Chettinad cuisine
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Chettinad cuisine is the cuisine of a community called the Nattukotai Chettiars, or Nagarathars,[1] from the Chettinad region in Sivaganga district of Tamil Nadu state in
Chettinad cuisine offers a variety of vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes. Some of the popular vegetarian dishes include ).
Historical influences
In the 2014 book The Bangala Table: Flavor and Recipes from Chettinad by Sumeet Nair and Meenakshi Meyyappan, historian S. Muthiah writes:
The Chettiars have traditionally been vegetarians. Their feasts at lifestyle ritual functions remain vegetarian. But trade once had them criss-crossing the southern reaches of peninsular India and absorbing non-vegetarian influences from the Malabar Coast, where Christians of the Orthodoxy of West Asia and Muslims lived in large numbers and Hindus too tended to non-vegetarianism. Further non-vegetarian influences became entrenched in Chettiar food habits from the late 18th Century after they established businesses in
. So did non-vegetarian fare from other parts of India through which they traveled en route to their overseas businesses.
Writer Guy Trebay adds in the foreword of the same book:
One is lucky to eat like a Chettiar, they say in South India. Chettiars say it themselves. They say it because a Chettiar table is a groaning board but also because the cuisine is uncommonly subtle and aromatic, a heritage of Chettiar participation in the centuries-old spice trade, the global import and export of pungent seeds and fruits and barks from places like Cochin and Penang, the Banda Islands, Arab ports in the Straits of Hormuz. To the coconut and rice and legumes that are staples of South Indian cooking they added Tellicherry pepper, Ceylon cardamom, Indonesian nutmeg, Madagascar cloves and blue ginger, or galangal, from Laos and Vietnam.
In places like Penang, in what is now Malaysia, the Chettiars developed a liking for the sweet-sour piquancy of Straits Chinese cooking, In Saigon, they adapted their cuisine to absorb the herbs that perfume Vietnamese food. In Buddhist Ceylon, they relaxed their dietary prohibitions typical of orthodox Hindus and came to enjoy meat.
Thus, the Chettinad region—a semi-arid zone comprising scores of villages, sleepy and agrarian, studded with important ancient temples yet far from major commercial centers—became an unlikely locus of internationalized tastes.
See also
References
- ISBN 978-93-5156-707-3.)
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ^ Rajagopalan, Ashwin (12 July 2017). "Chettinad Food: 10 Ingredients That Make It A Lip-Smacking Affair". NDTV. Retrieved 16 August 2020.
- ^ Nath, Parshathy J. (23 June 2016). "All the way from Karaikudi". The Hindu – via www.thehindu.com.
- ^ Verma, Rahul (1 August 2014). "Little Chettinad in East Delhi". The Hindu – via www.thehindu.com.
- ^ "Delicious destinations: From Dindigul biryani to Bikaneri bhujia". 14 June 2016.
- ^ Kannadasan, Akila (12 July 2016). "When Hyderabad came to Chennai". The Hindu – via www.thehindu.com.
- ^ "Varieties from Chettinad cuisine". Archived from the original on 9 May 2005. Retrieved 11 January 2006.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link) - ^ "Delicacies from the kitchens of Manappatti". The New Indian Express. Retrieved 3 April 2022.
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