Andhra Food: A Spicy Bone of Contention

Andhra food is a matter of pride. Every Hyderbadi I know defends the food of his or her native land with zealous and slightly insane pride. It is deadly to mention that you have partaken of biryani in a Hyderabadi's presence. "What kind of biryani?" they will ask as they move in closer to you, a look of growing insanity in their eye.

"A biryani biryani, with meat in it," may seem to be the correct answer. But of course, it is not.

You must reply "Hyderabadi biryani," and furthermore, the biryani must have hailed from a reputed restaurant or source of such. (They may be found overseas, but they are rare).

If the biryani is not Hyderabadi, or not vetted - well, so much for you. "How can you eat hat crap?" your Andhra friend will say. "We have got the best biryani, the best food in India, the world, and you subject yourself to that swill? What kind of a fool are you anyway?" After the verbal abuse, the Hyderbadi will inevitably whip out a pen and paper and write down the names of at least four or five places in which one can find real Hyderabadi biryani, and will cluck a few times in sorrow and horror. And then they will send you on your way.

And the people of Andhra Pradesh really do earn their bragging rights. There is the vaunted biryani, of course, but there is more to Andhra food then that. The cuisine is extremely sophisticated, has a long history, and involves a profusion of excellent local ingredients, including fresh dairy, fresh seafood and vegetables, and tons of blow-your-face-off hot green chilies. Andhra food today is a synthesis of local food - not dissimilar to that of the rest of South India - and the Mughlai food brought by the old time rulers of still predominantly Muslim Hyderabad. Rice and lentils are the main carbohydrates on offer, although papad (lentil crackers) are also popular. In Telgana, Western Andhra Pradesh, people even eat uppudi hindi or broken rice, a dish more commonly associated with Indochina. Pickles and chutneys come in a bazillion different forms and are considered entirely integral to a good Andhra style meal. The people of Andhra's coast lines prefer coconut and sesame oils to ghee and palm oils - it's a flavor that's pretty easy to detect in many of the region's speciality foods.

My favorite expression of the region's culinary genius comes in the form of Andhra "carrier meals."

A carrier meal is exactly what it sounds like. You are given a banana leaf, and a bunch of little thali dishes, composed of some form of vegetable and dahi and ghee and sambar. Then, a man comes around carrying a few metal pots, in which are contained the day's dishes. These are usually some form of rather bitter daal, a stir-fried vegetable, and something involving potato. Another man comes by to provide you with papad (lentil crackers), roti, and rice, with a dollop of liquid ghee to top it off. To supplement the meal, most non-vegetarians order some spicy (and bright red) fish fry, or perhaps a fish curry, or maybe even some of Andra's beloved fried chicken. The food keeps on coming until you tell it to stop or keel over, whichever comes first. Andra restaurants are usually busy and social establishments, with a mix of businessmen and women, families, and random hangers on (like myself), all eating ferociously with their right hands and shouting happily at each other over matters of great import. The carrier meals at lunch are usually scandalously cheap. 200 rupees is pushing it.


Bheema's
Asha Building,
Ground Floor,
31, Church Street,
Bangalore - 560 001



Bheemas is located on Church Street, and is a favorite haunt of Bangalore's umpteen downtown IT Professionals (whatever that means). Like everywhere else in India, it is a deserted ghost town until about 1:00 sharp, wherin it almost instantly fills up with the famished and highly paid. Like all Andhra style food, Bheema's serves up its veg carrier meals on a banana leaf - and eating with your hands is pretty much mandatory.

I ordered the carrier meal. Everyone orders the carrier meal. It's 225 rupees for a constantly-replinished spread of Andhra dishes, and it's even (theoretically) somewhat healthy. The stir-fried vegetables are tasty. The daal was a bit bitter for me - I like Nagarjuna's version better.



Buttermilk and curd served with a little bit of chili, salt, and onion. It's amazing how refreshing buttermilk can be in hot weather. There's also a sweet dessert of vermicelli with milk and lots of sugar. Papad and rice are mandatory. You can get some liquid ghee drizzled on the rice or not, your choice.



Apparently this is not sambar but is in fact charu, which is...pretty much the same thing. Don't ask me.



I also ordered aloo gobi, which turned out to be both excellent and not needed considering the amount of food already on offer. Still, a lovely representative of a dry dish that is often man-handled.



Nagarjuna Residency



Nagarjuna is an institution in Bangalore. The firm runs at least four or five other restaurants and a hotel besides, and it's attractively outfitted dining rooms turn into total nut houses around lunchtime. The guys carrying the carrier-meals look harried, but the food is totally worth it, featuring spices ground fresh daily and obviously intensely fresh dairy, vegetable, and fish products. This is definitely Andhra food at its best, and you're missing out on an essential Bangalore culinary experience if you don't make it over here. I love the tomato-sesame oil prepared chutney that's served with the veg and the daal here a lot . It's probably awful for you. Whatever.



I wanted the roast fish but they didn't comprehend this madness and brought me fried fish instead. Which was excellent, so much the better. No bones here, just tasty and perfectly cooked meat in a spicy and crispy filling. Excellent.



If you ever wondered where they get the banana leaves, the bug fuck insaneBangalore central market may provide an answer. They're purchased in bulk from various leaf sellers, who probably keep up banana leaf plantations somewhere or another in the tropical countryside. I like to think they are scrupulously washed prior to use. It's nicer that way.

India Again

I've been to India before.

I came to India for the first time in 2008, when I was 19, although I had had India instilled in me far before then. My grandparents best friends are Indian and reside in New Delhi, and the two couples spent much time together trekking throughout the subcontinent, having adventures of a sort that (they will reassure you) are completely improbable and impossible today. Travel in India was an entirely romantic and mostly 1wonderful affair: conducted in private train cars, conduced by pack pony's over Kashmiri passes, long evenings at Moti Mahal and safaris conducted on the backs of elephants. My mother went to India, too, when she was my age - Srinigar houseboats, enormous languar monkeys outside the Himalaya guest-house, dead bodies beside the ghats and accidentally hallucinatory nimbu-paani. Of course my ass was going to India. Everyone else's did.

India was by no means a disappointment. I was 19, as previously mentioned, and coming out of an academic year where I had managed to do a through job of driving myself completely insane: a third world accented release into something larger and mroe formidable then my own location seemed like just the thing. (This, too, an American construct. A country of a billion people, serving as a source of therapy and renewal primarily for yours-truly). I ended up half-heartedly "interning" at a profoundly dysfunctional Bangalore music magazine, run by a coke head half-American desi. I spent the majority of my time exploring Bangalore's streets, perfecting the fine points of verbal pissing-matches with rickshaw drivers, and delving further and further into the magical world of Bangalore's night-life. All the Bangalore clubs had to close at 11:30, that was the law, but there were after parties, there were models (male and female) and business tycoons and aspirant actors, there was pretty much everything a stimuli hunting teenager could possibly ask for, it was all there. Everything was cheap, too. I could live the life of a mid-range high roller off my small-time savings from working at the local art supply store and hoarding my Christmas money. A dream, un-deferred. I deferred very little, at that time.

I spent two and a half months in Bangalore, and then I decamped for Delhi. I met Auntie Sheila and Baldev for the first time, another experience: walking into their house like a parallel universe of my own grandparents, expensive whiskey and scratching the block-head of the family Labrador retriever, comfortable as anything. I got dropped off at the Chadwni Chouk and was told the car would come back for me in two hours: I was, as I recall, wearing a sundress, and I could see the beggars coming at me from roughly half a mile away from the steps of the Jama Masjid. It is hard to imagine the other world that goes on in the stalls and backallies of Old Delhi if you have lived as I have, but it is good to walk into it. (An indication: that this India did not exist primarily for the purposes of my therapy, that it was larger then me, immense even, and capable of crushing me, and did not care in one way or another).

I then spent a little over a week in Mumbai, visiting Aneesa and her sisters and her family there. I had met Aneesa at the Bangalore guesthouse: she was raised in London and possessed an extended and friendly family throughout Greater Mumbai. She, her sisters, and her cousins (especially Saleem, my evil Indian twin, my counterpart) showed me the city in the most pleasant way conceivable - bundle me into the back of taxi cabs and showed me the good places to eat, introduced me to my very first encounter with the overawing and largely benevolent primacy of Indian male protection. Never had that much fun before in my life. Kebabs on the hood of a car at 3:00 in the morning, terrorizing the Taj hotel wait-staff at 4:00 in the morning, endless taxi rides through late-night rain, Chowpatty Beach and the roofs of international hotels, on and on and on.

It's hilarious that I am writing this and looking back at it all with such a sense of nostalgia and general aged and grizzled malaise: I was 19 then, I am barely 22 now, God only knows how I will feel about all this, about right now, when I have actually attained something approximating age.


I was going to go back to the USA, and then the airplane caught on fire. Not a big fire, of course. More of a puff of smoke. I camped in the airport in Delhi overnight, being stepped over by Ethiopian stewardesses. I met a woman who had really done the ashram thing, was going back home to Scotland for the first time in 20 years. I said I didn't want to go back to the US, not really. "Well, there's no harm in staying," she said. I saw the logic in this: I pushed back my flight for two and a half more months. My money would mostly hold out. I knew some people.

Back to Bangalore. Fell for one of my house-mates, with the expected humiliating results. Got rejected from all my transfer schools due to a clerical error. Got more and more involved with the party scene in Bangalore, and began doing more of it - it was an endless progression of people-to-meet and parties to attend and was of course the most interesting thing in the entire world. I began to entertain thoughts of flipping the eternal bird to the USA and staying here and making something of myself. If they did not want me (at least in their top-shelf universities) I could just as well not want them.

Began drinking to excess. This was less out of spiritual or psychological need and more out of a sense of symmetry, a sense that this was what writers and artistes did when things did not go our way, we develop a reasonably poetic and easy to maintain addiction, the kind that allowed us to stay both attractive and fun-loving. ( i feel this is a bit of a theme in my life: doing things more for their aesthetics, less for the pleasure of them). A lot of us young first world travelers are, I think, afflicted with this third-world travel dream of attractive and slightly dangerous degeneracy, of debauchery. We are out seeking adventure, and are more then happy to run across it, as long as it does not frighten us too much.

It's a long story short: I got into Tulane University, with a scholarship thrown in. I came back to the USA and I moved to New Orleans and I got a BA and I made a lot of friends. Mumbai was savagely attacked by Lashkar A Taiba and Saleem was on his way to the Leopold Cafe at the time but did not actually go, and I watched the whole thing rapt in front of the television, wondered if it would ever be the same, if everything had changed. I wrote about India a lot for my nonfiction class because it was a subject that could not stop being interesting. I found myself relatively happy and content with my life, which is actually not a mean feat for a liberal arts major in her early twenties.

I got a job in Cambodia and was thus accorded the chance to go back to Asia, which is what I wanted to do and insofar as I could figure, what I had to do to be able to live with myself and look at myself in the mirror at a later date. That brings me around to here. So, back to Bangalore, game-set-match.

I wondered why I was going back to Bangalore for a while there, which was actually after I booked the ticket, there was that little conscious thought involved in this.

I guess we (as humans, as the nostalgia-bound such as myself) have to go back to the scenes of our old formative life experiences and sniff around their perimeters some. Has it changed much in our absence? Did we change it any ourselves? Are our memories correct or growing faulty and stale as time goes by?

There's only one way to find out.