United By Food

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 It was in Coorg that I had my epiphany about the souring agents that are used in that vast, unfathomable entity called Indian food. I was eating a dish of fried aubergines at the homestead of a friend, Kavita Muthappa, and a rich, sweet-sour flavour took me by surprise. It was almost like the reduction of an aged red wine. It suffused the dish of a humble vegetable that I am not even particularly fond of, and made it taste ambrosial. Outside, the rain drummed steadily on the tin rooftop, as it had been doing relentlessly all day and most of the previous night, making the slopes of Kavita’s coffee estate too slippery to walk on.

Coorg, in the southernmost part of Karnataka, just inside the coastal region, is home to a small community, the Kodavas, who are believed to have descended from the army of Alexander the Great. Their cuisine contains a good deal of red meat, particularly pork, but it was the delicacy of kachampuli—the vinegar made from garcinia, the fruit of a tree that grows along the western coast—that fascinated me. In Goa, garcinia is used in a sun-dried form. And the related species that is found further south, in Kerala, is dried in a contraption made of coconut husks set afire, to give it a slightly smoky taste. The other state where garcinia grows is Assam. There, it is called thekera and is used in a cold drink, among other things. Kachampuli exemplifies the sheer breadth of Indian food to me. It is an ingredient that is at once dynamic—changing form with the way it is processed and used, and yet unknown to the majority of India.

If one were to characterise Indian food in a single word, it would probably be ‘thali’. That steel platter with its six or seven