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Yesterday I wanted to talk about onions but ended up talking about sodium....that has become the nature of this blog these days...it meanders.
The earliest occasion I recall tasting an onion was a November Sunday evening in Muthukur. I must have been about 8 then. November is the monsoon month on the Coromandel Coast. I was playing outdoors and suddenly there was a downpour. I rushed in and found my sisters crowding around our angeethi (kumpati...charcoal-fired brazier with iron ears) in the kitchen. Father was the master of ceremonies for the occasion. And he was tossing a whole onion on the red-hot charcoals with a tongs in his hand. And the sights and sounds and smells of the rainy evening were simply memorable.
After the poor onion got grilled thoroughly, he took it out and cooled it by his breath. And peeled its tender skin layer after layer and served them to my sisters. And ate a couple himself. And I, being the only son, got the inner core, or whatever was left of the onion, to munch with relish.
Talking of layers of onion, I am reminded of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's comparison of our inquiry into who we really are with peeling an onion. Apparently after discarding layer by layer our confusion of our inner selves like the layers of an onion (grilled thoroughly by worldly woes) we are ultimately left with nothing...no core...the I-sense is but an illusion. I don't know...I do know who I am right now...a crazy blogger.
My second memory of onion has to do with my grannie who used to arrive at her daughter's place in Muthukur for a fortnight every year during our summer vacations. The first thing she did was to bring down our earthen pot from its hiding place on the attic. She would then capture the kitchen mercilessly:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/11/autocrat-of-dining-floor.html
And make a whole lot of extra rice in the evening so that quite a bit of it is left over. And before going to bed, she would pour a couple of tumblers of water into the earthen pot, add a little salt and butter milk to it, and dump all that leftover cooked rice into the water in the pot. By morning the rice would have started fermenting and after more of the same drill next evening, the rice in the pot would have fully fermented. And by the next morning, breakfast for us kids would be ready...almost.
Then she would take a couple of raw onions and chop them into pieces and grind them in the huge stone grinder lying in our backyard, adding blood-red raw chillies and some salt. The resulting chutney was fit only for demons and kids...it would burn holes in your tongue if you taste it by chance. But when added to the fermented sour rice taken out in morsels from the pot, the concoction would be just heavenly. And the morsels would be dealt into the waiting hands of kids squatting in a semicircle around her plump figure. The leftover water was not to be thrown out. By no means...it stores the yeast or whatever is essential for fermenting the next evening's leftover rice.
This sublime dish was known as Taravani Rice. And the red chutney...Ulli Karam...Ulli is onion and Karam, the chillies that go with the ground onions. The earthen pot would go back onto the attic as soon as grannie left Muthukur...till she arrived next time round, when she would bring it down triumphantly.
The reason was that Father, a food fad in his own way, was ok with raw or grilled onions and chillies but would frown on the Taravani Rice. His conviction was that fermented rice had quite a bit alcohol in it and would make us drowsy and addicted and brain-dead...you can see for yourself...
Onion is an essential ingredient of one of our famous chutneys...the Gongura Pacchadi...made of grinding sour-leaves whose white flowers are simply lovely to watch and touch:
And in Nellore district, most everyone's lunch is never complete till they have half of a freshly cut onion as a side-dish...they munch it bit by bit as the lunch progresses from one course to the other.
However, widows (and widowers like me) were not supposed to touch onions...apparently the harmless bulb tends to increase our tamo-gun (simply speaking, libido).
I had a problem when my mother-in-law (M-i-L) was staying with us at KGP for all of six months...she was recovering from PT. As expected, as soon as she arrived, she captured the kitchen of my poor wife. After a week I asked my wife why onion had suddenly vanished from our household. And my wife told me that her mom, widowed a couple of years back, doesn't eat onions and so doesn't use them in any dish she made.
This was just short of Marie Antionette's autocracy. I asked my wife why her fond mom couldn't remove her portion of curry, sambar, chutney or whatever, for her own blessed consumption and then add the golden onions for the consumption of the rest of mankind. My wife just demurred...she was a dutiful daughter well before she became a dutiful wife...M-i-L's are first in the family protocol and rest of us have to obey...grumbling and bitching but lumping it.
...Posted by Ishani
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Yesterday I wanted to talk about onions but ended up talking about sodium....that has become the nature of this blog these days...it meanders.
The earliest occasion I recall tasting an onion was a November Sunday evening in Muthukur. I must have been about 8 then. November is the monsoon month on the Coromandel Coast. I was playing outdoors and suddenly there was a downpour. I rushed in and found my sisters crowding around our angeethi (kumpati...charcoal-fired brazier with iron ears) in the kitchen. Father was the master of ceremonies for the occasion. And he was tossing a whole onion on the red-hot charcoals with a tongs in his hand. And the sights and sounds and smells of the rainy evening were simply memorable.
After the poor onion got grilled thoroughly, he took it out and cooled it by his breath. And peeled its tender skin layer after layer and served them to my sisters. And ate a couple himself. And I, being the only son, got the inner core, or whatever was left of the onion, to munch with relish.
Talking of layers of onion, I am reminded of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's comparison of our inquiry into who we really are with peeling an onion. Apparently after discarding layer by layer our confusion of our inner selves like the layers of an onion (grilled thoroughly by worldly woes) we are ultimately left with nothing...no core...the I-sense is but an illusion. I don't know...I do know who I am right now...a crazy blogger.
My second memory of onion has to do with my grannie who used to arrive at her daughter's place in Muthukur for a fortnight every year during our summer vacations. The first thing she did was to bring down our earthen pot from its hiding place on the attic. She would then capture the kitchen mercilessly:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/11/autocrat-of-dining-floor.html
And make a whole lot of extra rice in the evening so that quite a bit of it is left over. And before going to bed, she would pour a couple of tumblers of water into the earthen pot, add a little salt and butter milk to it, and dump all that leftover cooked rice into the water in the pot. By morning the rice would have started fermenting and after more of the same drill next evening, the rice in the pot would have fully fermented. And by the next morning, breakfast for us kids would be ready...almost.
Then she would take a couple of raw onions and chop them into pieces and grind them in the huge stone grinder lying in our backyard, adding blood-red raw chillies and some salt. The resulting chutney was fit only for demons and kids...it would burn holes in your tongue if you taste it by chance. But when added to the fermented sour rice taken out in morsels from the pot, the concoction would be just heavenly. And the morsels would be dealt into the waiting hands of kids squatting in a semicircle around her plump figure. The leftover water was not to be thrown out. By no means...it stores the yeast or whatever is essential for fermenting the next evening's leftover rice.
This sublime dish was known as Taravani Rice. And the red chutney...Ulli Karam...Ulli is onion and Karam, the chillies that go with the ground onions. The earthen pot would go back onto the attic as soon as grannie left Muthukur...till she arrived next time round, when she would bring it down triumphantly.
The reason was that Father, a food fad in his own way, was ok with raw or grilled onions and chillies but would frown on the Taravani Rice. His conviction was that fermented rice had quite a bit alcohol in it and would make us drowsy and addicted and brain-dead...you can see for yourself...
Onion is an essential ingredient of one of our famous chutneys...the Gongura Pacchadi...made of grinding sour-leaves whose white flowers are simply lovely to watch and touch:
And in Nellore district, most everyone's lunch is never complete till they have half of a freshly cut onion as a side-dish...they munch it bit by bit as the lunch progresses from one course to the other.
However, widows (and widowers like me) were not supposed to touch onions...apparently the harmless bulb tends to increase our tamo-gun (simply speaking, libido).
I had a problem when my mother-in-law (M-i-L) was staying with us at KGP for all of six months...she was recovering from PT. As expected, as soon as she arrived, she captured the kitchen of my poor wife. After a week I asked my wife why onion had suddenly vanished from our household. And my wife told me that her mom, widowed a couple of years back, doesn't eat onions and so doesn't use them in any dish she made.
This was just short of Marie Antionette's autocracy. I asked my wife why her fond mom couldn't remove her portion of curry, sambar, chutney or whatever, for her own blessed consumption and then add the golden onions for the consumption of the rest of mankind. My wife just demurred...she was a dutiful daughter well before she became a dutiful wife...M-i-L's are first in the family protocol and rest of us have to obey...grumbling and bitching but lumping it.
...Posted by Ishani
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