Sublime Kerala cuisine and the nicest people

I was walking steeply uphill in a cardamom plantation. The man-height bushes crowded in front of me so densely that I could barely make out a path. Suddenly, I heard a soft swishing sound and in a trice, an elephant and I were trying to occupy the exact same square foot of real estate. Elephant Junction was but one spice plantation in the Idukki District, and it espoused but one method of cultivation. I had been to a few plantations that lay along the main road of Kumily, the last village before Thekkady Wildlife Sanctuary. One was owned by earnest young Shinoj Kallamakal whose plantation was covered densely with every plant that could be coaxed out of the soil. His next door neighbour packed in the tourist buses because his motto was Buy Buy Buy (at vastly inflated rates). And then, I chanced upon Elephant Junction. The tourism brochures are not too far off the mark. It really is God’s own country, except that brochures don’t capture the sounds of silence, the cool breeze, the sweep of the rains and the made-in-heaven combination of soft appams combined with fiery fish curries cooked in earthen-ware pots.

From my perch at Niraamaya Resort in Kumily, all I could see were thickly forested hills. Also called the cardamom hills, because of their crop, my resort with its little cottages sprinkled on a hillside, was actually part of a cardamom plantation. Niraamaya was not on the way to anywhere, and the last two kilometres of road was actually a dirt track. So those of us who stayed there had the place to ourselves. More than that, we hardly even got to see each other—you could, if you wished, isolate yourself completely from humanity. It was an opportunity I grabbed with both hands. I allowed myself just one day of visiting cardamom plantations. For, to have come all the way to Idukki District and not to have visited a plantation would have been akin to visiting Agra without seeing the Taj Mahal. Every plantation is completely different from its neighbour. Some are gigantic: 200 acres and more. In the middle, you’ll catch sight of a plantation bungalow, usually single storeyed, with plenty of gleaming wood in the balconies and the trademark tiled roofs. There were others that were less than an acre, and were crammed end-to-end with 250 species of plants, only some of which were spices. Elephant Junction had no sale of spices on the premises. What it did have were a herd of elephants, because K.G. Raju the owner loved elephants and also because elephant dung was said to be the best manure for cardamom and pepper plants. Raju loved his 80 hectare plantation and knew every square inch of it. While his elephant keepers treated the pachyderms like mere animals, Raju would address them affectionately in Malayalam every time one passed by. Elephant Junction is one of very few plantations that take visitors around by elephant back on a demarcated trail. Raju was a walking, talking encyclopaedia of information about his spices. “All cardamom plants require a few conditions that are plentifully available on the Kerala coast. They require a hilly topography so that the water drains off; they require shade, so corral and jackfruit trees are grown on cardamom plantations and they require an equitable temperature all through the year, with moisture-laden breezes and plentiful rain. Cardamom plants fruit throughout the year, once every six weeks as a matter of fact, which works out to seven times a year. And that is why the spice has been named ellaka in Malayalam – because the word for seven is ella!” On the day of my visit, short green stems lay on the ground. Each had a few ripe cardamoms on it, and it was these that were being picked at lightning speed by Tamilian women. “Our industry would perish were it not for these hard-working ladies,” beamed the unassuming KG Raju. Apparently, they live across the border, just 7 kilometers away from Kumily in the Tamil province of Theni and have worked on cardamom plantations in Kerala for generations.

The spice coast of the Malabar has always been the home of two spices, cardamom and pepper. Cinnamon has always come from Sri Lanka and nutmeg and cloves from the Molucca Islands in Indonesia. Kochi has become, over the millennia, a trading post for all the spices, a throwback to the time when Arab traders would sail up to the Kerala coast on dhows, pack a consignment of pepper, ginger and cardamom, and sail on to Venice via Egypt and Istanbul. You can see the influences of all the traders along the seafront in Kochi from Dutch architecture in the trading posts and the Jewish quarter to Chinese fishing nets but on the whole, Kerala gave to its visitors more than it took from them.

My last port of call was a private (there’s that word again!) beach off Kovalam. A German professor based in Chennai, so the story goes, used to visit this part of the beach some decades ago. Around the same time, he noticed that beautiful old houses with attractive wooden frontages were being torn down to make way for concrete structures, so he bought the land where Niraamaya Surya Samudra now stands, and re-constructed cottages that were about to be destroyed. Those formed the nucleus of the lovely resort by the sea.

Not every cottage is traditional—a few are modern too. But it’s the casual juxtaposition of the two that is so organic. Two features stood out. One was the spa. Now, it may not be rocket science to get fabulous therapists trained in Ayurvedic massage in God’s own Country, but the Niraamaya Spa had a balance between traditional architecture and modern conveniences that should win it awards. The other feature of the resort was the food. The Executive Chef Prakash had worked in a Mediterranean restaurant in Delhi, aboard a cruise liner, a resort in the United States and in a small restaurant in Tuscany. Not bad for a boy from a tiny village in a forest in Karanataka, where he is still the only person to have worked outside it! The Kerala food in the open air dining room was spot on, but Chef Prakash had decided to give his customers a degustation menu on special request and he had created a meal around traditional Kerala food served up differently. One dish that stands out is three kinds of fish curry—meen moillee, meen manga curry and meen curry with kodampuli (fish tamarind), served in tiny portions off mussel shells. The western guests at the resort couldn’t seem to get enough of it. On my way back to the airport, I promised myself that I’d be back to this verdant state where even the shoe-shine men on the roads read newspapers and where banana sellers have the most photogenic shops in the country.