Returning recently from a weekend stay with friends, the car loaded with vegetables and fruit from their garden, I was reminded of the customary exchanges of home grown produce in Coorg.

When one sets out to visit someone in Coorg, chances are that the back of the vehicle will be laden with a sampler of whatever is currently yielding on the land, garden or kitchen garden. Avocados, a big bunch of mara balé (a local variety of banana), or an even bigger jackfruit. On the way home, one will very likely have been gifted, in exchange, some chikoos (sapotas), lychees, maybe some unusually succulent broad beans.

And there are the customary exchanges that accompany the exchanges along the lines of:

“You must try these. I got the plants from Kuttappa last year and they’re fruiting like nobody’s business. Fantastic flavour and such small seeds!”

“We saved the seeds from the fruit Kalu sent us but they didn’t germinate, so he’s promised to send us some cuttings.”

“I looked up the mystery fruit and it’s a Lakoocha.”

“These are limes from the plants Jagan brought from Bangalore a few years ago.”

The conversation  typically meanders in circles of sources, ideal growing conditions, and promises of more exchanges.

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In Coorg, as in most of South India, rice in some form is at at the heart of every meal. It never ceases to amaze me, just how creative cooks through the ages have been with a staple like rice.

The Kodava repertoire of rice based preparations is large, ranging from flatbreads to pulaos, pancakes to dumplings and more. And all those “puttus”. For the most part, a “puttu” is some form of steamed rice cake, savoury or sweet. But just to mix it up a little, there are several other kinds of preparations, fried, or made with roasted rice, that also carry the “puttu” tag!

Broken raw rice, known as thari, is used to make three of the most popular puttus, namely paputtu (broken rice, cooked with milk and coconut), nuuputtu (cooked broken rice pressed into noodles), and kadambuttu (steamed dumplings made from broken rice). The latter two use a finer grain of thari than is used for paputtu. If you don’t have access to suitable broken rice, it’s quite easy to make your own at home.

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Kachampuli

The most commonly used souring agent in Kodava cooking, that “vinegar” is really the concentrated juice of Garcinia gummi-gutta,  the same fruit that is used in dried form in parts of Kerala, where it is known as punampuli or kudampuli. It is a relative of kokum, which is used in some Mangalorean, Konkan and Maharashtrian cuisines. In the Kodava language, the fruit is known as panapuli, while the boiled extract is kachampuli.

Possibly because the tree fruits  during the monsoon months, making it difficult to dry and store in large quantities, the preservation of panapuli in Coorg takes a unique form. The result is kachampuli – a potent, concentrated, souring agent. It also has a very long shelf life. Every Coorg home has a bottle of kachampuli at the ready at all times! My mother made sure to carry a bottle with her as we travelled the length and the breadth of the country on various postings. I have bottles of the extract that are more than 12 years old, and while it does lose the fruitiness of younger batches, the sour power is quite intact!

Kachampuli is usually used in the final stages of cooking, mainly in meat and fish dishes, most famously in pandi (pork) curry.

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No, not the sequel to Three Idiots!

These fruity fools are part of my ongoing celebration of the berry harvest of summer. There’s a wealth  of recipes out there to transform this bounty into all kinds of cakes, pies, tarts, ice creams, sorbets, jams and jellies. I love it all, but, at the end of the day, there are few things I find more satisfying than a fruit fool.

All it takes to make a fool is crushed or puréed fruit, whipped cream, a little sugar to taste, all folded together gently. That’s it, a quick-fix. And for very little effort, you’re rewarded with a silky dollop of fruity luxury.

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Long, long before Chef Floyd Cardoz knocked the socks off the Top Chef competition with his upuma, there was Balan.

But first, a confession. As a child, I HATED upuma (or uppittu as we knew it) with a passion. Now there was very little by way of food that I actively disliked, but this was definitely close to the top of the list. Perhaps it had to do with the transitory nature of the stuff. Half an hour after eating an uppittu breakfast, my stomach would start to rumble as ominously as that Coorg monsoon thunder, forcing me to go in search of something more substantial to weigh me down. Not that that’s a bad thing necessarily, but you know how breakfast being the most important meal and all,  you can’t quite shake off a sorry start to the day.

There was also an air of afterthought bordering on downright negligence associated with an uppittu breakfast. What? No akki ottis, kneaded with strong hands and patted out painstakingly before being puffed on hot embers? Or dosas, or idlis, lovingly made from batter that was a full twenty four hours in the making? Heck! Even simple toast to slather with butter and jam would be accepted gracefully as a substitute for the varied cooked breakfasts one quickly grew accustomed to when in Coorg.

No, uppittu is what we got when the kitchen was busy with more important things. Or possibly just a little low on supplies, or help. So it seemed.

I know I’m not alone. If I did a survey of homes in Coorg, I’m pretty sure the results would show uppitu at the bottom of the list of breakfast choices.Its appearance at the table was usually met with one or more of the following reactions:

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While I’m eating blueberries by the handful, back in Coorg, people are getting their own colourful food fix. The wet, dark months of the monsoon bring about a mysterious transformation in an otherwise quite unremarkable plant known locally as “maddu thoppu”, lit. medicine leaf (Justicia wynaadensis).

This plant grows wild around Coorg, favouring moist, shady areas. During the month of the most intense monsoon rain*, mid-July to mid-August, a period known as “kakkada”, an extract is made from boiling the stems and leaves in plenty of fresh water. The extract has a peculiarly medicinal fragrance and the colour can range from shades of magenta, through to deep purple and, when at its strongest, indigo.There is a countdown to the day when it is believed the potency of the plant is at its peak.

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