Soul Food for the South Indian Palate
Soul Food for the South Indian Palate
Curd rice in Bangalore
This city sometimes feels like a wide river I am trying to ford to reach my friends on the other side. We tell ourselves we are too busy or that the summer this year is particularly hot, and that is why we cannot meet more often. We don’t always tell the truth.
We are at Koshy’s. The most Bangalorean thing to do in Bangalore is to hang out at Koshy’s, an old restaurant in the middle of town that retains an unimpeachable disdain for the new business of hurriedness. People grow old around its tables, and we talk about how one day we will, hopefully, be among them.
Liver on toast is the best thing to eat at Koshy’s, I am told. However, I am a vegetarian, and for me it is not an option. Koshy’s has been a constant through the years. I have conceived a food journal there, begun a relationship, made new friends, gossiped, grown older. It is our village square. And whenever it was close to any mealtime, sometimes even when it wasn’t, at Koshy’s I have always asked for curd rice, or mosaranna, or thayir sadam as we call it in these parts of the country.
No one I know believes me when I say how good Koshy’s curd rice is, especially in relation to the gooey, paste-like nonsense you get in every other restaurant in the city. Curd rice is something you eat at home, not something you order for a late breakfast as a standalone dish at, of all places, Koshy’s. But here, the cold bowl of perfectly tempered rice is an ode to mama’s cooking, to the soul-food status that curd rice, very deservingly, has attained in the palates of us true-blue south Indians.
Curd rice at Koshy’s is, I like to think, a well-kept secret. It comes when we are in the middle of discussing our current reading lists, in a shallow bowl, all jet-white and gleaming. It is tempered with mustard seeds, mildly spiced, and has a big red chili garnish, “like a cherry on ice cream,” says one of my friends.
It is cold, the perfect temperature to soothe a belly fired up by the many cups of coffee we have had while going through small-town gossip from back home in the hills, where some of us are from. It is milky with a hint of sourness from the curd, and vanishes within minutes.
I am tempted to order another plate, but by then we have made plans to go to Pecos, another of those ancient establishments, for beer. We are, all of us migrants from elsewhere, as close to local Bangaloreans as we can get on that bright May afternoon.