South Indian Vegetarian Cookbooks
Two Great Cookbooks about South Indian Vegetarian Cooking, the Great and the Easy.
Nov 28, 2006
Some of the most interesting vegetarian cooking originates in southern India, including the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, which have a long tradition of strict vegetarianism and deep adherence to tradition. For most Western cooks, the techniques are daunting and the ingredients, baffling. If you can sort it out, however, South Indian food is delicious. These two cookbooks are a great place to start.
South Indians begin a meal with rasam (a thin soup) and rice. (Many times, rasam is skipped.) The main course is sambar (a medium-density stew, thicker than French Onion soup, thinner than chili) that includes lentils and is seasoned with tamarind and other spices. There’s a vegetable side dish called sabji. Preserved, spicy-as-heck pickles, such as garlic, lemon, onions, mango, gooseberry, or green chiles, are often eaten as small side dishes. (A friend from northern India once remarked that Southern Indians will pickle anything.) The meal concludes with rice mixed with yogurt. A South Indian usually feels that the day is not over until one has eaten the rice and yogurt.
Many meals, however, are composed of snack foods, like eating a plate of appetizers for supper. These include adai and dosai, which are like crepes, made of ground rice and lentils. They’re not gritty. They’re tasty. Another is idlis, steamed rice dumplings. All of these is eaten with various chutneys, so it’s kind of like eating nachos or chips and dips for a meal.
Dakshin, Vegetarian Cuisine from South India (Chandra Padmanabhan), is the ultimate South Indian cookbook. The word Dakshin is Sanskrit for "south." This cookbook is comprehensive and beautifully photographed. The glossary alone is worth the price of the book for its pictures of the different spices and lentils. The recipes in this book are delicious but complicated. My mother-in-law, an extraordinary cook, was impressed by it. About half the recipes have a lot of steps, including making the main dish, making a spice paste to stir in, then finishing with a seasoning spice (like toasted mustard seeds.) One particular recipe required five pots to make one dish. That’s a lot of clean-up for a time-pressed person. This cookbook is for people who have done some Indian cooking in the past or those who really, really like to cook. The recipes produce food worthy of upscale restaurants. The Adai, a snack item like a crispy crepe, is delicious. The Mysore sambar is wonderful. The coconut chutney recipes are complicated but, again, they're what you would find in an expensive restaurant. All those warnings aside, some of the recipes are easy, have smaller ingredient lists, and can be thrown together on weekday nights.
The Art of South Indian Cooking (Alamelu Vairavan and Patricia Marquardt), however, is a compilation of South Indian recipes that is more accessible to the Western cook. Most of the recipes are one page and less than 10 ingredients. While that sounds like a lot, 7 of them are usually spices. These recipes are how South Indians eat at home. My mother-in-law nodded a lot when she read this book. The onion chutney recipes are scrumptious. The tamarind rice recipe is my fall-back one. The standard recipe for most vegetable sabjis is in here: pop mustard seeds and urad dal in oil, add the vegetable and cook, add salt, red chile powder, and a little coconut. Stir. That’s it. There are no pictures except the one of the front, but you don’t really need them.
Try these other vegetarian cookbooks, too, and good luck with your South Indian feast!
