Simple rice-based dishes to celebrate Navarathri

To sit in front of a banana leaf in a Hoysala or Havyaka Brahmin home during Navarathri is to encounter a cuisine defined by simplicity and frugality. No show-off, to quote modern parlance. Cooking for the goddess involves ritual purity. Every Kannadiga can recall their grandmothers (ajjis) waking up before dawn, taking a bath outside by the well, and then entering the kitchen with dripping wet clothes to light the lamp before turning on the kitchen stove. Rice or Anna is the cornerstone of this cuisine. The type of rice varies by region. In Dakshina Kannada, for instance, a variety of parboiled rice called Oorpel Ari in Tulu is a reddish pink grain which fades to pale pink when cooked into a fermented overnight gruel called kanji.

Drinking overnight soaked rice as kanji for breakfast remains something that you can still see all over Bangalore. Women on push carts have a large earthenware pot from which they serve Kanji to workers who line up for this gut-friendly, cheap and wholesome breakfast dish. Ayurveda calls this dhanyamla or fermented cereals and several studies document its healing properties.

Now, here’s the thing. The triumvirate of oota, saaru and palya (stir-fried vegetables, also called curry, poriyal, sabzi in other parts of India) remain the cornerstone of vegetarian lunches pretty much all over Bangalore. Saaru is hard to translate, but in my mind, its consistency is somewhat between a sambar and a rasam, which has been touted as a healthy and tasty functional food.

The most famous type of saarus are soppu saaru and bas-saaru. Soppu means greens and as the book, Chasing Soppu documents, these greens are usually foraged from all over the city, with some growing even between urban pavements. But all saarus need not be vegetarian. For example, the Kadu Kuruba tribals of Karnataka make a saaru with a ritually sacrificed hen in the gruel, alongside a good helping of leaves and lentils.

The grain that is the centrepiece of an Oota is rice, but historically this was a luxury in interior Karnataka.

In Kempa Gowda’s time, Bengaluru was a landscape that thrived on dryland grains such as finger millet or ragi. Rice was cultivated in river basins and the rain-drenched coastal plains. Seed banks show that Karnataka is home to over 2,000 indigenous rice varieties, but Bengaluru contains only 14 in this list.

Community seed networks such as Sahaja Samrudha have documented about a thousand distinct living native varieties cultivated by traditional farmers. Most of the rice is grown in the coastal and saline belts of Karwar and Mangaluru, or the Malenadu and Western Ghats region that includes Shivamogga, Uttara Karnataka, and Chikkamagaluru. The fragrant grains have beautiful names such as Gandhasale, Mysore Mallige, Jeerage Sanna, and Mullare. In and around Bangalore, grow the medium-grain rice varieties such as Rajamudi, Sanna Akki and others favoured by royal families.

To experience a traditional Oota, you have to attend a wedding and watch the orchestrated service, beginning with a pinch of salt and then following a standard format: salt, pickle, chutney, kosambari (salad), palya (stir-fried vegetable), gojju (a tangy curry), rice, saaru, huli (a thicker sambar-like stew), sweets like payasa, and finally, curd rice which ends the meal. To this day, South Indians don’t feel like they have finished a meal until they eat curd rice. The point of a traditional Oota is to imbue the meal with the Shadrasa principle of balancing six tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent, and astringent. Rich Mughlai cuisine, this was not.

Medieval Karnataka followed a similar format with a few variations linked to availability and quality. Cooking was done exclusively with ghee. Chilies had not made an appearance so pepper was used. Tamarind was extensively used, as were spices.

Ancient texts like the Lokopakara by King Chavundaraya explains different methods of using spices and making blends for recipes; types of cookware and choosing different vessels for different recipes; preserving food and fruits to make pickles and papad; methods of making butter and ghee and different ways to season them; and ingredient substitutions. There is also a chapter about making flavoured yogurts and coagulated buffalo milk cheese for sweets and sweets made from rice flour. The last chapter is dedicated to beverages made from different types of fruits and ways to season them.

All of these historical strands culminate in the ceremonial ritual of the traditional Kannadiga meal: the Oota. Unchanged over centuries, is a testament to culinary science. In Bangalore, have the traditional Oota at any of the humble lunch homes across the city, ranging from vegetarian ones like Halli Mane, Andhra meals like Nagarjuna, Coastal Karnataka Oota at Kudla type restaurants, and Naati Gowda meals at Gowdru Mane or Ranganna Military Hotel.

(Shoba Narayan is Bengaluru-based award-winning author. She is also a freelance contributor who writes about art, food, fashion and travel for a number of publications.)