Image by vegdevil via FlickrI come from Udupi, the town in Southern Karnataka that launched a million hotels across the globe. Its name has become synonymous with clean, fast, vegetarian South Indian food. The cuisine that got the Indian middle classes to switch from chicken butter masala to masala dosas. Still, for all its fame, very few Indians know that there is actually a town called Udupi, or realise that there is more to Udupi food than dosas, idlis, and vadas.Idlis, Dosas are typical of Udupi cuisine. Soumya Dey/Wikimedia Commons
For much of my life, I didn't really get Udupi cuisine either. I have never lived in Udupi, and spent most of my childhood overseas, interrupted by brief spells in Bangalore . But, unlike many Indian families abroad, my mother never resorted to pizzas for dinner or cornflakes for breakfast. We would awake instead to the sound of dosas sizzling on the tava, the house filled with the aroma of pure ghee. One day we would have lacy and fragile neer dosas with jaggery and coconut, and robust and thick adais with spicy chutney, the next.
Later in the morning, the house would be filled with the heavenly smell of coconut, chillies and assorted spices being sauted to make "huli" (similar to sambhar, but oh so much more complex and richly layered) for lunch. We ate off steel plates with our hands, learning early how to build a mound of rice to hold the runny saaru, a tangier version of the Tamil rasam, garnished with crunchy haplas (papads). We would go on to the palyas (sauted vegetables) or perhaps a deliciously sour gojju (chutney) and then proceed to the main course, the coconut-ty huli. Our meal would end with mosranna, the curds and rice without which no South Indian meal is considered complete. {Read on}