I’ve always maintained that food must take you somewhere. It must rekindle a memory from the past or form the basis of new memories. And so here I was, travelling through Kerala, taking a slow and gentle six-day road trip through the state, exploring local flavours, meeting people, looking for adventure and inspiration. The timing was perfect. I had recently quit the restaurant company I founded in 1996. I was ready for new ideas and a fresh start. And what better way to get those than travel?

Over 26 years ago, as a young man who’d just returned from working kitchens in the United States, I backpacked through Kerala. What I saw then made me want to come back and stay in India, to get to know my country and people again. And I did. I also went on to open restaurants—chief among them, Mumbai’s Indigo.

So, Kerala wasn’t new to me, but this time, I was going to see it through new eyes. My itinerary was designed with a different agenda. I’d still be tasting my way through this land of warm spices. I’d still be breaking bread with locals—and even cooking with them. But the journey would focus around a single ingredient—beef.

Beef in Kerala

Why beef? I live in Mumbai, where the meat was recently banned. The craving, however, lives on. In Kerala, beef has always been the king of the table, all tables. I wanted to try it in each and every way it’s cooked and eaten in the state—by Hindus (yes, you read that right), by Muslims, by Christians: by the daughter-in-law of a Muslim royal clan, by an instructor specialising in Syrian Christian cooking, by a friend’s Hindu house help and by cooks at restaurants where 6,000 people eat every day.

The plan was to travel south to north—from Thiruvananthapuram to Kannur, through Koottickal, Kottayam, Kochi and Kozhikode. We crossed the backwaters with the monsoon chasing us, pulling over by the side of the road for sweet, milky chai made by slight matriarchs and for a tender coconut deftly sliced open by burly moustachioed men in mundus. I stopped at markets, getting my hands dirty handling freshly butchered cuts of beef. I listened to animated fish trade negotiations in Malayalam and marvelled at glistening hand-hewn knives and toddytappers’ sickles. Colour for all the senses. Even in its clichés, Kerala was bright and beautiful.

My search for beef in all its variations really began when we spent a day in Koottickal, at Anju and George Varkey’s farm, with its cowshed of mooing, ruminating Holsteins. On the emerald lawns, game birds and massive roosters clucked suspiciously at our unfamiliar faces. Anju had prepped a bunch of ingredients so that she could teach me how to cook her Pottamkulam clan’s beef ball curry. I’m not talking bulls’ testicles here but minced or ground meat, the kind used for making the meatballs eaten with spaghetti.

Legend (and it depended on who told me the story) has it that around two generations ago, the matriarchs of the clan were preparing a large number of beef cutlets one night, for an upcoming celebration. Naturally, they’d had a bit too much to drink and were, as Anju describes it, “in full condition”. As the night wore on and their hand–eye coordination got poorer, the cutlets became increasingly spheroid in shape and stunted in size. As the sun came up, they found their now marble-sized “cutlets” had begun to dry out and they did what any good amma nursing a hangover would have done. They dropped them in some really fresh coconut milk with a bunch of regional spices and let them simmer while they themselves sobered up. And thus was born the clan’s beef ball curry. A truly memorable dish, not only for its genesis but also for the gentle, slow method of cooking it and for its delicate, divine taste. Exquisite, really.

Kerala’s spice affair

The subtle use of spices reminded me of a conversation I’d had a couple of weeks before the trip with Lathika George, author of The Suriani Kitchen and an authority on Kerala’s cuisine. She’d said, “If you find yourself doing food with a lot of garam masala in it, it’s Kerala food for the tourists.” At the time, I didn’t quite get it. The Malabar coast was, after all, garam masala country; the home of wonderfully warm, woody spices—cinnamon, cardamom, clove and nutmeg. Surely they had an integral part to play in local cuisine? A few days into the trip, I was surprised to discover that they didn’t, or at least they didn’t scream in your face, loud and obvious. I understood what Lathika had meant. The earthy spices are used just to warm and round off the flavour of coconut, which dominates and permeates everything. It left me wondering whether the bulk of these spices might, in fact, be grown in Kerala only to be exported elsewhere. Ironic. Pepper on the other hand, I did learn, is used a lot everywhere—thankfully, for you can never have enough freshly ground black pepper!

If you find yourself doing food with a lot of garam masala in it, it’s Kerala food for the tourists

Famitha Suhail’s erachi paalpuyukk, or beef stew, was a case in point. On a very rainy day in Kannur, Famitha, a young member of the Arakkal royal family, cooked with me in her beautiful old family home, the dining room of which had a skylight, and the living room, exquisitely patterned antique tiles and an entresol. Her almost centenarian grandmother-in-law walked by every now and then, to make sure we were comfortable. Famitha taught me to make a traditional family recipe: an elegant peppery veal stew thickened with potatoes, known as erachi paalpuyukk. Instead of coconut oil, she used ghee, and she perfumed the dish with ginger, garlic, curry leaves, chillies, a whole lot of freshly crushed pepper—and then just the gentlest touch of warm spices. The curry was served over thiral pathiri, an almost Goan bebinca-style, slightly savoury cake, made by steaming layers of rice flour mixed with coconut milk. This dish, a treasure of the Arakkal royal family, was just sublime. Its complexity and layers of delicate, subtle flavours brought you back for more, much more.

The kitchens

Over the next five days, we were welcomed with much graciousness and warmth into people’s homes and kitchens, for cooking lessons and vast feasts with extended families. In Kochi, culinary school owner Nimmy Paul went out of her way to introduce me to her Syrian Christian beef mallicharu with idiyappam. In Bindu’s home in Puthur, outside Thrissur, I discovered edible napalm in the fiery, but strangely well-balanced varutharacha thenga erachi kayayam—beef cooked with tapioca and a spicy coconut paste.

At Famitha’s cousin Yashir Adi Raja’s home in Kannur, the act of cooking turned into a family affair, with numerous other cousins and nieces joining us in the kitchen to help us prepare a gnocchi-like aana pathiri. Rice dough with fennel, chilli and shallots was transformed into marble-sized dumplings, which were then stirred, much like pasta, into a (pressure-cooked) beef stew. And there was the erachi varattiyathu, a simple dish of sautéed beef that we tore into with crisp, fried, puri-like ney pathiri.

Kadeeja Moidu and her mother, Amina, of the aristocratic Koyappathody clan in Kozhikode, graciously opened their stunning colonial home and prepared a feast (beef varattiyathu, beef porichathu and beef mulakittathu) I won’t easily forget. Their pepper beef was just to die for—incredibly tender, with wonderful aromas and an intense Tellicherry pepper heat that had plenty of the sharpness of black pepper but didn’t hit the back of your throat. I was grateful for the expandable mundu they gave me to wear and for the bed I was able to stagger off to after lunch.

Next came the kitchens of Muhammed Suhail’s Rahmath Hotel and Sumesh Govind’s Paragon restaurants. These are Kozhikode institutions—epitomes of efficient, well-oiled food preparation machines. We watched in wonder as they churned out endless kilos of flawless beef biryani and other local fare for the hundreds of diners who occupied their rooms at any time of the day.

What I learned

At all times during my journey, despite the differences in the dishes I ate, the primary ingredient remained the same. But there was something else that tied these culinary masterpieces together. Initially, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but about halfway through this journey, I had that epiphany.

What I realised was that everywhere we went—the dining rooms of Hindus, Muslims and Christians—we were not merely eating beef, but we were doing so in ways that totally belied the stigma and taboo associated with eating this meat elsewhere in the country. In most places I’ve travelled to, and this certainly holds true for India, the evolution of cuisine is generally culture-driven. Hindus eat differently from Muslims, who eat differently from Christians. Gujaratis eat differently from Bengalis, who eat differently from Maharashtrians, and so on—regardless of how close they live to one another. But here in Kerala, what became apparent to me was that it didn’t matter so much who you were or where you came from, but where you lived. You pretty much ate in the same way and with similar traditions, governed only by the ingredients and spices indigenous to that particular region.

This practice is something very precious and quite unique. It spoke to me of a wonderfully integrated, gentle and tolerant people, with a great sense of community. People may have initially brought different traditions to the table, given their heritage, but the cuisine that’s evolved from all of these is one based on the indigenous ingredients and spices of a particular region. This pure expression of food—devoid of any cultural prejudice—is a truly wonderful thing that needs to be exported everywhere.

Where rice rules

I also realised that, save for a couple of spectacular flaky maida parottas in Rahmath Hotel in Kozhikode, I barely ate any wheat the entire trip. The truth is, I didn’t miss it, because rice in Kerala makes up for it. I’m not talking about heaps of the red Matta rice we associate with vegetarian sadya meals. And I’m not talking about the ubiquitous appams and idiyappams, exquisite as they are. Rice here took on forms and textures that I never knew existed, forms I could not have anticipated. There was the soft-as-flan thiral pathiri, comparable to the gently fused layers of lasagna that we had at Famitha’s. At her cousin’s, there were the two pathiris—anna and ney—which, in spite of using the same rice dough, were as alike as gnocchi and puri. And the steamed puttus we ate by the roadside, on a rainy night en route to Kozhikode, reminded me of a savoury version of the sweet, migliaccio-like semolina cake from Campania. It amused me that what wheat pasta was to the Italians, rice “pasta” was to the Keralites. And much like in Italy, where the sauce dictates the use of a particular shape of pasta, each beef preparation we tried worked better with rice cooked in a particular way.

Memories

This was but one of the several dots I connected on this trip. But perhaps the most important connection happened while I was dressed in a cotton mundu and kurta, standing over a black clay urli, blowing on the flames below it, fired by dried coconut husk. I was suddenly taken back to my childhood, flooded with memories of my father’s mother, my aji, in her kitchen in our family home in Nashik. Except, we were at Kadeeja’s mother Amina’s home in Kozhikode. Similar style of home, spacious kitchen and pantry, though.

As I watched Amina, I couldn’t help but remember my aji cooking away in her kitchen. The intense love and single-minded passion with which Amina cooked made it all seem effortless. Just like my aji. Amina’s hands moved with an efficiency and precision that came from muscle memory learned from years of experience. Just like my aji. Amina cooked with the same confidence and joyous abandon as I remember my aji doing. And then, all the food turned out just as you’d expect of such an effort—spot on, delicious and perfect—and again, I was reminded of the many magical meals at my aji’s.

Something touched me very deeply that afternoon. During this journey of revelations and epiphanies, of rediscovering my own—given where I was just then, having quit everything searching for my true north—I reconnected with what it really meant to stand for something I believed in. I was put back in touch with things that really mattered to me—cooking and eating, sharing food that takes you places. That afternoon, I died and went to heaven in God’s Own Country.

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