Mooma’s Morsels – A Matrilineal Kitchen from Kayalpatnam | Sumaiya Mustafa

The figure of maternal grandmother is no nostalgia or a memory of holidays to me. She is intrinsic to my everyday from childhood to hitherto. She is the cornerstone to even my four year old daughter’s every day. Simply, she is the Madam-Knows-it-all of our house. If this leads your imagination to think that my mother and I are single parents, then that is not true. It’s only that my father and husband moved in with us after their weddings. It’s a social custom in our part of the world.

Deep South in coastal Tamil Nadu where the turquoise blue Bay of Bengal relentlessly splish splash to a soapy foam is where Kayalpatnam, my hometown, is. Anything by the side of the sea turns lyrical. Kayalpatnam isn’t isolated from that fact. Home to one of India’s oldest Muslim community for more than a thousand years, it can be dubbed as Tamil Nadu’s best kept secret. The Tamil speaking Muslims of our town guard customs that are so ancient. All the same, Kayalpatnam doesn’t believe in lopsided guarding of customs and traditions forgetting contemporary realities. It’s deeply cosmopolitan and deeply local at the same time.

The kitchen and pantry of our households are the conveyers of this message.  While tinned cans of tuna decorate the hind corner of my grandmother’s fridge, it’s Adai Oorgai (lime preserves) by the side of the stove that’s cardinal to the running of her kitchen. Like any house, kitchen is the boiler room of ours too where Mooma ( maternal grandmother) exercises her fully authority from resource allocation to stashing. It’s where she decides which batter and what meat will cook alongside Neinama Latha, her sidekick for over half-a-century.

Neinama Latha is the one who cooks for the family though Mooma spearheads its functionalities.  Our regular fare isn’t Idli, Dosai, Sambhar, and Medu Vadai like one would like to imagine a Tamil kitchen. This doesn’t make Mooma’s kitchen a lesser Tamil, in my humble opinion. It’s in Kayalpatnam’s kitchens one gets to hear archaic Tamil words. While the whole of Tamil Nadu calls its curries and gravies Kulambu, it’s Aanam in Kayalpatnam. A word that had been practically erased from Tamil dictionaries.

Meen Aanam (fish curry) boils everyday in Mooma’s stove. From Monday to Thursday, it’s perpetual. Only the fish changes with what was the best to sell on any given day. On Fridays, we hop from the blessings of the sea to land. It’s always mutton curry or kida kari aanam like we call it. Fridays are the days of Jummah prayers and special meals are cooked  in Muslim households worldover.

Mooma’s meal plan table which is real-time according to the week tries to cover all of Kayalpatnam’s very own delicacies which can be found nowhere else. Kari Adai, a meat based breakfast dish which can be called a meaty pancake or crepe is a family favourite. The batter for it is always made by Mooma. With coarsely toasted rice flour, leftover mutton curry, and eggs, Mooma’s plump fingers jointly work together to make it to a pourable batter. Standing there  by the side of the kitchen counter with her greasy palm and yellow batter , she begins to sweat in no time as her blouse gets to be pasted to her body. She is 84 and is too old to stand by the stove for hours to dish out Kari Adai after Kari Adai. With generous lashings of ghee and coconut oil mixed together, Neinama Latha and my mother take turns to make Kari Adais on an Adai kal(tawa for making Adai) which has been with Mooma for decades. Another thing which Mooma is very religious about are her kitchenwares. She is hell bent to give up on the long-standing ones. Like the Adai Kal, there are so many other pots, pans, and jugs that have attained timelessness in her kitchen.

Our kitchen and living space of the house are separated by a narrow corridor that runs in between. Before we redid our kitchen area to make a new house for my younger sister’s wedding, ours used to be a very spacious kitchen with even more spacious service space for washing clothes, and utensils followed by a backyard of kitchen garden with a guava tree, curry leaves plant, and  pandan leaf plants.

Pandan leaves are our other curry leaves. It’s there in our every tempering. It’s the tone to our curries. The sizzling floral smell of pandan leaves in coconut oil is the smell-track of my house and Kayalpatnam in general. A cross-sectional walk in the town at 12’o clock in the noon will leave your nostrils invaded with smells of pandan leaves in different combinations in different Kari aanams (curries). The refreshing floral smell of pandan reached Kayalpatnam hopping port to port in the Indian Ocean all the way from South East Asia along with the seafaring men.

It’s now fathomable when I say the pantry of Kayalpatnam is also home to non-perishable innovations like ‘Seeni Maavu‘. Seeni Maavu’s  birth story was midwifed by long sea-voyages of the Indian Ocean trade demanding long-lasting nautical supplies to eat. There is no such thing as a stale Seeni Maavu. It’s in its tendency to not go stale. It mimics the looks of the sand by the sea. Made by meticulously toasted rice flour, coconut milk, eggs, and sugar it’s that one thing without which Kayalpatnam’s diaspora cannot do. It’s always made by expert makers who are sent a word when someone in the family leaves.

Whenever my uncle leaves for the U.S , Esakki Ammal Akka is the one Mooma calls for. Mooma entrusts a five kg sack of raw rice, coconuts, eggs, and a quarter litre of ghee bottle to her. It’s now upon Akka to conduct that sorcery of making a never dying Seeni Maavu with every ingredient that is bound to go stale easily. From washing, drying, and taking it for milling, Akka takes care of it. She takes it back to her home, toasts it and sets on to making it. Before we lost our backyard to building another house, all of these were done there. The edible sand is then packed in ziplocs by mum for my uncle to take to his other home in Atlanta . It’s literally and figuratively the taste of homeland’s soil.

Seeni Maavu comes handy on a busy day breakfast or becomes a lordly snack in no time for guests who show up from nowhere. It’s enjoyed as is or with a well ripe local variety of banana called the Poovam.

Mooma has raised a brigade of snack-eaters in the form of kids, grand kids, and great grand kids. She diligently keeps the house stocked with snacks all the time. While that comes to back her with situations when guests come home unannounced, it’s for the most part for us to snack between meals. Murukku of all kinds are permanent residents of our home just like us.

It’s from Valli Akka ,who hawks door to door, Mooma buys them. Omapodi Murukku and Achu Murukku are my personal favourites. In the air of our small-town life we have been lucky enough to enjoy treats from home-made businesses that are naïve to sub-standard quality. Kayalpatnam is home to unique sweetmeats that are to be found nowhere else in the country.

Dum Adai, a crumbly cake-cross-cookie is one such. Our tea time fare is accompanied by a variety of munching and crackling sounds. While Dum Adai lives well between a week or two before going stale, Vaadas of Kayalpatnam are eaten fresh and must be consumed within hours of making.

Generally, when in Tamil Nadu people look for Medu Vadai and Paruppu Vadai. But when you are in Kayalpatnam, you look for Manja Vaada and Sothu Vaada. Tea and Vaada are in a quiet dash with each other always. Vaadas are crisp, deep fried rice flour based dough with fillings of coconuts, onions, and dried Maldives fish called Maasi. It’s bought from hawkers that are adept makers of Vaada in the neighbourhood. It’s sold door to door. Waking up to a greasy old newspaper, wilted by holding the Vaadas together, sitting quietly at the corner of the dining table lit by mellowing morning light, is my every day.

Before all of us, it’s Mooma who wakes up to answer every hawker in the Mudukku (a private alleyway that runs between any two houses in Kayalpatnam). The either sides of a Mudukku open into another street and the space is exclusive to women. Women hawkers and sellers also use Mudukku to reach out to matriarchs at their doorstep. As the family’s uncoronated head, she is the first one to rise up while we battle against the cozy whirling fans to wake up in the mornings.  Right after her morning prayers, she heads straight to the kitchen to make her morning tea that gets filled up in a grey flask with a white cap that’s been with her for years. Ginger and cardamom are customary to our tea making .Tea and masala tea are not two different things here.

According to an unwritten cookbook of the town, it’s nearly 75 grams of ginger for four cups of tea. Tea is called as Theyilai in our households. Tea here is milky with almost no water. But I have seen Mooma rinsing the emptied milk packet with water before adding it to the pot of milk. That’s all is the water that goes in our tea. Mooma has a high regard for Ceylon tea. Her father was a gold merchant who had his business based out of Colombo. So, the family is habituated to Ceylon tea which he brought down in his every monthly visit to Kayalpatnam. In Kayalpatnam, everyone’s forefather in some way or the other had their business in Colombo. So, the town in general goes gaga for Ceylon tea.

But it’s been a while now the business ties with the island nation have died a natural death. So, the tea preference is switched over to other local options. Though we have switched to the local market’s tea options, we haven’t made that switch with spices. It’s always Sri Lankan cardamom and cinnamon that are fit for our curries. Cassia bark which is a commonplace in Indian markets spoil the spirit of our curries and is never used in our household. Knowing the demand for these spices, local businesses keep us stocked with them.

Mooma puts any professional strategic planner to shame when it comes to planning. As our recipes demand copious amounts of coconuts, Mooma stocks it up in all forms to suit to the needs of our fast-paced times. You will find grated, ground, powdered coconut in her freezer alongside packets of coconut milk from a local brand. For school and college it’s again Mooma who decides and enables a fuss-free conduct of lunch box. Before Neinama Latha arrives in the morning, from her house which is in the immediately next street from ours, Mooma finishes the chopping and pre-prep part.

Mooma hadn’t once declared a floating day to not make a breakfast. There used to be times when we had to pump water from the backyard water pump. Water bodies in Kayalpatnam are scarce and fresh water supply from the municipality is open only twice a week. All of us in the morning, from Mooma to my younger sister when we were kids, took turns to fill up our overhead tank. Those are the days when we had our most favourite breakfast of Raal Kolulattai (prawn dumplings), which is again found nowhere but Kayalpatnam, because it doesn’t take a lot of time with a quick preparation time.

At the backdrop of all of this is a strong and brawny physical structure, our home. The house was built at the time of my grandmother’s wedding. Interestingly, our house is a twin house like the majority of houses in Kayalpatnam. Twin houses are built for sibling sisters. They are symmetrically built with features acting as mirror images of each other. Every single thing in twin houses at the cost of nobody’s privacy. But it is also supportive of a downright neighbourly air with sisters and cousins. A common wall with one or more doors run in between a pair of twin house. You will never be separated from your sister for life while also living in two separate houses. It’s an unthinkable reality that you live with your cousins just the same way you live with your siblings in a twin house. It strikes a balance between joint and nuclear families. It’s not excessive for me to say that the house itself is another member. It has seen generations of life and death from Mooma’s wedding to my younger sister’s. My mother is the fifth and last child of Mooma. By tradition, the last girl child inherits the house of the family while the other girls are given seperate houses like twin houses at the times of their weddings. The sons are sent away with their wives.

This has made me a beneficiary of this social custom. From being a child to now a woman I haven’t lived away from Mooma, her food, and home. This may have seriously resulted in some shortcomings to my exposure of the outside world. All the same, growing up with many cousins listening to this master storyteller is ,without doubt, invaluable. Her stories are always her lived experiences sans a moral end line. Not a day in her day goes by without reading every ad and notification on the daily newspaper. She is over 84 and is older than independent India. As a matriarch, she refuses to pass on the baton to my mother for too long.  My mother who is 50 has never run a house by herself and is a happy camper under the shelter of Mooma. This is almost true to households all across Kayalpatnam.

Kayalpatnam is a harbour of customs and practices that are offbeat from mainland Tamil Nadu. But the denizens are also pragmatic to embrace new practices and are always willing to adapt sensible new habits while guarding the old traditions that are too good to let go off. The old and new always stand in a compelling equilibrium in this coastal town. The perpetual touch with global realities through centuries of sea-route trade has made the people of Kayalpatnam inherently cosmopolitan.

Sumaiya Mustafa is a writer-researcher from Tamil Nadu. Her interests revolve around food, society, and coastal lifestyles. Her works have appeared in The Hindu, The Caravan, The BrownHistory Newsletters among others. She is a grantee of Serendipity Arts Foundation’s “Food Matters Grant 2024”. She works with IFB as their Food Researcher.

^{Translations and detailed descriptions are provided to give a better understanding of the story to people from different cultural backgrounds across the globe.}