People associate traditional cooking with orthodoxy and think of it as being unfashionable and time consuming.” says Chennai-based cookery expert Santhi Balaraman. Santhi has launched her new book, Dakshin Bhog, a cookery book with over 200 traditional recipes from the four southern states of India.
Santhi says she wrote the book because she felt there was a need to inform people that traditional cooking can be simple and nutritious. She says that as she herself cannot remember many recipes taught to her by her grandmother., she realised that many recipes will be lost in future if they were not documented.
“Most people in the present generation are unable to learn cooking from their mothers. As opposed to previous generations where women used to spend most of their time learning in the kitchen, women these days obviously have no time. So the mothers just make the food for them instead of teaching them. But another major problem that mothers face in teaching cooking is that they do not have accurate measurements. Most of it is done by instinct and practice. Since women in those days spent most of their time in the kitchen, they would just learn these approximate measurements while observing,” says Santhi.
The book does however solve all these issues. Santhi says she spent two years experimenting working on all these recipes to get the measurements right.
Not only that, she believes that most of the recipes in the book are nutritious. But aren’t quite a lot of traditional recipes deep fried and filled with wholesome ghee?
Santhi explains, “I have tried as far as possible to work around this, by taking up alternative methods of cooking. Say, a sweet that has to be made in the pan with ghee, I would change it to steaming and then transferring it to the pan, so as to use lesser ghee. But there are many recipes in traditional cooking that are very healthy. It’s only food that we make on festive occasions that have a high calorie count.”
 A great deal of thought has gone into Dakshin Bhog. “In my book, none of the recipes fill up a whole page. I have made sure that each page has at least three recipes, only because people are overwhelmed by full-page recipes and simply skip to a smaller one!” observes Santhi.
Santhi hosted a popular cookery show on Sun TV for almost seven years. She also authored four books in Tamil, one in English and is still active in the media in Chennai. She began cooking when she got married at 19. “I moved into a joint family with four generations living under one roof! I guess that’s one of the reasons I learnt how to cook so many dishes, because each generation wanted a different cuisine. But of course I realised that I didn’t resent cooking,” she quips.
It was only after her children grew older that Santhi, well into her forties, started building her career. And has her family been supportive?
“They have been supportive but they do make fun of me! They say that nowadays I cook only if they take out a video camera. And there was this other time, when I had a section in my show which featured ten-minute recipes. But for one such recipe, I had said that the channa needs to be soaked for 24 hours! My boys started laughing and said that I was deceiving the viewers by calling it a quick recipe” she says laughing.
With this book just out on the stands, Santhi is already preparing herself for future projects. Perhaps what best describes this passion of hers for cooking, is the interpretation of a good meal in her book, ‘ A good menu is like a good story. It must have a proper balance of dramatic elements, sorted out and arranged in a coherent manner. All elements must be resolved in the end, for unlike some stories, all meals must have only happy endings.’