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Search for the words food and Udupi together in a search engine and you will quite likely come across the term Udupi “hotels” (read as Udupi restaurants).  Even though this post uses these words numerous times, I won’t be writing about the vegetarian fare that is served in Udupi restaurants which has evolved to become such a delicious mix and match of popular south Indian snacks.  However, most people still think that these restaurants serve food exclusive or native to the Udupi region.  Well, read on…

In my quest for forgotten foods and cooking methods, it was a long standing desire of mine to research what kind of foods were around a generation or two ago, how they were prepared and stored and how they have changed over time. The best place to start would have been in my own community, so that is what I focused on this Christmas.

This post took me a full month of research, photography, travel and lots of cross checking, which I was able to do making use of my annual leave. Let us then have a look  at the food eaten here in Udupi; then and now by people from the Kanarese -i.e. the Kannada & Tulu speaking Protestant Christian community. This covers the  entire region of the Dakshina Kannada or South Canara District.

A leaf from my grandmother's cookbook

The coconut that dominates the coastline is an important ingredient in most recipes. You can find trees in the garden of every traditional house worth its salt. If you were to flip through the pages of an old recipe book, some of the  ingredients that would fly past are,  among meats -mutton, beef, pork, chicken,  <Sea food> Fresh or dried fish (Nungel meen) and prawns (yetti); crabs (denjee); aanae, dadd’ and kesa marvai  (3 kinds of mussels/clams); kalla (limpets); ajeer (oysters) and field and sea nartae or snails.

Yashodha, one of the many fishwives who sell fish door to door

I heard from the older folk that there was something called Kadal Panji (literally sea pig) whose red meat was sold in the fish market when they were kids.  I suspect that it was probably dugong (sea cow). It is no longer available in the fish market and neither are snails, limpets, some kinds of mussels and oysters. (the causes, without doubt  are over fishing, exports and pollution -probably extinction of some species too!). The field snails disappeared after chemical fertilizers started being used in the fields. Udupi being situated on the sea coast, has its share of loud mouthed fishwives who come door to door selling fresh fish that their husbands have allegedly caught.  Once, limpets were struck off the rocks, pried out of their shells and filled into a pot which the fishwives then peddled door to door. We never got to see these things in our generation.

Fish being unloaded and auctioned at Malpe port. Sadly most of it, which includes the best of the catch gets canned and goes abroad.

We have some ingredients and cooking methods in common  with the other coastal states of south India, viz.. Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Our cuisine however is distinctive in its own way. I will in brief give you a general outline of the kinds of food preparations native to the Udupi region and its surrounding areas. I will also be discussing the traditional tools and techniques used to prepare them. Wherever possible, I will mention the modern equivalent/substitute for the same.  I will record what they are called in the Tulu & Kannada languages and try to obtain an English equivalent whenever possible. Finally, wherever any of the items justify a separate post, I will be linking to a detailed post, recipe or trail on that subject in the future.

Food preparations & Dishes:

A cast iron dosa griddle with a freshly poured dosa on it

A short note on oiling the griddle for preparing dosas and appas. As far as I can remember, we had a cast iron griddle and my mum remembers the same from  her childhood. Cast iron is called aeraka (eraka) in Tulu. When preparing dosas, the griddle needs to be oiled with a thin film of oil which needs to be evenly spread on the surface of the griddle.  There are at least three ways of doing this.

An oil applicator for your griddle made from the stalk of the banana plant

1. Where the house has a garden with plantain/banana plants (Musa balbisiana ) growing, the stalk of one of the plantain leaves is cut off diagonally (at 45 degrees) to the stalk. The other end is trimmed to leave you with  a length of stalk of about 5 cm.
2. In the second method 1/4th of  an onion is cut off from its shoot end. Then the root end of the onion is speared with a fork. If the wrong end of the onion is sliced or more than a quarter of the onion is cut off, the onion will disintegrate as it is being used for greasing the griddle. After making dosas, the onion may be chopped up and used for some other recipe.
3. On the shoot end of the coconut, there is a very soft tuft of coconut coir below which are three black shallow depressions. The coconut is usually sold with this tuft on to keep it from going bad. This soft tuft is peeled off from the coconut and can then be held at the tip and used as a brush.

A note here, when you use any fresh object as a brush, the flavor from it transfers to the dosa, for eg. a griddle oiled with a cut onion will have a better fragrance than one oiled with coconut coir or a modern silicone brush.

The thick dosa is covered with a dome which steams the top of the dosa

Any dosa  fried on a griddle goes through the following 5 steps.

1. The griddle is greased using one of the above mentioned methods.
2. The dosa batter is poured and shaped/spread  out evenly to form a round disc. [This can be done by trailing the back of the spoon on the batter and tracing an outward spiral with it or by drawing a thin metal sheet about 4" x 3' in size over the surface of the poured dosa.]
3. The dosa is covered with a dome shaped lid which forms a seal with the circumference of the griddle. [This uses two cooking methods simultaneously. The bottom of the dosa is fried on the oil film, while the rest of the dosa gets steam cooked.]
   
4. A crackling sound is heard which is made by the steam which has condensed on the dome and is now dripping onto the hot griddle.
5. When the crackling stops, the dome is lifted off,  the dosa folded in half  with a spatula (optional) and taken  off the griddle. [Folding makes it easier to lift the dosa off the griddle in one piece. If you used a cast iron griddle, expect the first dosa or so to come off  the griddle scrambled.] This is true for all cast iron griddles -especially if they haven’t been used for a while.
   

The traditional wet grinding stone, the kadepina kall'

If the griddle overheats, some people drizzle water on the griddle before pouring the next dosa. We don’t do this at home but commercially it is done after every dosa as they have huge gas burners which they don’t want to keep turning down every time the griddle overheats (which it does pretty often). Personally, I prefer to lower the heat as dropping cold water on a hot griddle can cause severe thermal stress in the cast iron and crack the griddle. Practically I have not heard of anyone’s griddle cracking… but then I have not gone out of my way to find out. If you have experienced such a fault, please leave a comment to educate the rest of us.

Dosa (F)

The finished dosa. The outward trailing motion of the back of the spoon used to spread the batter is clearly visible.

I suppose most readers eating at restaurants serving south Indian cuisine will be familiar with this one. Dosa becomes “do-say” in Kannada and “Ad-day” in Tulu. However Addae and dosae are now used interchangeably in Tulu. The old people kept this distinction but the current generation has borrowed words from Kannada and also Hindi. It is common to go to a shop and speak in Tulu and have the shopkeeper tell you the price in Kannada as many of them do not know numbers in Tulu. The chief difference between the dosa and idly is that dosa batter is ground fine while idly and padd’ batter is ground coarse. This is because the dosa is cooked for a very short time and  the batter will remain uncooked if ground coarsely. It was traditionally poured and spread on to pottery griddles called Vodus (singular Vodu or Vod which rhymes with road) which is the same word used for the pottery Mangalore tiles which are used for roofing. Now it is preferably poured onto flat cast iron griddles which  are said to be manufactured in Kerala. The current generation however seems to prefer the non stick griddles as they don’t want to go through the trouble of seasoning and maintaining cast iron.When used regularly and maintained properly, cast iron comes out on top and is my personal choice as the thick bottom spreads  and holds the heat evenly. Where dosas are prepared on a large scale, a flat sheet of iron around 5mm thick is used as a griddle. It is usually big enough to straddle two gas burners and accommodates three or more dosas at a time . Note that the top-steamed Udupi dosae is not served in any of the restaurants I’ve been to. This avoids extra work, but the steamed dosas are crisp on the underside and soft and fluffy at the same time making them a delight to eat.

A traditional tin plated copper steamer grate from about two generations back.

It must be mentioned in this section, that when there are a lot of guests, the batter is sometimes ground  coarsely like an idli  and poured into the steamer onto a banana leaf or a plate and steamed. This is also called a dosae although it is technically an  idly. Some people called this a maha (big/super) dosa. The semai addae mentioned later on in the post seems to have been classed as a dosa too although technically it is more like a pundi pressed through the screw operated  press to get rice noodles.

Modern aluminum kodapanas used for drawing water from a well

Finally, there was and probably still is, a different kind of  “dosa” prepared by people from the Dikka  community on special occasions. I’m not sure what it is called. It should have rightly been classed with the gendaddae described later on in this post. The batter was supposedly poured into a newly bought large pot -the kind used for drawing water from the well (clay kodapana) The top was covered/tied with banana leaves. Dried leaves were then heaped over it and sticks piled over the leaves. Then it was set alight.  The people then sat around the fire, sang songs, drank toddy,  in other words danced and partied hard while the “dosa” cooked. When the fire burned down and the pot cooled, it was broken and the “dosa” liberated from within and divided among the group.

Tellau ( Probably comes from the word telpu (Tulu) or tellu (Kannada) both of which mean thin)

Neer Tellau  or Neer dosae (Neer = water) has its batter  almost as thin as water and that is where it gets its name from. It needs no fermentation and the watery dough is spooned with a tablespoon onto the oiled griddle till the batter is shaped like a round disc. While pouring the batter,it feels similar to completing a dosa shaped jigsaw puzzle.   Sometimes an egg is added to the batter to make it easier to lift off the griddle when it is done. The neer tellau doubles up as a sweet when grated coconut is mixed with pounded jaggery and filled into a roll made out of the neer dosae. Sugar is also commonly substituted for jaggery. The Neer Tellau is a good quick fix for breakfast as it doesn’t need to be fermented. Unlike the other preparations (Dosa, Idli, padd etc, it is prepared out of rice only, i.e no other grains are mixed with it in any proportion)

Aapa (F)

The aapa

The aapa is a different kind of dosa. It is rice ground extra fine with coconut, toddy and coconut milk and left to ferment overnight. It is then poured onto a griddle which slopes towards the center. Traditionally it was poured in a circle and allowed to flow to the center making for a lacy dosa as streams or strings of batter flowed to the center radially before it hardened. Now especially when it is mass produced for sale, the batter is poured into the center and the griddle tipped outwards in a circular fashion so that the batter spreads outwards to make a round aapa. Since the griddle slopes inwards, the aapa is always thicker in the center and thinner at its edges. An egg white may be added to the batter to make it easier to lift off the griddle when done. As mentioned  in the introduction, instead of toddy, a spoon of sugar was added to coconut water and left overnight to ferment. This was then added to the ground  batter in the morning. It is similar to the appam prepared in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Sri Lanka.

Battladdae(F) (Battal + Addae = Utensil (bowl or plate) + Dosa)

The battladdae batter is similar to the aapa in all respects. It differs only in the way that it is cooked. Instead of being poured on to a griddle like the aapa. It is ground thicker and poured into little molds or a large utensil and steamed like an idli or maha dosa till done.

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Credits:

| Mrs. Sukumari Furtado  | Mrs. Manorama Soans | Mrs.Prabhavati Kunder | Mrs. Rohini Soans | Mrs. Alice Mathias |

 

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