To sit in front of a banana leaf in a Hoysala or Havyaka Brahmin home during Navarathri is to encounter a cuisine defined by simplicity and frugality. No show-off, to quote modern parlance. Cooking for the goddess involves ritual purity. Every Kannadiga can recall their grandmothers (ajjis) waking up before dawn, taking a bath outside by the well, and then entering the kitchen with dripping wet clothes to light the lamp before turning on the kitchen stove. Rice or Anna is the cornerstone of this cuisine. The type of rice varies by region. In Dakshina Kannada, for instance, a variety of parboiled rice called Oorpel Ari in Tulu is a reddish pink grain which fades to pale pink when cooked into a fermented overnight gruel called kanji.
Drinking overnight soaked rice as kanji for breakfast remains something that you can still see all over Bangalore. Women on push carts have a large earthenware pot from which they serve Kanji to workers who line up for this gut-friendly, cheap and wholesome breakfast dish. Ayurveda calls this dhanyamla or fermented cereals and several studies document its healing properties. Now, here’s the thing. The triumvirate of oota , saaru and palya (stir-fried vegetables, also called curry, poriyal, sabzi in other parts of India) remain the cornerstone of vegetarian lunches pretty much all over Bangalore. Saaru is hard to translate, but in my mind, its consistency is somewhat between a sambar and a rasam, which has been touted as a healthy and tasty functional food. In Kempa Gowda’s time, Bengaluru was a landscape that thrived on dryland grains such as finger millet or ragi. Rice was cultivated in river basins and the rain-drenched coastal plains. Medieval Karnataka followed a similar format with a few variations linked to availability and quality. Cooking was done exclusively with ghee. Chilies had not made an appearance so pepper was used. Tamarind was extensively used, as were spices. Ancient texts like the Lokopakara by King Chavundaraya explains different methods of using spices and making blends for recipes; types of cookware and choosing different vessels for different recipes; preserving food and fruits to make pickles and papad; methods of making butter and ghee and different ways to season them; and ingredient substitutions. There is also a chapter about making flavoured yogurts and coagulated buffalo milk cheese for sweets and sweets made from rice flour. The last chapter is dedicated to beverages made from different types of fruits and ways to season them. (Shoba Narayan is Bengaluru-based award-winning author. She is also a freelance contributor who writes about art, food, fashion and travel for a number of publications.)
Seed banks show that Karnataka is home to over 2,000 indigenous rice varieties, but Bengaluru contains only 14 in this list.
The grain that is the centrepiece of an Oota is rice, but historically this was a luxury in interior Karnataka.
