Grains of truth: Kunal Vijayakar on India’s love for rice

In Hindi cinema, when Nirupa Roy, Achala Sachdev or Reema Lagoo wanted to indulge the prodigal son, home after a long trip, or her labourer offspring after a demanding day at work, she’d cook what became an iconic dish, kheer.

Now, we all know the accepted axiom: North India is predominantly wheat consuming, while the south is devoted to rice. While this may be somewhat true, rice plays an important role in most Indian cooking. Rice and its variations figure prominently in the stories of Krishna (puffed rice and kheer). The Vrindavan temples still make a rich kheer at the Banke Bihari temple. So kheer is not just a filmi dish cooked by often-widowed mothers in white saris. It goes back to Ayurveda, and is considered the original happy meal.

Kheer is nothing more than rice sweetened and boiled in milk. In the south, it’s cooked as payasam and often enriched with ghee, nuts and spices. Some recipes use jaggery instead of sugar, giving the kheer a distinctly audacious flavour and an abounding brown colour. When garnished with deep fried raisins, almonds and cashews and cardamom powder, nothing can please me (or the gods) like a warm payasam can.

Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and other southern states make their own variations of rice pancakes. Visit any village in the Konkan and you will be welcomed by a ghavna or amboli, both much like a neer dosa, but with slight variations. Some grind the rice coarse, some use rice flour and most of them are cooked crisp with bits of green chillies and coriander mixed in the batter.

We are, of course, familiar with appams and dosas, but sarvapindi from Telangana is unbeatable. It’s a rice pancake with peanuts, ginger, onions, curry leaves, chilli powder and sesame seeds, traditionally cooked in a copper pan, and is crispy on top and spongy and soft at the bottom. Kholasapori pitha, from the North East is often made during festivals like Assam’s Bihu. It’s a rice pancake with carrots and onions, cooked in mustard oil.

Appam is the Kerala variation of rice pancakes in India.

But rice as rice has its own importance across India. Dal-rice is unarguably a staple. Rasam-rice or sambar-rice is the lifeline of a south Indian meal. And you can take a curry-rice ride down from coastal Maharashtra and all the way up to Vizag on the east coast.

But the kinds of rice eaten in various parts of India could fill a complete edition of an encyclopedia.

To start off, there’s polished white rice – quick to cook and goes splendidly with dal, varan, rasam and sambar. Ponni is popular in Tamil Nadu as is sona masuri in Andhra Pradesh. Goa’s staple ukdem tandul is unpolished with distinctive red streaks, an unyielding texture and nutty taste that makes it the perfect mate of a thick coconut curry. It’s also the basis of a thick gruel called paiz, or kanji, and often eaten with dry fish and pickle. When ground and fermented in toddy and steamed, it leavens into bread called sanna, which is perfect to mop up a spicy vindaloo or sorpotel.

Not all rice is white or red. Unique to Chettinad, Tamil Nadu, is kavuni arisi, a rice so black, it appears like it’s been dyed. It’s similar to the black rice found in Burma and South-East Asia. It’s tough to cook but is rich in antioxidants. Locals make a kavuni arisi adai or crepes made with three kinds of dal and black rice, soaked overnight and ground with red chillies to produce a dosa-like batter that cooks on a hot pan. Although the most popular black rice dish is a pudding simply called kavuni arisi payasam.

Bengal too has a black rice: kalabhat. But the most popular rices from that region have mythological names: Gobinobhog and Radhatilak. Gobindobhog is a short-grain, white, slightly sticky, aromatic rice with a sweet buttery taste. It’s often used for traditional khichuri, sweets like payesh, or with a good solid fish curry.

Then, of course, there is basmati, long-grained, aromatic and a must for biryanis or pulao. Just the thought of a biryani, each grain separated by ghee, flavoured with saffron, fried onions and meat, is a rice eater’s dream. Or a warm Hyderabadi zaffrani pulao, with saffron, ghee, sugar and dry fruit, served with silver varq.

These are just a few of the varieties of rice that form the fundamentals of Indian cooking. There’s Maharashtra’s ambemohur, Tamil Nadu’s seeraga samba, a key ingredient in Dindigul and Ambur biryanis. Mushk Budji from the Kashmir valley is nearly extinct but the list can go on and on.

First Published: Oct 06, 2018 18:54 IST