The New Evolution of Tamil Muslim Cuisine
Text and Images by Maazin Buhari
Pearls, Ships, New Religion, Culinary Jingoism
The life and times of the Tamil Muslims have constantly been shaped around our proximity to the ocean. Our origins as a port-dwelling, sea-faring community meant that a lot of the local economy relied on maritime trade, fishing, and pearl-diving as sources of income.
The epicurean home of the Tamil Muslims is the Coromandel Coast, on the Southeastern tip of India. We are a people born out of the intermingling of Arab traders with local Tamil women, which started some time in between the eighth and ninth centuries, depending on your historical source of choice. The Tamil Muslims are distinct from the Urdu-speaking Muslims, who are found in other parts of Tamil Nadu but are descendants of Turkic populations that invaded North India.
Over the centuries, along with merchant traders, Islamic evangelists and foreign cultural practices, a heavy dose of new culinary influences docked in towns like Kilakarai, Kayalpatnam and Thondi.
What would evolve over the years, as Zainab Jalal (a researcher of the culinary history of Tamil Muslims) says, is a rich and distinct food identity, that was shaped by influences not only from the Gulf Arab world, but also countries such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives and the Southeast Asian archipelago. As a minority community, within one out of the 28 immensely diverse states in India, Tamil Muslim culture and food has rarely been highlighted, or engaged with, in mainstream (or even indie) media.
Despite their global influences, mercantile integrations and exploratory tendencies, a majority of ordinary Tamil Muslims were restricted to the confines of their villages until about the early 20th century. Increased educational attainment and the pursuit of more varied economic opportunities eventually led them into larger northern cities. Movement into cosmopolitan centers like Chennai would eventually pave the way for semi-permanent migrations to countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore, the UAE and eventually farther west to global hotspots like London, New York and Toronto.
These migrants would form cultural strongholds in the form of quasi-exclusive social networks, in order to establish their identities in these greener pastures; and one of the proudest cultural exports was, of course, their food. As with any diaspora, the Tamil Muslim palate expanded to incorporate the halal cuisines of the cities they moved to: porkless yum cha in Kowloon, Mamak food in Singapore, and Khaleeji mandi in Dubai all became hot favorites.
However, Tamil Muslims, or maybe just my family, have always been pedantic about the narrow specificity of ingredients they’ll entertain when cooking at home. Pantry staples widely available at any global supermarket, such as generic Indian spices, coconut milk and ginger-garlic pastes, are tripled packed and double sealed before being stuffed into suitcases and shipped overseas in a Narcos-esque biannual operation. Because, “ooru masala” (home spices) always taste better than anything store-bought.
An Ode to Kanava Karuvad
What is a kanava karuvad? To me, it has always been an almost overindulgent luxury that, as a child, I would gorge myself on until I felt a bit unwell. It is a finicky dish that reminds me of my grandmother’s stern love and hot Indian summers. Literally translated as squid that has been dried, it’s also a surprisingly rare ingredient made out of fresh squid that has been gutted and laid out to dry in the blazing tropical sun of the Southeastern coast.
I’ve never seen the specific variety of dried squid that I am referring to outside of my hometown of Kilakarai, even in other Tamil Muslim villages a couple hundred kilometers north or south of ours. The food across Tamil Nadu changes almost as frequently as the accents do in Britain, a country almost as populous as the state. The squid, once thoroughly dehydrated, is deconstructed by hand into thin threadlike pieces and sold by the kilogram. It is one of the most expensive seafood commodities available locally, because of how labor intensive it is to make.
The combination of calamari, deep fried with curry leaves and dried chiles, served with murungai keerai (moringa spinach), puliyanam (a chilled coconut milk based dish designed to be poured over hot white rice) and maasi thuvayal (dried tuna and channa dhal chutney) is what “home food” means to me. The intensity of the fruits de mer, with their umami oceany punch, is mellowed out by the cooling coconut milk and the humbling bitter spinach stir fry. (It is still somewhat bemusing that the equivalent of Brussels sprouts for Tamil kids has become a superfood that is pulverized into an unsightly powder to be mixed along with turmeric and ashwagandha to top açai bowls.)
The reason why dishes like kanava karuvad will continue to be held in an esteemed nostalgic gaze is not only because diasporic young adults, such as myself, grew up eating them when visiting our grandparents back home, but also because they’re virtually impossible to re-create overseas. While dehydrated seafood is hardly indigenous to coastal Tamil Muslims, the particular style of karuvad (an umbrella term for dried fish) that is required to make the dish cannot be found anywhere else.
In the case of Tamil Muslims who moved to capitals in Southeast Asia, an inferior replacement was eventually found in the form of Thai squid. Dried cuttlefish is popularly eaten as a streetside snack across Southeast Asia, and a slightly thicker version can be found deep fried and coated in a spicy and sugary sauce. The problem is, these varieties of squid are always either far too small, thin or thick to be served along with rice and gravy. They don’t have the same argumentative mouthfeel, that quickly mellows into a soft sweetness once chewed for a few seconds.
Nethili karuvad, or dried anchovies, however, could be relatively easily replaced with ikan bilis in countries like Malaysia and Singapore. They’re almost indistinguishable, maybe because I don’t care for them as much. The long shelf life of preserved seafood means it is convenient to traffic overseas in bulk, rather than to try and replace with whatever is available domestically. And I imagine, that was the only way it was done for a long time, until a shipment was missed, or a batch went off, and a chewy, salty sidekick was needed in a pinch.
I remember either Sithima, my maternal grandmother, or someone who used to work for her, telling me that the preparation of kanava karuvad separates the amateur cooks from the seasoned ones. I learned that ideally the squid should not be deep fried on an open flame, but rather that it should be dropped into a vat of oil that has been heated to an unspecified high temperature and has been taken off the flame. The karuvad will rapidly bubble and is then removed from the vessel, before it takes on an unpleasant bitterness. It doesn’t really matter how you fry the machine-cut Thai squid strips, they always taste to me of disappointment.
Still, sometimes, novel experimentation with similar but fundamentally different ingredients can lead to interesting new results. I recall trying to replace Sri Lankan and/or Maldivian fish sambal, a dinner table staple that was introduced centuries ago through sea-trade, with katsuobushi. The bonito flakes are much thinner and flakier than their chunkier South Asian cousins, and while they do not challenge the pungency of the raw onion and lemon juice that constitute two fourths of my preferred sambal (the other ingredient being green chilles), they still bring the same recognizable savoury bite that underscores a good maasi. Freshly prepared tuna-fish sambals have long been replaced by the somewhat cheaper, and more globally available varieties that come out of Colombo and Malé, but they’ve always had an air of convenience to them. Maybe combining a bottle of MD fish sambal with a packet of bonito flakes is the flavor sensation missing from our weeknight dinners.
Idiyappam, and Meen Anam.
Nothing is a more quintessential symbol of Tamil Muslim cuisine than idiyappam and meen anam. An idiyappam, popularly known as a “string hopper,” represents the main carbohydrate in many breakfasts, lunches and dinners. It is a small mound of steamed rice (or more healthily, ragi) flour dough that has been pressed through the world’s narrowest potato ricer. The circular wicker trays they are spun onto are then steamed in a specially made steaming vessel, resulting in a soft and filling idiyappam.
The iconic pairing for an idiyappam, is unquestionably, a fish curry that is made out of a specific type of barracuda, or seela meen as I’ve always known them. As a child growing up in Dubai, I hated idiyappam, and would groan audibly and repeatedly at the sound of meen anam. Perhaps it was the seeming repetitiveness of how often it was served, or my inability to appreciate the intricacies that went into making it just right. I rediscovered idiyappam when I saw it served at a uber trendy bib gourmand in London’s Soho.
Hoppers, a restaurant serving various hits of Tamil cuisine, is both gentrifying in its essence and fantastic in its delivery. And I’m still figuring out whether I should lament rediscovering my mother cuisine through a poorly but earnestly pronounced tasting menu.
London Sri Lankan restaurants like Hoppers, or even Paradise or Kolamba for that matter are all great in their own right. In the UK, they represent an interesting enough breakaway from the stranglehold that North Indian restaurants, in their mughlai biryani and butter chickened glory, had on the global South Asian food scene. To go out for ‘ an Indian’ (or any South Asian cuisine more broadly) was to eat about three specific starters, four cliched main courses, down it with a mango lassi and finish with a kulfi.
Desi Trendy
The mainstreaming of South Asian culture in the global gastronomic world does excite me. Restaurants across ‘food capitals’ are increasingly becoming somewhat relatable and ancient ingredients are being rediscovered. London, as a benchmark, has always had a strong and troubled history of celebrating and remixing Indian food; however, in recent years a smattering of hole in the wall eateries catering to subcontinental subdivisions have popped up. Yesteryears’ curry-houses provided satisfyingly generic renditions of a homogenized Indian palate, while new-age establishments are seeding appams and karis into the British popular imagination. It’s a fascinating, if slightly jarring, experience to see plates from my childhood (even described in Tamil) served at bistros throughout every self-respecting cosmopolitan city.
Witnessing desi food heritage being appreciated, a viscerally visible recent phenomenon, swells my heart and lights up my eyes. Food being a ripe medium for storytelling, à la Bourdain, has me optimistic. Eight years ago we simply had No Reservations about Keralan food, while today it has become a happy reality on our degustation cartes and Instagram feeds. Even Eleven Madison Park, at least briefly the most exciting restaurant in North America, had its own version of a dosa and thakkali chutney. But I don’t think Tamil Muslim food, specifically speaking, is going to make a feature in the East Villages and Fitzrovias of the world, and I have a very brief hypothesis on why this is the case: We simply don’t want it.
I used to think that the richness of our food, with all its seemingly inaccessible ingredients and expensive accoutrements, would make it difficult to commercialize. But endangered ingredients are being shaved tableside as we speak, and it all seems to be a matter of who wants it enough. The most sincere appreciation of such a micro-tuned cuisine, sustained through a largely oral tradition, comes from understanding the labor that goes into making it: the transportation of fresh and dried ingredients across borders, straining to listen to a Whatsapp voice note from an aunt or cousin on how to make those lamb adais for Eid breakfast, the frenzied train into zone 4 across town or Jackson Heights in Queens to get just the right masala blend. It comes from seeing my father carry his own masala tea components (complete with Indian ginger and Indonesian condensed milk) in a shoebox when he travels, because no commercial chai blend comes nearly close enough to how spicy he likes it, and I still have no idea what a nannari is (Indian sarasapilla?!), but I know that most people don’t put it in their milk tea.
It feels as though you are participating in living history when you treat recipes as heirlooms, and go through the genuine trouble it takes to make a proper meen anam or vasakna aral with thenga paal (prawn stir fried in coconut cream). That isn’t to say there isn’t room for experimentation, or expanding our horizons, rather it is about knowing and appreciating the value of a cuisine that was perfected some time ago and has been gifted to us, only to be passed on again.
