What an Idli, Sirji!
How the south
Indian breakfast staple beat the north Indian chapatti in the popularity stakes
In a culinary clash between chapattis and idlis, the
south Indian staple would not seem to stand a chance. Chapattis are ubiquitous
wherever wheat is eaten in India. They require just atta and water and can be
made in minutes.
Making idlis is much more laborious, with all that
heavy-duty grinding, overnight fermenting and then careful steaming of the
batter to achieve an adequately airy result. Like all fermented foods, it can
go wrong — over-ferment into sourness or under-ferment into stodginess.
Foods made from steamed rice and dal batters are made
in different parts of India, but usually speeded up with a leavening agent like
toddy or yeast in Mangaluru’s sannas or Eno’s Fruit Salt for Gujarat’s dhoklas.
South India sticks to slow fermentation (at most, helped by microbes in the
methi that is usually added), perhaps because it gives idlis their special
supple, yet soft texture.
But it isn’t easy. Unsurprisingly, early Indian
cookbooks avoided idlis. Many, of course, were essentially north Indian
cookbooks, with just some token recipes from the South. But even those with a
clear South Indian connection, like EP Veerasawmy’s Indian Cookery (1936),
avoid idlis, though it has a recipe for hoppers or appams, involving a
fermented batter. The Time & Talents Clubcookbook, first
published in Bombay in the 1930s, has a recipe (though it’s not clear which
edition it first came in), but with a pinch of baking powder!
Proper idli-making, it was clear, was best left to
south Indian women or professional cooks, like the founders of Mani’s Lunch
Home, founded in Matunga in Bombay in 1937. The historian Sharada Dwivedi,
whose grandfather rented the space out to them, recalled the constant manual
labour with the giant mortar and pestle: “rolling, pulverising, slapping and
blending the fermented rice and udad dal mixture”.
Yet, for all that complexity in cooking, idlis are
everywhere these days. You will find them in mid-sized towns in north India,
often at stalls near the inter-state bus terminals, perhaps because idlis are
vegetarian and steamed so are seen as a safe and healthy option while
travelling. Pilgrimage spots obviously have them for south Indian devotees, but
they are really universally popular now.
Food courts in malls and airports now almost always
have outlets serving fresh idlis (it helps that these can easily be made in an
electric steamer in places where open flames aren’t allowed). In Mumbai,
vendors get up before dawn to make large steel containers full of idlis which
they take on bicycles to sell to early-morning commuters. Idlis are even ready
to go into space, thanks to K Radhakrishna of the Defence Food Research
Laboratory, who has figured out a way to dehydrate them.
Idlis have not, obviously, replaced chapattis, but
they have a value and wide availability that chapattis do not. The latter are
staples, made in millions at homes, in the cheapest eateries or institutional
catering like hostels and factory canteens, but eating chapattis is never a
special occasion. (The one place where chapattis make for a feast is Kenya
where Indians introduced a paratha-like version. Barack Obama’s Kenyan
step-grandmother celebrated his election by making chapattis).
No Longer a Daily Grind
This unlikely victory came from turning the problem
with idlis, the batter-making process, into an advantage. It required a huge
effort, but once it was made, making large amounts of idlis was simply a matter
of spooning the batter into pans and steaming them. This was easily mechanised.
By 1964, an appliance manufacturer for large kitchens named Kleertone was
advertising a 136 litre boiling pan with “extra utensil for preparing idlis”.
Commercial wet grinders for the batter seem to have
come out around the same time, possibly from Coimbatore, which was a hub for
small manufacturing. By 1981 VG Panneerdas was advertising a home version in
the Times of India (ToI), but even before that enterprising
south Indian women like Mrs Gomathy Murthy from Matunga had figured there was a
market for the batter made in fullsize wet grinders they had got from Tamil
Nadu.
Steamers, Ahoy
The really enabling technology here was the pressure
cooker. It had been introduced to cook rice and dal, but in the 1960s
manufacturers realised that with the weight removed they made for excellent
idli steamers. In 1967, Prestige advertised the Preett Steam-It stacked idli
pans: “Does away with messy cloth or banana leaf.” With batter bought from
outside, or even made fairly adequately in heavy-duty Indian mixer-grinders,
home idli-making was now easy.
Chapattis never had a similar breakthrough. There are
machines used in institutions, and periodically a new device is touted that
promises to make perfect chapattis, but they never quite manage it. If
anything, their product tends to reinforce prejudices against machine-made
chapattis. In their very simplicity, chapattis are peculiarly hard to make
right — or what people perceive as right.
Naomi Duguid, who investigated chapattis for her
book Flatbreads & Flavors, explains how everyone who eats
chapattis regularly has an idea of the perfect one, made by mother, wife or
cook who knows how to make it exactly the way the eater likes it — slightly
burned, slightly undercooked, larger, smaller and so many tiny variations.
“When you try to make a chapatti for someone you are always competing with this
idea of perfection,” she says. And, of course, this perfection comes at next to
no cost.
Idlis even managed to survive an actual attempt to
stop them being made. The famines of the 1960s reduced rice availability to the
point where the government decided to discourage anything but the most basic
use of rice. In 1964 ToI reported that PM Lal Bahadur Shastri
had a great liking for idlis, but had given them up as a way to reduce rice
consumption. In 1967 hotels and restaurants in Bombay announced that five days
a week they would not serve anything made with rice, including idlis.
This was also the era of a concerted effort to get
south India to eat wheat, which was being supplied as food aid from the US. But
this effort, which might have seemed designed to promote chapattis over rice,
backfired. The wheat coming in was the high-gluten variety grown for making
bread, not the low-gluten varieties used in India for making soft chapattis.
Anecdotes from that era often have people lamenting the tough chapattis that
resulted from this imported wheat.
South India did start eating more wheat, but either
made into bread, or in flatbreads like porottas that added substantial amounts
of fat to counteract the toughness of the wheat. The 1960s increased wheat
consumption in India, but did little to make chapattis more popular. Rice, by
contrast, remained high in value simply due to its scarcity, and by extension,
idlis did too. And in any case, the lower grades of rice that became available
were good enough to make idli batter. Even famines, it seems, have been unable
to stop the rise and rise of the idli!
Vikram Doctor
ETM2APR18
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