Is the food that we eat everyday for breakfast, lunch, dinner and on special occasions, discovered or invented? If it is a discovery then it must have existed already, like America, and some chap like Columbus found it somehow and told the world. But an invention calls for a necessity because necessity is, after all, the mother of all inventions. So, were idli, dose or upma – sorry, I’m a strict sasyahari – discovered like America? If yes, who found them? Or, if they were all inventions, the obvious question is, again, how and who?
Contemporary south Indian gastronomical history records at least two inventions – rava idli and maddur vade –both familiar items. The former was invented in Bengaluru’s legendary MTR kitchen in the 1940s when rice was scarce – thanks to the World War – and the production of idli, its byproduct, was a hit. ‘Why not try idli with rava?’ they thought and thus was born rava idli, a World War invention.
At Maddur, not far from Bengaluru, a pakoda seller at the railway station instead of making balls from the dough, flattened it. Thus maddur vade was born into this world and it became a gastronomical delight overnight. While rava idli was a necessity, maddur vade was an accident. Fine. What about other dishes?
Let’s get back to the humble rice idli, the softest, simplest, yet most nourishing breakfast. Idli is produced when rice teams up with urad dal. How did anyone think of this grand alliance is something that fascinates me whenever I bite into this steamy dish. Fermentation plays a vital role here but who discovered it? By sheer accident or by experimentation? If it was an experiment then the idli must have gone through many trials and tribulations before the soft version hit the dining table.
Similar, innumerable accidents and experiments must have taken place in the culinary world because there are hundreds of items, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian, on our menus. But there is no one to claim the credit nor do we care to give credit. It is an anonymous world when it comes to cooking. Only the chefs who dish out these exotic delicacies are famous! The real culinary architect is in the background.
But wait. Every day we find new items being prepared on the small screen and chefs claiming authorship of the dish or giving credit to their mothers or mothers-in-law who passed on the recipe after experimentation. But when the first chapati was rolled or the first steamy pot of biryani/pulav cooked, no such public demonstration was possible. Yet, item after item slowly moved out of the ancient kitchens to become public property with no copyright issues.
No one knows who first cooked the avial but it became a staple in Kerala. Similarly rosagolla in Bengal, bisibelebath in Karnataka, gonkura in Andhra and Telangana...the list is inexhaustible.
By the way Odisha now claims copyright over rosagolla. I hope Didi will sort it out. But why bother, let us eat and enjoy and let more (healthy) items enter the gastronomical world and the cook books. Happy eating!
Published 06 October 2015, 18:01 IST