Bananas for Mappilas
Text and Photos by Jehan Nizar
Bananas are a way of life for the Mappilas, a Muslim community who inhabit what is referred to as the north Malabar region of the south Indian state of Kerala.
The taxonomy of bananas is probably the last thing Ummi Abdulla has on her mind as she launches into an animated anecdote, featuring the much-loved kayadas of her youth. You would be forgiven if, for a minute, you had forgotten that this woman, author of numerous pioneering cookbooks and considered, in many ways, the doyenne of Kerala’s Mappila cuisine, was not your grandmother.
While her stories have an old-world, come-sit-with-me-by-the-fireplace quality to them, they are marked by the quiet confidence of someone who is well aware that hers was the culinary bible thrust into the hands of, “everyone from our community who got married.” To emphasize her point, Abdulla adds, “Those who left the country have often told me that my book Malabar Muslim Cookery became their dictionary.”
In a tone free of restraint, she goes on to declare the miniature conical parcels of mashed bananas, ground rice and jaggery to be her all-time favourite.
“Kayadas always taste better the next day. Steamed things get nice and moist when they’re allowed to cool. Don’t store them in the fridge just leave them out overnight and…” Her voice trails off and she draws out a decadent sigh. “Eat them first thing in the morning. In Thalassery, we also call them chappe ada because they’re steamed in banana leaves.”
Bananas are a way of life for the Mappilas, a Muslim community who inhabit what is referred to as the north Malabar region of the south Indian state of Kerala and whose descent can be traced to the long-standing ties (and subsequent intermarriages) that connected Arab traders to the west coast of India. These bananas’ attributes are as distinct as the recipes they lend themselves to. Abdulla will vouch for this. She states that her grandchildren, who live in the metropolitan city of Bengaluru, have tried, to not nearly the same degree of success, to recreate the classic kayadas with Robusta bananas that are more readily available than the requisite Mysore variety.
Mashed Mysore pazham in sweetened coconut milk is served for breakfast with idiyappam.
While the Mysore pazham, as Abdulla fondly refers to it, assumes its own place at the Mappila table, its contribution can be regarded as negligible compared to its more versatile counterpart, the Nendran plantain. The number of recipes that enlist the former can be counted on one hand, and it is, strictly speaking, a “dessert banana.” Things are immediately put into perspective when Abdulla mentions a visit to Kolkata for a food festival she hosted at a five-star hotel.
“When I mentioned that I would need Nendran pazham, they said they were unable to source them.” She pauses dramatically and chortles with the air of a seasoned storyteller. “I ended up having to send raw plantains from Kerala by courier. By the time I reached Kolkata, they were ripe.”
The term banana is often flung about to refer to the entire genus, but a basic education into the history and origins of regional cultivars is needed to understand how the Mappilas have not only made the fruit their own but also played up its diverse facets to make it a mainstay of their cuisine.
One of the earliest and most significant recorded mentions of the Indian banana was in the Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, Continents Regni Malabarici apud Indos celeberrimi omnis generis Plantas rariores, 1678-1681 more commonly referred to as the Hortus Malabaricus. Literally translating to the “Garden of Malabar” in Latin, this groundbreaking Dutch botanical text was commissioned by the Dutch East India Company’s governor of Cochin, Hendrik Van Rheede, and holds the distinction of being the first definitive insight into the history and survey of tropical botany in South Asia.
Theories regarding the introduction of bananas are as varied as the diverse schools of thought that later established a framework of nomenclature. The plantain bananas of peninusular India, Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia are believed to have been domesticated, rather than introduced, in India. The Malabar region is thought to have been the point of origin for bananas that were taken to east Africa, in the early centuries of the Common Era, by the early Arab and Muslim traders who engaged in coastal trade between the Indian and Arabian coasts and onwards to the Mediterranean and East African coasts. From East Africa, bananas are likely to have spread westward to central and West Africa as part of the great Bantu expansion.
The genus Musa (a genera falling under the broader Musaceae family to which the banana belongs) was coined by Linnaeus in the first edition of Species Plantarum, based on observation of a plant growing under a glass house, in the garden of Dutch director of the Dutch East India Company George Clifford, in the Netherlands. Two species, the Musa paradisiaca L. and the Musa bihai L., were initially described by him. Subsequently, he cited two more species, the Musa sapientum and Musa troglodytarum. All these names are no longer in use, and Musa paradisiaca and Musa sapientum are now treated as hybrid cultivars while Musa bihai has been transferred to the genus Heliconia L.
Bananas have historically gone by a number of names. The etymological roots of the generic name Musa is rooted in the Sanskrit word moca. Rheede’s Hortus Malabaricus makes a reference to the banana by the Arabic name, mauz, lending credence to the theory that it may be a derivative of the Arabic word mauz, mouz or mauwz. The other names he used were bala and vazha as in Malayalam and kela as in Sanskrit. The early Portuguese travelers called it figuo d’India (Indian fig), which was a name given to a variety of East and West Indian tropical fruits that Linnaeus had made mention of in Species Plantarum.
Bananas, in their most nascent form, were said to be seeded and nonedible forms growing in damp and humid forests. English botanist Ernest Entwistle Cheesman, considered to be the father of modern Musa taxonomy, was the first to draw to attention to the fact that Linnaeus’ model for the Musa paradisiaca was based on a plantain, while that for the Musa sapientum was based on what is likely to be the “Silk Fig” or a dessert banana from the West Indies.
Cheesman’s bone of contention was that it was impossible to reconcile wild species of banana and cultivated types within the Linnaean nomenclature system. This oversight was investigated by Cheesman’s younger colleagues, Norman Simmonds and Kenneth Shepherd, who introduced an alternative genome-based nomenclature system for cultivated bananas. They attributed the process of evolution to the Musa acuminata Colla and Musa balbisiana Colla, two wild species touted the Adam and Eve of present-day bananas. The process of evolution is thought to have been initiated with the Southeast Asian species Musa acuminata. Further human intervention and movement brought this species to South Asia, where it crossed with Musa balbisiana leading to the creation of the earliest bispecific types.
Although there is a great deal of research conducted with respect to cultivated bananas, most still do not have a formal botanical identity in India. Different local or common names are used for cultivars grown in various regions and the local language of each of these places has its own general names for bananas such as vazha in Malayalam; valai in Tamil; arati in Telegu; and bale in Kannada. Another popular way of naming cultivars is after the name of the area in which it is grown, such as the popular Poovan that also goes by the name of Mysore, where it originates from, and the Chengalikodan Nendran banana that hails from Chengazhikode in Kerala’s Thrissur district and has been credited with one of India’s respected Geographical Indication tags.
To fully navigate the nuanced Mappila terrain of cooking with bananas and plantains, one needs to understand some fundamental points of distinction between the two.
Palatability and starch content are usually the two basic differentiators, but this becomes harder to establish in places such as South and Southeast Asia because of the presence of a large number of starchy cooking bananas. Broadly speaking, dessert types are eaten raw when ripe, while plantains or cooking bananas contain more dry matter and need to be boiled, fried, roasted or powdered to be palatable. The line that separates the two, botanically and genetically, can be arbitrary.
Kaayi nulliyetithe—one of the few cooked preparations of a table banana—puff up as they’re fried in oil.
The Nendran is the most popular banana cultivar of the Malabar coast, and this plantain enjoys household stature with the Mappilas. This type of plantain is distinguished by an orange-yellow color due to the presence of the compound tepal in its flowers, and the starchy fruit pulp acquires an orange-yellow color upon attaining ripeness. N.M. Nayar enlists its other morphological features such as, “slender and angular to pointed fruits, incurved petiole margins, slightly hairy peduncles, and glabrous fruit skin,” in his paper The Bananas: Botany, Origin, Dispersal,
One can’t study the cuisine of the Mappilas without evaluating the historical impact of the emergence of Malabar ports as centers of Arab mercantile and maritime activities.
Raw banana in its underripe green stage, is called pacha kaayi and gets cooked in the pressure cooker to make kaayi mulakittathu.
In his book Studies in Medieval Kerala History, A.P. Ibrahimkunju draws attention to the fact that, “Long before the Greeks and Romans had begun to frequent the parts of the Arabian Sea, the Arabs had established contact with the west coast of India. King Soloman carried on trade with West Indian parts and the bulk of imports came from Kerala.”
Kozhikode, formerly known as Calicut, was considered the big city and trading hub of the Malabar region and was also the port of entry for Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, who landed on its shores in 1498.
Faiza Moosa, author and hostess of heritage homestay Ayisha Manzil in Thalassery, reminds us in her cookbook Classic Malabar Recipes that, “Right from 1000 BC, when King Solomon’s fleet came to this coast, all manner of seafaring vessels—Roman mercantile ships, lateen-rigged Arab dhows, Chinese junks, Portuguese caravels and British East Indiamen—have touched these shores. Malabar, lying between latitudes 8° and 12°N, longitude 74°E, was once the hub of world trade. Though gold, ivory, peacocks and cotton cloth were among the exports, spices were numero uno. With its unique wealth of cinnamon, cardamom, cassia, ginger, turmeric and pepper, Kerala was the spice garden of the ancient world.”
Malabar’s cuisine is the amalgamation of these inherited cooking traditions, and plantains and bananas are an embodiment of this unique culinary lexicon. From being steamed and mashed into a ripe plantain paste that is eventually moulded into the bud-shaped, fried unnakkai (named for the pod of the cotton tree that it resembles), to being poached in a cardamom-flecked sweet coconut milk stew called kaayi (local word for bananas and plantains) curry that is a synonymous with festive breakfasts, the Mappila preoccupation with bananas is the ultimate lesson in ingenuity.
The Poovan (Mysore) and the Rasthali (Silk) are both commercial table cultivars that are enjoyed quite simply on their own or in minimal fuss-free preparations. Mashed with a sprinkling of sugar, they are a breakfast indulgence for children and adults alike, usually eaten with a steamed, log-shaped ground rice and grated coconut preparation known as puttu. These bananas can also be mashed and added to a thick extract of sweetened coconut milk.
One of the rare cooked preparations involving these cultivars is the kaayi nulliyetithe. Literally translating to “pinched,” bananas are hand mashed to a slightly chunky consistency. Soaked and ground boiled rice, flour, jaggery syrup and cardamom powder are added to this slightly coarse batter. The mixture is pinched into bite-sized dumplings, reminiscent of the New Orleans beignet, and dropped into hot oil.
The Nendran, on the other hand, takes its role as a pliable plantain seriously, transitioning effortlessly from the sweet breakfast staple kaayi porichathu—sliced lengthwise and fried to a glorious golden brown in a ghee bath and sprinkled with sugar—to snacks such as the egg-and-flour-batter fried kaayi mukkiporichathu that are a key component of the quick bites (known as chaaya kadi) enjoyed with an evening cup of tea.
Kaayi mulakittathu sees quartered pieces of raw banana being pressure cooked and given a simple tempering with mustard seeds, red chiles and curry leaves.
The preliminary rule of thumb to go by when understanding the Nendran’s diverse usability is to ascertain its stage of ripeness. This is, after all, a plantain that can be used as both a “dessert” and “cooking banana.” Color can also serve as a helpful giveaway. At its raw and green stage, locally referred to as pacha kaayi or green banana, these bananas provide the starchy heft called for by standalone curries such as the kaayi mulakittathu that sees quartered pieces of raw banana being pressure cooked and given a simple tempering with mustard seeds, red chiles and curry leaves. The same variant is also used in a mutton preparation spiced with aniseed and red chile and coriander powder. The resultant stew gets its body from a ground coconut paste and has a consistency similar to that usually derived from the addition of tubers.
Abdulla, being the veteran she is, takes it upon herself to make mention of lesser-known specialities such as pacha kaayi beriyathe that are the accompaniments of preference for the local rice gruel kanhi. Raw bananas are boiled with turmeric and red chile powder and mashed to a porridge consistency. Deboned mackerel, a coastal influence, and a coarsely ground coconut, garlic and aniseed paste are added to this. She adds,
“In Thalassery, Kozhikoke and Wayanad meen mulakittathu (spicy red fish curry) and beriyathe is a much-loved combination,” she says.
When the Nendrans acquire a mellow yellow color, they are pronounced half-ripe and are used in a banana and coconut curry called kaayi puzungiyathu, which follows the same method as with its raw banana and mutton counterpart, minus the meat. This is a treat reserved to be eaten with ghee rice or neichor.
It is often joked that if you arm a Mappila with the unlikely combination of bananas and eggs, you will be confronted with a never-ending repertoire of dishes. Certain techniques such as adding delicately scrambled eggs into a caramelised, fried ripe plantain preparation, perfumed with rose water and enriched with cashew nuts, raisins and ghee, can be considered nods to the Mappila’s Arabian trading lineage. The Middle Eastern affinity for dried fruit, nuts and ghee is no secret, but Faiza raises a valid question in her book and wonders how in a land where coconut oil reigns supreme, ghee managed to creep its way into the Mappila kitchen. She goes on to cite a popular theory that attributes this inherited influence to the nomadic Bedouins of Arabia who used the same and referred to it as samn.
The pairing of eggs and bananas in sweet preparations seems unconventional, but perspective comes from unexpected quarters on learning of a plausible Portuguese connection. Portuguese priests who settled in the north Malabar city of Kannur back in the 16th century are said to have turned to using egg whites as a starching agent for their cassocks. The leftover yolks were mixed with sugar syrup and piped into a frothing hot sugar syrup. This dish, known locally as mutta maala and in Portuguese as fios de ovos, is considered one of the finest food legacies left to the Mappilas.
The predilection towards eggs is showcased alongside another borrowed technique Faiza touches upon in her book. She puts down the existence of numerous stuffed dishes in the Middle East to, “the belief that food must ‘surprise’ the eater.” This concept is best exhibited in the pazham nirachuthe where slightly overripe bananas are steamed until the skin splits and fried whole until light brown. Long slits are scored on the sides of each banana, with utmost care being paid to keeping them intact. The “surprise” quotient is courtesy the filling or “pandam” as explained by one of Kerala’s well-known home chefs Abida Rasheed.
“The word pandam literally means jewelry.” She says., “Pandams can be of two kind, an onion, green chile and cilantro base added to meats and a sweet one made with coconut, sugar, raisins and cashews.” After a moment’s pause she adds, “There is also the same version of this sweet filling that goes into unnakkai and pazham nirachuth, made with scrambled eggs. This is something that I think is mostly done by members of the Arinhal Karuvantevalappil family to which my mother belongs.”
Behind Rasheed’s simple statement is the revelation of customization, improvisation and tweaking that each of these treasured recipes undergoes by not just families but individuals and the ever-expanding diasporic Mappila community.
Faiza’s husband, Chowakkaran Pazhukkatha Moosa, who prefers to be referred to as Moosa, is a colorful raconteur. He makes mention of the sacred trio without which the holy month of Ramzan is incomplete for Mappilas.
“Bananas, eggs and sugar,” he says. “You cannot think of an iftar without these three.”
He also illustrates how there is a banana dish to mark every Mappila occasion and milestone, weddings included: “Bananas play an important role in the teatime snacks served to puthiyappillas.” Moosa uses the term fondly used to refer to Mappila bridegrooms, literally translating to “new boy,” by which he will be addressed for his entire marital life. Faiza’s book outlines the groom’s first breakfast, which is a big event and how he, “is prepared for it, as soon as he wakes up, with a customary dish of sautéed bananas and half-boiled eggs.”
The story of the Mappila community and its fixation with bananas is not new. It is, however, one of certain painstaking delicacies that are disappearing from tables and risk being forgotten because of their labor-intensive nature. On thumbing through Faiza’s cookbook, I come across a description for a confection fashioned out of a soaked and ground raw rice and egg batter, “whipped to a huge froth, which is ladled into boiling hot oil.” The resultant fluffy mountain with the texture and mouthfeel of honeycomb is sprinkled with sugar and eaten with steamed and mashed Nendrans.
As someone who takes particular interest in chronicling heirloom recipes, my curiosity is sufficiently piqued. I send Moosa a text asking for more details. His response is prompt. “Pancharapatta. Not many make it anymore. When we invite you home for a meal, let’s see if we can serve it.”
The story of bananas and plantains in Mappila cuisine is also a tale that is interwoven with that evocative element of nostalgia, which catches you off-guard and at the unlikeliest times. Abdulla unknowingly testifies to this as she casually mentions how she has just stepped out of the kitchen, where she has been dabbling with a raw banana dish that draws from flavor memory.
“I remember attending the weddings of relatives when I was younger where they would make dishes with certain varieties of large fish,” she says. “One of my distant aunts had cooked fish tail with masala and made it over an open fire with kannal [coal]. I remember her making pacha kaayi in the same way. I am not quite sure how she did it, but I’m trying to recreate it.”
