Pastoral Potboilers

Channel Surf ‘N’ Turfing Through Rural India

- Sonal Shah

The sight of early watermelons, piled up like cannonballs along the roads, had worked its way into my brain, and I found myself searching for recipes that incorporated the ingredient. One thing led to another, and there I was in Gudivada, Andhra Pradesh, watching 106-year-old granny Masthanamma cooking chicken in a hollowed out watermelon over an open flame.

YouTube took me there, of course, via a channel called Country Foods, which has since gone predictably viral, with over 3,00,000 subscribers and 54 million views. However, Country Foods—launched by Srinath Reddy and Laxman K. last August, and featuring Laxman’s rheumy-eyed, sharp-tongued great-grandmother—is only one of over a dozen rural recipe channels from India, most from coastal states, particularly Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

“Watermelon!” exclaims Ravi V., founder of My Money My Food, down the phone from Chennai. “Everyone is doing watermelon chicken, watermelon juice, this, that.” A transcriptionist on weekdays, Ravi travels to nearby villages to cook on weekends. After having kids, he wanted them to experience the flavour of his own rural childhood and started uploading videos of these outings in October 2015.