South Indian cuisine - demystified!!. Review on Samayal - Viji Varadarajan

I love food .... and to my eternal disgust am unable to make even a simple thing like coconut chutney without step-by-step instructions! Stepping into the kitchen (or my personal chemistry lab) for the first time after leaving home and carrying out tortuous experiments on myself and others, I felt like a total fish-out-of-water (or murderess, take your pick!) and was only helped by mom patiently explaining recipes over the phone to me. After my mom's khana, I have a decided partiality for the South Indian dishes I have eaten in my friends moms' kitchens. While I did harass them all for their recipes, I would tear my hair out with despair over measurements like ball, handful, armful, mouthful, dash, pinch, ad infinitum, and nothing ever tasted the same. That is, until my search for an authentic South Indian cookbook led me to this one. This book is called Samayal: The Pleasures of South Indian Vegetarian Cooking and the author is Ms. Viji Varadarajan.

'Samayal' in Tamil simply means 'cooking'. The book covers Tanjore and Palghat cuisine and most of the recipes come direct from Ms. Varadarajan's kitchen. The book comes with a delightful little introduction by the author where she has elaborated on the satvic cuisine of South India and has given a detailed description of the staple diet of the South, their traditional every day and festival foods, all with little anecdotal inputs alongside.

The one thing I really loved the book for is that for (ex)-novices like me, Ms. Varadarajan has really given a lot of detail on methods and measurements for cooking. She explains what she means when she says 1 ball of tamarind, or something as mundane as how to cook rice and vegetables in the microwave/ rice cooker or even how to use a pressure pan to cook different items in. She gives little tidbits on storage of herbs and vegetables and lists the entire calorie content after each recipe. These little tips and information have made this book an invaluable asset to me.

The recipes are presented in the following sections:

~ Rice Dishes - These are not extensive, but contain tried and true recipes from the ordinary lemon rice and curd rice to an exotic mango rice. The Bisi Bele rice is something I will swear by, it is yummy!!!

~ Vegetables in Gravy - This section contains sambhars, kootus and kuzhambus and there is an exhaustive list of each. I couldnt be happier. No longer is my sambhar repertoire limited to the MTR sambhar ... now I can dazzle guests with a new taste each time :P Some of the sambhar recipes include Small Onion Sambhar, Drumstick-Methi leaves Sambhar, and of course there are recipes on Potato Stew and Avial.

~ Kootus as Side Dishes & Dry Vegetables - These 2 sections contain side dishes which are accompaniments to a main course. The dry dishes section is heaven sent. After a disastrous meal, when I tried to cook cabbage thoran by 'imagining' the taste, now atleast I can do it by the book and none of my guests have to look green around the gills after a bite.

~ Chutneys & Pachadis(Cooked Vegetables in spiced Yogurt) - Ok, two more fantastic sections! Speaking as one who has lived only on coconut and peanut chutney until I bought this book. Besides the ubiquitous coconut chuntney some other interesting ones are tomato onion chutney and curry leaves chutney. The pachadi sections has yummy recipes like Okra in Spiced Yogurt and Cocktail Idlis in Spicy Yogurt.

~ Rasams (South Indian Soups) - Again, no more MTR rasam! And the pepper rasam and garlic rasam are lip-smacking delicious.

~ Tiffins (Snacks) & Payasams and soft candies - Two of my favorite categories. There are amazing varieties of dosas (rava, masala), uthappams, idlis (rava, rice and kancheepuram), idiappams, uppamas and upittus, vadas (masala, udad dal, etc) and a whole lot more, as well as delicious sweets like kozhukattai, badam halwa, jackfruit and banana jam, myriad varieties of payasams and even a most useful recipe on how to make ghee!! These 2 sections are truly a foodie's (read mine) delight.

~ Podis - Last but not the least, this is one of the most important sections. Ms. Varadarajan gives recipes for all the podis (spice powders) handed down to her through generations of superb cooks. No more packaged spices .... grind your own to add a superbly authentic taste to the food you prepare (of course, it'll be a while before I overcome my laziness to do something like this :).

I've tried a lot of the recipes in this book and all of them have been easy to prepare and taste incredible. Ms. Varadarajan even has a glossary with Indian ingredients and their English names and even commonly used names in the US. I will never forget the epiphany I had while standing in a grocery store aisle, when I finally registered that the Mexican (?) 'chayote' was actually the Indian 'chow-chow'. Ms. Varadarajan has packed a fount of information into this book and if you are a beginner or wish to expand your culinary borders and recipes or are stumped for a gift, try this book out. You will not regret it!!

If anyone has used this book or if you decide to buy it, do let me know what you think of the recipes. Any other suggestions for cook-books of ANY cuisines are more than welcome.

Bon apetit!!