Bringing home a tribal cuisine

Authentic Toda food is best had in a little tribal hut, but there are options available to the city-dweller too.

If you are holidaying in the Nilgiris this summer, what would be your dining options?

Apart from the local cuisine "" curd and tamarind rice of the kind that you never get in north India and some exceptionally fragrant dosas-sambhar-coffee even in the smallest of spotlessly-clean eating places "" one word that will keep popping up on your plate is likely to be "Toda".

In Ooty, for instance, Toda cafes of all manners and pedigree beckon eager tourists want-ing to sample something authentic. Of course, the food you get at these restaurants is nothing that even approximates the tribe's cuisine "" it cannot.

Because, as we found out on an illuminating trip recently, Toda food, in all its simplicity, is completely unsuited to the requirements of a full-fledged restaurant. It is best had at home "" in a little Toda hut "" but since managing an invite to one is clearly not an option, you could try cooking a dish or two in your own home.

The alternative, of course, could be that some enterprising chef from one of the larger hotel chains sets up a special counter or the like in a coffee shop and offers us all a sampling.

Chef Sujju John from the Fortune Hotel Sullivan Court, who invited a couple of these indigenous people into his kitchen to acquaint me with Toda food and customs, can perhaps carry on with such experiments. But let us get on to what we all want to know: what is Toda cuisine?

For starters, the cooking makes no use of either veggies or meats. Instead, only cereals (millets, rice) with milk and milk-based products are used.

Rice is a staple and a special kind of grain grown by the tribe "" today estimated to be just 1,600 strong and diminishing "" is used for preparations including a curd-rice type dish and another pongal-type (for want of a better parallel; Portuaar does taste like sweet pongal even though no daal is used) that were demonstrated.

Buffalo milk or buttermilk made from it also goes into almost all preparations since a Toda's wealth has traditionally been measured by the number of buffaloes a householder has. (The tribe is not nomadic as was earlier believed when John Sullivan, collector of Coimbatore, found it scattered on the slopes of the Nilgiris, driven upwards from areas around Mysore by Tipu's armies.)

Cooking is done in bamboo vessels with a wooden spatula-like stirrer and each person has his set of personal utensils to eat from which cannot be shared with others and which are burnt with the body when he dies!

But while a peek into such customs is fascinating, what I found most curious from a culinary point of view was the fact that both salt and sweet were used in the dishes.

Is some kind of a philosophy necessitating the balance of opposite flavours at play here? Or is it a more basic ORS-type balance of body fluids that these people thus ensured?

We'll never know. Communication has always been tough with the indigenous people "" the Todas speak a language with no script and which only they can understand "" and now, as we gawk at their munds, houses, in museums, or buy their trademark weaves from touristy curio shops, all ancient thought-processes may be lost.

RECIPES

Portuaar
Rice, milk, salt, jaggery, ghee made from buffalo-milk
Boil the rice. Add milk, jaggery and salt. Keep stirring till the rice is mashed on a low flame. Pour a spoonful of ghee over the rice. Serve

Mojunthuar
Rice, buttermilk, salt
Boil rice in buttermilk, mash the rice, add salt to taste

Tuskperiki (chutney)
Dried red chillies, coriander seeds, onion, tamarind, salt. Roast the chillies and the coriander. Grind them together with the onion. Add a little tamarind paste and salt and blend well.