taj to show the cooks just how it is done. But each time she cooked the dish and the cooks tried to replicate it, hers turned out better.

Homes, restaurants, even street food vendors became a five-star hotel’s muses. Thus the Karandi Omelette Varutha Kozhambu, an omelette simmered in a chilli coconut gravy, popular on the streets of Madurai, an oil paratha from Virudunagaram and Gutthi Vonkaya, a brinjal dish cooked with lentils,tomato and spices picked up from a Vizag eatery, share pride of place with such marquee items as Hyderabadi Haleem or the humble Tomato Pappu, masoor dal stewed with tomato and garlic that has always been served at the Southern Spice from its inception.

And for dessert? This is where they had to scratch their heads to get beyond the payasams, says Taj Coromandel GM N Prakash. So, to continue the experimental streak, I tried their Chocolate Purnam Mousse, the Purnam being a filling of coconut, lentils and jaggery — with a dash of southern spice , of course.