The frilly salads and pretty berries of summer are long gone. Slow simmering pots fog up the cold windowpanes and fill the kitchen with warm aromas. This has to be one of the best things about autumn and winter in my kitchen.
This is a time for hearty soups, stews, and brews to warm your toes! What better time, then, to cook up one of my all time slow cooked favourites – mudaré kanni, a savoury, deep reddish brown sauce made by boiling and reducing an extract of horse gram.
Mudaré, or horse gram is one of the unpolished gems in Indian cooking. As the name might suggest, this most humble of legumes was considered suitable food for horses as well as cattle feed. (Read more about this legume and its various health benefits in this excellent article by Ammini Ramachandran.)
Despite the name, it is most definitely food for humans too! The bone chilling cold and damp of the Coorg monsoon, and the cooler winter months, call for fortifying foods that nourish and heat the body. Few foods fit the bill better than mudaré.
“Borrow horse gram in bulk from cart driver or farmer.” Says Jaya Shenoy, in her wonderful cookbook “Dakshin Bharat Dishes”.