Our daily flatbread

Akki otti, a rice flatbread, is a staple at breakfast. My grandmother made these the traditional way, patting out the dough in circular movements on a dampened piece of muslin placed on a round wooden rolling board. These days, there are food processors and roti presses that make short work of the process of kneading and pressing out. There is nothing more evocative of an early morning in a Coorg household than the smell of freshly made akki ottis being given  a final quick roasting on glowing embers.

Akki Otti

• 3 cups soft, cooked rice (freshly cooked is best but leftover rice is fine too)
• 1 cup rice flour
• Salt to taste
• Rice flour for dusting

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Rain and paddy fields

Rice really is the heart of Kodava cuisine. The narrow valleys of northern Coorg and the fertile lower lying areas of south Coorg traditionally produced the grain that every household relied on for their staple. A second crop is not common since the harvest coincides with the arrival of the monsoon. There are several kinds of rice grown, but the most favoured variety, particularly for pulaos, is the small grained and wonderfully fragrant jeerige sanna, or sanakki, (the same as the jeeraka chamba of Kerala).

Types of processed rice – clockwise from top left: raw, parboiled, broken, flattened, puffed, and powdered

Rice (akki) is processed and cooked in an astonishing number of ways into the perfect foils for the foods that the changing seasons bring. From the hearty akki otti (rice flatbread), to the ethereal oduputtu, scented with “banda” (resin of the indian copal tree, Vateria indica) the creativity and ingenuity of generations of cooks shines through.

Being an army family, it goes without saying that we moved house a lot. But whichever corner of the country we found ourselves in, once a year, like homing pigeons, we would find ourselves making for the green hills of Coorg. Here, we would converge on my mother’s family home in Mercara (Madikeri), joined by aunts, uncles and cousins.

It was one large household filled with noise and bustle.The noise was mostly provided by a gaggle of unruly cousins and the bustle came mainly from the region of the kitchen, which had to cope with some rather gregarious appetites. And we were fed and watered from morning to night with unflagging devotion and patience by my grandmother and her trusty handmaidens and sometimes the odd handyman too.

What did we eat? Stick around, we’ll get to that soon enough!

My grandmother lost her mother when she was very young. Being the fifth of seven sisters, she learned to cook by observing her older siblings’ efforts. A photograph of her, taken early in the twentieth century, shows her as a young schoolgirl at St Joseph’s Convent, simply known as “Convent” in Mercara. (In the third picture above, she’s the one peering nervously over the right shoulder of a rather stern looking nun).