The Spice Route

Just before dinnertime on our last day in Kovalam, we receive a fax from an Indian friend. Her tip: “Don’t leave town without finding a crab masala.”

Frantically, we try to locate a restaurant with crab on the menu; no luck. But after badgering the hotel desk clerks, we finally get a lead on a lobster masala at the nearby Hotel Sea Face.

Unlike the Udaya, this really is a hotel, with a candlelit restaurant on a pool deck overlooking the beach. Below us, a chef stands at an outdoor tandoor, roasting gorgeous fresh fish to order.

“Mmmm, perfect,” the historian half of us says.

“No, no, no,” counters the cook. “The tandoor is northern. What’s it doing in the South?”

We argue. Does the probable deliciousness of the fish justify a blatantly nonlocal cooking method? Then our appetizer appears—little round peanuts stir-fried with onions, chiles, tomatoes, and spices that release their fragrance as they heat up. And the lobster, rich and pungent, has been shelled, then slowly cooked in a Keralan spice paste that is sweet with palm sugar and sour with tamarind. We eat this elegant food with our fingers, Indian style, and forget about the tandoor.

Everything we’ve read about Kochi (formerly Cochin) makes us eager to get there. Capital of the spice trade for some 1,500 years, Kochi is one of the world’s great crossroads, and its food is famous for reflecting the diversity of Kerala’s cultures and kitchens. Like many tourists, we travel part of the way to Kochi by ferry, motoring slowly through the lush, peaceful backwaters of Kerala. On the way, we pass private houseboats staffed with hired chefs, but we love our perch on the roof deck of our old, rickety vessel. At midday we dock at a clearing where wooden tables are set up, a banana leaf at each place. Servers speed down the tables, spooning dollops of food on every leaf: soft Keralan rice moistened with a big spoonful of lentil purée; chile-reddened lemon pickle; white pumpkin bathed in a soothing yogurt; a hearty mix of chopped vegetables, including white beets, potatoes, and green beans made rich with coconut, shredded cabbage so piquant it’s almost a pickle, and a small, whole karimeen, a ubiquitous local fish, spice-rubbed and fried.

“More?” they keep asking. “More?”

Barely three days into the trip, we’re eating food we’d been certain didn’t exist—wonderful local food cooked expressly for tourists. Yes, we want more.

We arrive in kochi later that day and fall instantly in love. Spread out over islands and peninsulas, with its constant boat traffic and the scent of spices wafting from cool, dark alleys in the market, Kochi has been called the Venice of India. Hindus, Muslims, and Christians live amicably here, contributing their traditions to an extraordinary local food culture.

By a stroke of good fortune that we can only attribute to the Hindu deity Ganesh, remover of obstacles, we arrive in Kochi just as a team at the Taj Malabar Hotel is busy doing exactly what we’re doing: investigating the food of Kerala. In preparation for the hotel’s new Keralan restaurant, local cooks are in the kitchen demonstrating traditional dishes to the chefs while researchers visit Keralan villages, gathering recipes from housewives and filming them as they prepare meals.

At the center of it all is a talented young Taj chef named Deepak T. Das, whose memories of his mother’s Keralan cooking help him create for us some of the most dazzling food we’ve ever tasted. For breakfast, he prepares puttu, lavish with freshly grated coconut and more refined than the Udaya’s; there’s also a spicy-hot black-chickpea curry, aromatic with ginger, fennel, green chiles, and slices of fried coconut. Another morning, he offers us oroti, pancakes of rice powder, coconut, and cumin that are shaped and flattened by hand; we can see Das’s palm print on each delicate cake. At dinner, Das shows us the range of Keralan cuisine, starting with an Anglo-Indian fish moilly, chunks of fish poached in fresh coconut milk and subtly seasoned with turmeric, ginger, garlic, and sweet spices. Then, representing the centuries-old Syrian-Christian community, a spicy, dry-fried hash of beef and coconut that holds exciting layers of flavor in every bite.

Confessing that he is no expert in Kerala’s Mopplah, or Muslim, cuisine, Das arranges a lunch for us at a restaurant in the Hotel Abad. There, typical Muslim dishes are served in their southern guise, quite unlike the North Indian versions served in Indian restaurants all over America. A sumptuous creamy mutton curry, delicately infused with cardamom and black pepper, is dotted with roasted local cashews. We pour fresh coconut milk over it and use paper-thin rice crêpes to pick up chunks of the tender meat. A beautifully molded chicken biryani is laced with cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon, its aroma evoking the city’s spice market.

In Kochi we notice for the first time that our favorite guideline for identifying great restaurants in South India—grunge rules—is not infallible. It falters at a place we come to think of as The Cart with No Name, a street-corner operation we had heard about and were longing to try. In a Dickensian cloud of heat and smoke, one cook towers over a propane-fired grill turning out dosas, parottas, and eggs, while another cook handles the fried fish and chicken. Hordes of hungry men wait at long tables. It seems like everything we’d hoped for ... until the food arrives. Apart from a great dish of fried sardines, nothing is remarkable, especially when compared with our dinner at a modern, thoroughly appealing Kochi restaurant called Four Foods, where businesspeople and families go for home-style duck curry and shrimp masala.