Chettinad and Thanjavur: two Tamil kitchens, two different plates

Karaikudi sits inland and dry, in what used to be Ramnad country and is now Sivaganga district. Thanjavur sits on a river delta two districts over, wet for most of the year, its paddy fed by a dam built when the Roman empire still ruled Britain. The two towns are a short drive apart. Their food is not close.

Chettinad cooking runs on dried, roasted and smoked flavour: whole spices bloomed hard in oil, ingredients built to survive months in a jar, a pantry assembled by men who were away trading for most of the year. Thanjavur cooking runs on what a wet delta grows: rice across three separate seasons, coconut, tamarind, curry leaf, the produce of settled farming rather than a merchant house. The real difference between the two is not chilli heat, though Chettinad food gets flattened into "the spicy one" often enough. It is where the ingredients came from, and why.

The pantry of a trading house

The Nattukottai Chettiars, who call themselves Nagarathar, are a Tamil merchant and banking community native to the villages of Chettinad, spread across present-day Sivaganga and Pudukkottai districts. By the nineteenth century their firms were trading and lending money across Ceylon, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China, and that trade grew, by the century's end, into a genuinely sophisticated banking network reaching across South and Southeast Asia. Men left home for years at a stretch. Wives ran the kitchen and, often, the household ledgers. A pantry built to survive a husband's three-year posting in Rangoon looks nothing like one restocked from a market twice a week: dried, salted, sun-dried, roasted, ground, and kept.

Contact abroad changed what went into the pot as well as how long it kept. Some Chettiar households picked up a way of cooking sticky black rice pudding through their Burmese contacts. Dried and fermented prawn and fish, more at home in Burmese and Southeast Asian kitchens, found their way into what had largely been a vegetarian cooking tradition. None of that arrived by cookbook. It arrived with the shipping season.

Kalpasi, a lichen and not a plant

One of Chettinad cooking's defining flavours is not, strictly, a spice at all. Kalpasi, also spelled kalpas, kalpashi or kalpash, and known in English as black stone flower or stone lichen, is Parmotrema perlatum: a lichen, which is to say a joint growth of fungus and alga that forms flaky grey-black patches on tree bark and rock. Raw, it has almost no smell and no flavour worth mentioning. Dropped into hot oil or ghee, it turns earthy and faintly smoky, and that reaction, not the lichen itself, is what a Chettinad cook wants from it. It goes into meat masalas and into the region's biryani, usually alongside star anise and cinnamon, always added whole rather than ground.

Marathi mokku, the bud nobody quite agrees on

Marathi mokku is harder to pin down. It is sold as a small, dark, star-shaped dried flower bud, dropped whole into hot oil at the start of a tempering much as a clove or a caper would be. India's own spice-trade references do not agree on what plant it comes from. One widely used glossary of Indian spices lists it only under the English gloss "Kapok bud" and the Hindi name semar, with no botanical name given at all, unusual for a source that supplies a Latin binomial for almost everything else it lists. Cooks in Chettinad, and in parts of coastal Karnataka, use marathi mokku as a matter of routine. A spice seller in Karaikudi is unlikely to hand over a species name with the packet, and inventing one here would be worse than leaving the gap.

Fennel and star anise, on the register

Set those two against fennel, sombu in Tamil, and the contrast sharpens. Fennel is Foeniculum vulgare, native to the Mediterranean rather than to India, and it is one of the fifty-two spices formally listed under the purview of India's Spices Board, the statutory body established under the Spices Board Act, 1986 and functioning since 1987 under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. The part of the plant used, botanically, is the fruit rather than a true seed. Star anise, anasipoo in Tamil and the flavour that most often turns up beside kalpasi in a Chettinad biryani, is Illicium verum, the fruit of a tree native to south China and northeast Vietnam, nowhere near Tamil Nadu. Whether that is coincidence or cargo is not written down anywhere authoritative. Vietnam happens to be one of the countries where Nagarathar trading houses operated by the nineteenth century, and the geography lines up closely enough to notice.

Four ingredients, one register

The delta grows its own pantry

Thanjavur starts from a different set of facts. The city sits in the Cauvery delta, watered by the river and its branch the Kollidam, spanning several districts of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry that rank among the most densely farmed and densely populated tracts in the country. Water was rarely the constraint here. Land and labour were. The Kallanai dam, on the Cauvery near Tiruchirappalli, was built by the Chola king Karikala in 150 CE, unhewn stone, 329 metres long, and it still diverts water into the delta's canals today. It is usually described as the oldest water-regulator structure still doing its original job anywhere in the world.

Rice governs the calendar in a way it never did in Chettinad. Delta farmers work three cropping seasons: kuruvai from June to September, samba from August to January, thaladi from September to March. The kitchen follows the harvest, not a shipping timetable. Coconut, curry leaf, mustard seed and tamarind, everything a wet delta grows locally and cheaply, do the work that dried lichen and an imported Vietnamese fruit do two districts west. Thanjavur was also, from 1674 to 1855, the seat of a Maratha dynasty founded by Venkoji, annexed by the British under the Doctrine of Lapse after its last ruler, Shivaji II, died without a natural heir. What that court actually ate is not something the historical record settles cleanly enough to state as fact here.

Two pantries, not one cuisine

Put a Chettinad meal and a Thanjavur meal on the same table and the giveaway is the dry-spice box, not the chilli. A Chettinad kitchen keeps kalpasi, marathi mokku, star anise, dried red chillies and a jar of roasted pepper-and-coriander podi that will hold through a monsoon. A Thanjavur kitchen keeps a coconut, curry leaf off the tree outside, and rice from whichever of the three seasons just finished. Both are inland Tamil cooking. Only one of them was assembled by people who spent half their working lives on a ship to Rangoon.