by Pallavi Rao
For years in my home, the last meal before we set out for any travel has been a rasam saadham (rasam rice). Innumerable overnight bus journeys on bad state highways, train journeys to small-town relatives, flights to metropolitan centres, or even the occasional road trip — they had all been fortified with a hearty plate of tomato rasam and rice before we left, the time of the day being irrelevant. The ritual would start with my mother in a pre-departure frenzy, locking, unlocking, relocking, packing, unpacking, repacking, questioning and re-questioning all of us, until she would calm down, enter the kitchen, and make a rasam. Rasam we were told, was the ultimate pre-travel food, soothing, restorative, light on the stomach and comforting. For my mother, even the process of making a rasam is calming and restorative.
One particular time when I’d felt I’d sufficiently mastered the art of family cooking, I offered to make the rasam before we left and my mother reluctantly agreed. Feeling emboldened, I experimented and added some garlic, whole pepper, and cloves, thinking it might add layers of flavour. I never lived it down. “Rasatillai lavangu,” my mom exclaimed in Tamil, “I’ve never heard of cloves in rasam!” The garlic and pepper didn’t meet her approval either. “We never put garlic and pepper in rasam in our house, my amma would have been aghast,” was her response.
It took me some years to realize that my mother staunchly followed a Brahmin rasam recipe. In my mother’s rasam, no garlic or anything else from the onion-garlic family were allowed, which were considered “hot foods” or in the Brahmin worldview, rajasik, with a tendency to increase “animal” passions and energies. A rasam’s apparently soothing properties were all disrupted by my addition of non-Brahmin Tamil rasam staples such as garlic and pepper. And that when I called it rasam soru (rice) and not saadham (also rice), an aunt would gasp and ask me where I was learning non-Brahmin Tamil words like soru from.
For many years now, I’ve deconstructed how much of an influence ritual Kannada and Tamil Brahmin food practices set the rules in my mother’s kitchen. Onion and garlic were only ever used for heavier pulses such as chana and rajma; tamarind was only sparingly used in rasam and sambar, and rarely in anything else; whole red chilies, coriander seeds and cumin were vastly preferable to whole spices such as cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, or even garam masala. Coconut was always a welcome addition to vegetables, especially in the mixed Madhava-Iyer Kannada-Tamil Brahmin household that we were, and “pure” vegetarian food as a whole was deemed “healthy.”
It took me many more years and a growing commitment to anti-caste politics to dismantle this Brahminical consciousness in my kitchen-life and I’ve since liberally used the aforementioned “hot” ingredients, whole spices, and broken all the taboos on consuming meat, eggs and alcohol. I’ve rigorously experimented with “traditional” recipes, refashioning them to suit my single woman’s tastes, diet and lifestyle. Most of all, I’ve kept my mother’s voice out of my head when I cook and adapt a number of family recipes… all that is, except for rasam. Somehow, from the moment I put that stainless steel pot on the stove to begin my rasam process, her voice begins to make its loud presence known. In fact, it’s most pronounced when I make the rasam podi, the spice base for the rasam that requires diligently measured quantities of spices, and a strict order in which they should be roasted before being ground together.
Even more remarkably, after years of experimenting with what spices I like in my rasam podi, I have come back to my mother’s set of preferred ingredients and her distaste for any modifications to her traditional Brahmin flavour. This irritates me profoundly. Brahmin food is a food of forbiddances, after all, and Brahmin recipes tend to have longer lists of what they should not have rather than what they should have. After years of practicing progressive food politics, I find to my dismay that when it comes to rasam, I practice as much ritual purity as every other Brahmin.
Non-Ingredients for my mother’s rasam:
no rajasik ingredients.
especially no onion, no garlic.
no other whole spices barring red chillies, coriander and cumin.
no pre-packaged spice mixes.
no English vegetables beyond tomatoes.
no cooking utensil except for stainless steel or a traditional tin-alloy pot, called eeya chombu.
Additional forbiddances preferred for the rasam:
not to be eaten as a first course, but as a second, or preferably third course.
no overpoweringly flavored side-dishes except appalam or papad, and maybe a water-heavy vegetable that is lightly flavoured.
cannot be cooked as a small or single serving, must be made in large batches.
In U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Kannada novel Samskara, the Madhwa Brahmin priests who are the story’s central characters repeatedly yearn for anna-saaru (rasam rice) to break the ritual fast that the death rites of a Brahmin stipulate. The gold standard for rasam among Kannada Brahmins, after all, is the temple rasam. For us, having resided in Manipal in coastal Karnataka most of our lives, this meant the samaradhane saaru made in the all-Brahmin kitchens of the Krishna temple at Udupi. The temple rasam of Udupi is something even distant relatives would insist on having when visiting us. An Outlook article credits this to the male priests managing the kitchen saying, “Udupi Brahmin men are traditionally peerless cooks.” My father, himself a Madhwa Brahmin, was not. He was however, a big fan of the temple saaru.
The traditional lunch served from this Udupi Krishna temple kitchen remains to this day strictly caste-segregated for Brahmins from non-Brahmins, and the doormen have an eagle eye for catching any non-Brahmins from entering the Brahmin chowki of the bhojanalaya. Up until 2015, the temple still practiced made snana, a 500-year old ritual where devotees would roll over the banana leaf meals of Brahmins who had already eaten to get rid of their bad karma. Historically performed by lower-castes, the temple for a long time justified the practice claiming it was now being performed predominantly by Brahmins, a harake (spiritual offering) to answer their prayers.
The history of the Krishna temple is a genealogy of caste and food culture. In the 16th century, one lower-caste devotee’s desire to get darsana of his Krishna led to a literal window opening in his name. Kanakana kindi (Kanaka’s window) on the west side of the gopura became the frame mediating the inner sanctum with the outer temple, the sacred and the profane. Rumor has it that along with this darsana, the wall of the temple kitchens also broke and cooked rice began flowing from this broken wall. Udupi Krishna has apparently been known as Anna Brahma (god of rice) for this reason, and over the decades, the temple has continued to serve free saattvik — but segregated — food to its devotees.
For many centuries for the lower-castes, Kanaka’s window would have to suffice instead of the Krishna gopura’s main door, and their faith (and money) were valued more than their presence inside the temple premises. If eyes are the window to our souls, then this window is a glimpse into the Krishna temple’s Brahmin soul. Udupi’s reputation for the temple rasam is far outmatched by its reputation for being a hot-bed of caste and communal tensions.
If food means something beyond the senses, if food becomes history, culture, experience, then what could we understand to be the history, culture, and experience of Brahmin food? What affordances does a food of forbiddances provide us? In this confluence of Kannada and Tamil Brahmin food customs in my home, in the confusing melee of strictly cooked dishes and forbidden foods, comfort cooking has fast made me uncomfortable. The history of rasams in my household speaks of histories of exclusion, segregation, and power dynamics. And the private has now become public. Forbidden foods after all, are now a part of our national culture, where the contents of people’s lunchboxes and shopping bags are being routinely searched by vigilante mobs.
Comfort food does not speak of discomfort food, the foods that have always been considered uncomfortable for some. Discomfort foods have enabled Brahmins to keep whole ingredient families out of their dishes, and whole communities out of Brahmin public spaces. This is the moment to think about what that means.
Ingredients for my mother’s rasam (about 4 servings worth):
4 whole red chillies (Guntur or another hot variety)
3 teaspoons coriander seeds
1.5 teaspoons cumin seeds
0.5 teaspoon of fenugreek seeds
a sprig of curry leaves
a dash of asafoetida
All to be roasted in a little dab of ghee till they change color. Then, finely grind.
Boil two tomatoes in about two cups of water, with the juice from a small lemon-sized ball of tamarind, salt, a generous pinch of turmeric and asafoetida.
(You can add garlic, pepper and any other vegetables to the broth at this point.)
Once it reaches boiling point, add half a cup of well-cooked toor dal and slow boil for about 10 minutes. Add the rasam powder, a teaspoon of jaggery, boil for another five minutes and take it off the heat.²
(You can add whole spices and pressure cooked chicken for Gowda-style saaru or cooked mutton for Chettinad-style rasam at this point.)
Garnish with ghee, mustard seeds, more cumin, curry leaves, and some fresh coriander leaves.
(You should break all the rules and serve it with a fish or chicken fry at this point.)
Pallavi Rao is a feminist, anti-caste writer and activist.