FROM GOD'S OWN COUNTRY

MRS KM MATHEW, the lady who took the cuisine of Kerala to various parts of the world, persuaded chefs and home cooks to give her recipes from their kitchens in the 1960s and '70s. Her finest recipes now become a part of a special book her daughter curated this year.

- Shraddha Kamdar

Imagine the 1950s. No television (yes, it came to India in 1959), no internet, hardly any accessibility to cookbooks, and the only way to get recipes was to either inherit them from your family or coax friends to share theirs. In 1955, when Mrs KM Mathew cradled her third and last child in her arms, she also held the copy of her very first cookbook Pachaka Kala (The Art Of Cooking). Little did she know that she would go on to write 23 more cookbooks in Malayalam and English, championing the cuisine of Kerala, as well as three travelogues, and a book on haircare over the next 40 years. For 25 of these 40 years, she was also the editor of the women’s magazine Vanitha.

For Annamma Mathew (she later changed it to the more popular Mrs KM Mathew and never looked back), what began as a weekly newspaper column at her father-in-law’s insistence changed the course of her life. Well aware of Indian taste buds, she knew what to offer her readers, whether they were the nuanced delicacies of Kerala, the Tamil offerings she had come to cherish from her days in Madurai as a student, or the Kannadiga dishes she learned at a later stage when living in a coffee plantation nestled in the scenic hills of Chikmagalur, Karnataka.

Her life had Mrs KM Mathew not only travelling to various towns and cities, but also spending a considerable amount of time in different kitchens to get to the heart of a particular dish. Her knowledge of the English language, which was not so common at the time among Indian women, worked to her advantage when it came to entering the kitchens of the most elite restaurants of the time, requesting recipes from chefs and coming away with a list of tips on cooking!