India On The Plate

Home chefs, entrepreneurs, and gourmands are coming together to bring regional Indian cuisines back to the table.

- Ganesh Vancheeswaran

I was at Sumitra Kalapatapu’s house along with two others, relishing the freshly-cooked dishes that emerged from her kitchen. Sumitra specialises in Andhra Brahmin food and serves it with great delight to small groups that she invites to her house in the Bengaluru suburbs. For our lunch, she had prepared mirapakai bajji, pappu, pulusu, charu, koora, appadalu, perugu mirapakai, avak-kayulu (pickles), and semiya payasa.

Sumitra is part of the growing tribe of ‘home chefs.’ That’s the food industry’s jargon for someone who cooks his or her native cuisine extremely well and loves hosting strangers for a meal. Home chefs are at the heart of the small culinary revolution stirring across urban India in the last few years. A revolution that has ushered a resurgence of several small community cuisines.

India is a world wrapped inside a country, thanks to the multitude of cultures and traditions it encompasses. This, most definitely, is true of its food too. Even a state as small as Kerala has different culinary traditions peppered throughout. Apart from our ancient homegrown traditions, influences from several invading dynasties and trading communities have seeped into our culture over the centuries in a culinary osmosis (like how Gujarati cuisine shows up some Parsi influence and vice versa). This has resulted in a rich assortment of ingredients, culinary styles, and recipes across the country. Chatting with me, Suresh Hinduja, a noted food consultant, remarked that in India, you find difference food styles every 100 kilometres. He is not joking.

Most of these cuisines have never made it out of their native regions. In fact, many of them have been confined to home kitchens, even failing to appear on the menu of local restaurants. This is mainly because our restaurants have been enamoured by a few popular food types, especially those imported from the USA and Europe.